In our last MoneyMastery class we had a discussion about my favorite money book – Lynn Twist’s The Soul of Money. For those of you who haven’t heard me extol its virtues, it’s a terrific book that offers a unique perspective on how to free ourselves from the influences and limitations of our “money culture”.
One of the focal points of our MoneyMastery conversation centered around the question of how much is enough – an issue I deal with all the time from a financial perspective. Will I have enough to retire? What if I end alone and a bag lady? Do I have enough to buy a house?
But let’s think about this. What is enough? Is it a number? Is it a concept? And when do we know we’re there? Have you ever asked yourself, how much would enough be for me? I wonder if what we really are asking is, when will I be secure, free, happy? Now that’s a completely different question!
I have worked with hundreds of clients over the years and I am struck by how little joy there is around money and how worried most of us are about it. Believe it or not, this money angst has very little relationship to how much money people have. I’ve worked with clients who have gone bankrupt and mega millionaires and the only thing they have in common is an underlying fear that they won’t or don’t have enough.
Think about it….Money is one of the biggest factors in our life and most of us feel terrible about it. We avoid dealing with it, we worry about losing it, we fight about it, we feel guilty about it, and we stress and obsess about it. And that’s on a good day! The financial world madly spits out new products and services and sends messages that we’ll be bag ladies if we don’t “max out” our RSPs or take on $500,000 mortgages to buy 500 square foot condos on parcels of landfill! To make matters worse, as we’re frantically rushing off to set up a savings plan, we are hit with “no money down you gotta have this now” latest gismo promotion. So if we buy the gismo, we feel guilty that we didn’t save and if we save, we feel we’re missing out on the gismo’s promise of perfect skin or everlasting romance. No wonder we’re miserable!
So we figure that if we work harder and make more money, we will have more so we will be more. In a culture that largely defines success through monetary value and having more things, who can blame us. But somehow we know this isn’t right and judging by the state of the world and our personal suffering, we have to begin questioning the conventional wisdom of acquiring and accumulating beyond what we need. Gandhi said it best: “The world has enough for our need but not for our greed”.
So we need to think about what’s enough. How much we really need? We need to ask ourselves if we are making our money and spending our money in ways that are consistent with our higher values and commitments. This doesn’t mean deprivation, poverty or lack, it does mean being conscious about how money flows through our life. It means taking responsibility for our finances and paying attention to what we spend money on. It means believing that we are ok right now, no matter how much money we have. It means taking charge of our money and holding it accountable to our highest commitments. It means challenging the consumer culture that we aren’t ok unless we have more. We can then be free to strive and invite abundance into our life in whatever form it takes, and our joy will come in seeing money for what it is, a way to support our highest purpose. And that is enough. – Karin Mizgala
Karin Mizgala is a Vancouver-based fee-for-service financial planner with an MBA and a degree in psychology. She’s the President of LifeDesign Financial and co-founder of the Women’s Financial Learning Centre.