Is Your Relationship With Money Holding You Back From the Life You Want?
I recently came across a quote online that went something like this: Change your relationship with money and everything changes. It stayed with me for days. Not because it was profound, necessarily, but because it made me look honestly at my own relationship with money, which has often been a difficult one, if not an outright negative one.
I have never had a problem earning money. There have been times in my life when I had a lot of it around me, and times when I had very little. And as I look around me I see people who seem to find an abundance of wealth without much effort, while others appear to be in a constant battle with it. What makes the difference, I have been asking myself, is not always the work. It is the relationship.
Over the past year or so I have made a conscious decision to break the habits that lead to stress and anxiety. That has meant, among other things, taking an honest look at how I earn and how I spend. I am not a materialistic person. Things have never meant much to me. I am simple in my desires and happy with that. I do not chase fashion or flashy cars, I do not want a bigger house, and none of those things have ever brought me lasting happiness.
And yet a pattern has run through my life that I can no longer ignore. Money comes easily but it never stays. I have never been one to put money aside. I have never quite believed that I would end up with an impressive bank account. So where does that come from, I asked myself. I have worked hard since I was young. I have done more jobs than I can count. I have always believed that my future is in my own hands, and self-pity has never been my mode. I can and I do is much closer to my philosophy.
So where does the pattern come from.
Where Our Beliefs About Money Actually Come From
It was a passage from Morgan Housel's book The Psychology of Money that helped me see it more clearly. Housel had written a letter to his son when the boy was born, and the opening of the letter was what caught me first.
Some people are born into families that encourage education; others are against it. Some are born into flourishing economies encouraging of entrepreneurship; others are born into war and destitution. I want you to be successful, and I want you to earn it. But realize that not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself.
Including yourself. Those were the two words that did the work.
The House I Grew Up In
My father was a gambling addict. It is a theme that shaped my childhood more than anything else. My mother was not a gambler, but she liked to spend. I grew up in a house where money was the cause of constant argument and constant insecurity. It was never a source of safety. It was never something that stayed.
But here is the part that is harder to describe, because it is more of a paradox than a straightforward story of scarcity. We did not learn to save in my house. Saving was not part of the family dynamics. It was not something my parents modelled, talked about, or taught us to value. And because my mother spent, our home was, in many of the visible ways, a house of abundance. The cupboards were full. The fridge was full. If we wanted something, we asked, and most of the time we were given it.
Our neighbours were almost certainly wealthier than we were. But their children learned, as most children do, that if they wanted a treat they had to save up for it out of their pocket money. They learned to wait. They learned that a thing you wanted cost something, and that the cost was yours to manage. We did not learn any of that. We wanted, we asked, we received. The treats arrived. The sweets arrived. The abundance was real, even if the money behind it was not.
What I absorbed from that, without anyone sitting me down and saying so, was a very specific set of beliefs. That money is for spending. That wanting something and having it are effectively the same thing. That saving is what other, more cautious people do — not us. That the pleasure of having the thing is the point, and the arithmetic behind it can look after itself.
By the time I was old enough to think about any of it consciously, those beliefs were already mine. Or so I thought.
In my book How Did I Get Here? I wrote about learned behaviours — the patterns we absorb from the people and environments that shaped us, long before we are old enough to question them. We carry those patterns into adulthood and mistake them for our own nature. They feel like who we are, because they have always been there. It takes real work to see them as the inheritance they actually are.
My relationship with money is one of those inheritances. I can see it clearly now. I had just never looked at it directly before.
Before moving on, it is worth pausing here:
What did money mean in the house you grew up in?
Did you learn to save, or did you learn to spend?
Were those lessons ever spoken aloud, or did you simply absorb them from the air around you?
The Difference Between Choosing Freedom and Inheriting a Pattern
Here is the part that has been harder to admit.
In my book I wrote that the real prize is not money but freedom — control over your own time, your own life, your own attention. Morgan Housel makes the same argument. What we actually want, he says, is the ability to decide what we do with our days. I still believe that, completely. I am not about to announce that I want to get rich, because I do not. The chasing, the spending, the needing of more keeps us trapped, and I have written about that at length.
But there is a difference between not chasing money and not being able to hold onto it. One is a choice. The other, in my case, is closer to an inheritance I had not examined.
I am not my father. I have never gambled in the formal sense. But I have taken risks many people would not have taken, and that is what gamblers do. They take risks. They thrive in the taking of them. In my own way, more respectable and less visible, I have lived as though money was not worth holding onto. I have taken risks with it I did not need to take. I have let it move through my hands. I have told myself that this was freedom, or simplicity, or a healthy detachment from material things. And some of that was true. But not all of it. Some of it was a pattern I had lived with for so long that I could no longer see it.
Your Pattern May Look Nothing Like Mine
Your pattern may be the opposite of mine. You may be the person who holds onto money too tightly, who finds it hard to spend even on the things that would genuinely make life better, who was taught that money is something to be guarded rather than enjoyed. That is an inheritance too. And it can be holding you back from the life you want just as surely as my pattern has held me back from mine.
So let me put it to you plainly:
Where does your pattern sit — do you struggle to hold onto money, or do you hold onto it too tightly?
What might each of those be protecting you from?
Is the relationship you have with money genuinely yours, or was it handed to you before you were old enough to have a say?
Giving Myself Permission
Seeing it has meant meeting it with honesty. I have had to forgive the younger version of myself who absorbed those beliefs without any say in the matter. A child cannot choose what she inherits. She can only work, later on, with what she has been handed. I have also had to stop being ashamed of wanting money to stay. For a long time I felt something close to guilt about wanting security, as though it was beneath the person I thought I was meant to be. That guilt, I now see, was part of the inheritance too.
The change has been small and undramatic. I have started to give myself permission. Permission to be proud of my home, which I bought, which I worked for, and which I have every right to be happy about. Permission to want money to stay rather than pass through. Permission to treat money as a resource that supports the life I am building, rather than as a threat I have to keep at a distance.
What has surprised me most is how different it feels, day to day. Checking my bank account used to carry a low-level dread, as though I was about to discover some evidence of my own carelessness. Now it is simply information. Having a small amount set aside and leaving it alone — not spending it, not redirecting it, not finding some reason to move it — used to feel almost impossible. Now it feels like an act of genuine self-respect. The money does not need to go anywhere. It can stay. And in its staying, something in me settles in a way I had never experienced before.
None of this contradicts what I wrote in my book, or what I wrote about simplicity only last week. Freedom is still the real prize. Simplicity is still the ground I want to stand on. But freedom is not the same as having nothing. And simplicity is not the same as living as though money was not worth holding onto.
A different relationship with money, I am beginning to understand, is not about wanting more of it. It is about no longer being at war with it. It is about recognising what you inherited, naming it for what it is, and choosing, from here, to relate to it differently.
Two questions to take with you:
What might a different relationship with money look like in your own life?
What would change if you allowed yourself, for the first time, to question the beliefs about money you have been carrying without ever choosing them?
That is the change I am working on. I will let you know how it goes.
If this piece has stirred something in you, my free guide 5 Daily Practices for a Calmer Later Life offers five simple practices that can help settle the anxiety that so often sits underneath these patterns. You can download it here.
Anna Zannides is the founder of Freedom in Later Life and the author of How Did I Get Here? A Guide to Letting Go of Your Past and Living in Alignment with Your True Self. She writes weekly on meaning, purpose and the second half of life.
