I believe we all carry some dysfunction in our relationship with money. I know I do. My way of coping is to ignore it, and I learned that early. Back in 1994, I signed up for a cell phone on my college campus, not realizing I couldn’t afford it. I ignored the payments, and it took years to get my credit back to a reasonable level. Yes, your financial advisor once had bad credit.
I am not ashamed of that because I believe the first step in building a healthier relationship with money, or with anything and anyone for that matter, is acknowledging poor decisions from the past. A poor decision is not always spending more than you have, though of course that is harmful. It can also be failing to spend on something that could bring emotional benefit, provided it is affordable.
Too often people focus only on saving, saving, saving, when in fact a small amount of thoughtful spending can have an outsized positive effect, either for themselves or for someone else. In my view, helping clients work through that internal tension is one of our most important roles, and it is something I discuss almost daily.
If we strive for self-actualization at the end of our lives, why not put equal effort into creating a healthy relationship with money in the same way we try to build healthy relationships with others?
