By Megan Janssen
Have you ever caught yourself graphically daydreaming your own demise? Plummeting down a flight of white-tiled stairs, getting side swiped by your neighbor’s Ford while taking the trash bin out, making one faulty step at the canyon’s edge, being at the exact spot an airplane door falls from the sky…
A few years into investigating my relationship with money, I realized that my gripping fear of death was one of the things keeping my bank accounts barren. I think you might understand. Stay with me.
Our fears present in myriad ways and sneakily hold us back, invisible parachutes inflated behind us. My particular flavor has been the rejection of complacency because I decided as a ripe teenager that complacency was the slip ‘n slide directly into the jaws of death. Get a boring job, settle in a marriage, buy a giant television, contribute to a 401K, put on weight, buy a watercraft if you’re really lucky, day drink too much on the Fourth of July, retire, and try to piece meaning together for the rest of your life from hobbies, holidays, and daytime TV until you split. Welcome to my highly judgemental and cynical mind.
I subconsciously decided that spending money, or rather, not keeping money around (there is a difference) was one way for me to “stay young.” The idea of saving made me want to run. I saw saving as the patriarchy’s oily grip molding me into a piece of the machine, forcing me into an uninvestigated life. Monotony. Death. I realized that impulse buying was a sort-of “I’ll do what I want, you can’t hold me down” plan I had to… well… not die too soon? It makes little sense. I can tell you now that buying a plane ticket, leaving $300 to my name, doesn’t play well as an act of resistance and it certainly doesn’t retrograde the aging process. The thing is, we’re all doing this in some bizarre way.
What are you afraid of? Commitment? Vulnerability? Death? Being seen? Security? Worthiness? Stay with that one for a moment. Worthiness. Are you afraid of claiming your truest self, giving it a bullhorn and softer sheets? You, too, might be psychologically keeping yourself broke because you are afraid to radically accept who you are, budget for it, and live your juiciest life. Or maybe you’re afraid of commitment and money likes you. Or you’re afraid of the vulnerability of squarely looking at your unhelpful habits and patterns and designing something more supportive. Are you worried that if you have money you’ll be seen in a new way? You won’t be able to slurp through life unnoticed? Perhaps you’re afraid of abandonment and having money will separate you from your delightfully broke peers. We do live in the never-never land of the Roaring Fork Valley, after all. What would it mean to, wheeze, “grow up?” What would it mean to really take care of yourself financially?
Here’s an exercise. Picture yourself five years from now. You are elated. You are getting ready to do your favorite thing: perhaps you’re going on a rafting trip, maybe you’re traveling internationally, maybe you’re meeting your best friend for a beautiful dinner. You are light-hearted, you aren’t stressed financially, you feel safe in your skin, you have the means to care for yourself in body, mind, spirit, and beyond. Friend, you have money. Take a beat to feel what this feels like and compare it to your fear. In this scenario are you more or less vulnerable? Are you more or less alone? Are you more or less alive? Come up with a word or phrase that describes what money is for you in this vision. Reconsider if you want to keep it a little closer at hand. Maybe you’d even like to, how do you say, commit?
The first step to building wealth is understanding your relationship with money. Regardless of how significantly your income grows, it’ll just the same be ushered away if you don’t want it hanging around. And understanding the relationship is understanding yourself, your fears, and your inherent worthiness. Take the first step toward building wealth by spending time with your joys and cutting the strings of that parachute. Consider being seen, being vulnerable, committing, living, rejoicing, and you will begin the journey toward wealth.
Megan Janssen is a financial educator and founder of Money Juice. Learn more at money-juice.com