Relationship With Money: Does It Make You A Bad Person? |

1. Intro

In your relationship with money, is it real, or do you believe money makes a person bad? Or, in your head, do you have such belief, that in order to have the money a person has to become a ruthless m.f.?

Or money is just that: money? Something that serves to exchange for other commodities? Just like salt was 6000 BC used by Phoenicians to trade and exchange…

Or is it that money is your own personal Jesus?

Actually having plenty (it’s relative for each one) will enable you to have more power of acquisition. What would you acquire? You get to acquire more commodities. Not people’s affection.

Money doesn’t make you a bad person: it enhances what you already are and have inside.

Of course, we are beings in the growing process – being is not a hermetic definite phase: to be is to change. That’s the natural life process. What do you have inside that money will enhance?

It’s important to do inner work to keep balance within.

So: how’s your relationship with money?

After all: money is a tool.

2. Money Is A Tool. Do You Own It Or Does It Own You?

Money is a tool. Do you own it or does it own you?

Does money serve you or do you serve money?

Do you manage money or does money manage you?

Financial wellness is an important part of your overall wellbeing: one cannot afford to undervalue it.

But you have to understand that financial wellness includes having a healthy relationship with money: satisfied, with no excess of stress.

Yes: money matters. Unless you are planning to go to this exoplanet, Proxima B, since long ago and while you’re living this planet: money matters.

Does It own you?

And yes: the world kind of tries to make us all money slaves. The rats' wheel. The cost of products and services is way too inflated: take the cellphones for instance. The law of offer-demand does not apply here, it doesn’t reflect on the cellphone’s prices.

Don’t you wonder about those manufacturing costs that show up on the internet: knowing most of the raw material and in some cases, even labor: it comes from poor countries, where price-hour is miserably low?

Don’t you ever doubt its manufacturing costs, if it justifies the small fortune that the cellphones cost to the end-line client?

There’s some obvious sense of extortion making a cell phone cost as much or more than a month paying the wage of the commonly employed worker…

Yeah: it’s necessary to make an effort to be constantly bombarded with so much consumption stimulation and resist the apparent need to be enslaved by money, in order to get access to some consumption.

We all need the tool (money) to build the life we want.

But: are we in a toxic relationship with money?

3. Are You In A Toxic Relationship With Money?

A relationship with money can be seen through the lens of 3 dimensions: acquisition, spending, and managing dimension.

It becomes toxic when there’s an imbalance in one or more dimensions.

Toxic Acquisition: the opposite poles a toxic relationship with money

You despise money because you might have a limiting belief that it might corrupt people (certain religions often inculcate since childhood that having ambition is a bad thing, that one should accept poverty if born in poverty, and wealth if born inside wealthy nests). And due to certain limiting beliefs you self-sabotage to acquire it. You associate having money with feelings of guilt.
You worship money (because you were taught that the value of a person is intimately related to the amount of money: a label of respectful and socially powerful is tagged to that person. We associate with honor. And then you do “whatever it takes” to get your slice of social veneration and power.

Toxic Spending: the opposite poles of a toxic relationship with money

Everything you earn, you spare. You don’t allow yourself to enjoy the money you earn. Out of fear that scarcity enters your door, you end up living a life of scarcity whilst, eventually, accumulating money in the bank.
You spend every dime you earn not because you need to acquire some service or material good. It's just that consumption reminds you that “Now you can” … Buy. You buy because you can. You don’t buy because you want. And most likely: you don’t know what you want. You’re just feeling some void In your life and you try to compensate that void with stuff you buy: there’s also scarcity energy beneath that attitude of compulsive purchase. An emotional scarcity.

Toxic Managing: a toxic relationship with money

Let’s get real here: nobody taught you at school how to invest.

The majority of people were taught to work and save for retirement. Also encouraged to buy credit for consumption, that will make you become a bank hostage for a large portion of years.

But nobody really teaches us at school how to invest or to have an extra regular income.

And that would be awesome.

Maybe Covid context is awakening people to the need of not just counting on safe employment and safe retirement. And that’s forcing us all to stretch and find different approaches in regards to managing the money.

4. So: Making Money Makes You A Bad Person Or Not?

Money is money. Has value because of the meaning it is given: because it buys things.

But let’s face it. Having a large amount of money doesn’t mean that a person is of value. Nor the contrary.

A thing is a thing.

It’s what people do or do not do with the money that makes it valuable. Is the meaning you give to it.

So: having money will only make a person of value, depending on how the person is going to use it.

If the fact of having money makes a person use it to entitle themselves to treat other people poorly: don’t blame it on the money. Is not the money that is making that person a jerk.

The entitlement was already there (probably on reverse: that person felt inferior without it): and the money amplified that already existing imbalance.

Maybe we should ask ourselves the following question: what am I willing to do to have a lot of money?

The answer to that will tell us what kind of person we’ll become when having a lot of money: a jerk or a person that impacts positively the life of others.

Is not money itself: is the material within ourselves.

There’s enough neuroplasticity in the brain to rebuild/reorganize/make new paths of neurons after an experience or injury.

If our brain has that neuroplasticity, the means we are capable of renewing ourselves as well, as a whole.

So we’re rich and jerks? Let us not blame it (outside) on the money.

So we’re rich and we build up others? Let us not put the credit all on the money.

Money can act as an amplifier of what we already have inside. And if what we have needs reframing: that is possible. We’re not doomed to be jerks (if we, at some point, eventually turned out to be).

Our core values will sketch the type of rich we are or will become.

Our work on the self: will dictate the quality of what we have inside.

Because rich is good. Being rich, unhappy, and unfulfilled is not so good. Down the path, it will make us write and sing some sad elegy.

Being rich, happy, and fulfilled sounds a lot better.

Let’s make sure that we work to have both, to have from it all.