Have you ever played doctor and
attempted to diagnose your fears? In Suze Orman’s book, The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom,
her first crucial step of the financial planning process is to uncover a
person’s less-than-obvious anxieties stemming from their first encounter with
money.
The excerpt below, from Suze’s
book about her client’s story, will help you consider your own
circumstances.
Suze writes,
The
road to financial freedom begins not in a bank or even in a financial planner’s
office like mine, but in your head. It
begins with your thoughts.
And
those thoughts, more often than not, stem from our seemingly forgotten past
with money. I’ll go so far as to say
that in my experience, most of my clients’ biggest problems in life today –
even those that appear on the surface not to be money related – are directly
connected with their early, formative experience with money.
So
the first step toward financial freedom is a step back in time to the earliest
moments you can recall when money meant something to you, when you truly
understood what it could do. When you
begin to see that money could create pleasure – ice-cream cones, merry-go-round
rides; and also to see that it could create pain – fights between your parents,
perhaps, or longings of your own that couldn’t be fulfilled because there
wasn’t enough money or even because there was too much. When you first understood that money was not
just a shiny object or something to color on.
When you understood that money was money. I want you to think back and see that your
feelings about money today (fearing it, enjoying it, loving it, hating it) can
almost certainly be traced to an incident, possibly forgotten until now, from
your past.
Andy’s Story
If you’ve lost it all, how can
you think you have the power to keep money safe, let alone make it grow!
“When I was about eight, my mother gave me
ten dollars to go to the bakery to buy bread.
My grandparents and cousins were all coming to lunch, and this was a big
deal. It was the first time that I got
to go all the way by myself – down the block, to the right, then across the
street all by myself, and down one more block to the corner. I’d been that way a million times, but never
all by myself. Mom told me how much the
bread would probably cost and told me to keep the change in my pocket. There was all this trust in me, all this
responsibility. And what did I do? Lost
it, the ten-dollar bill. When I got to
the bakery: no money in my pocket. I had
no idea what could have happened to it, no idea. I was late getting home; I looked everywhere. My grandparents and cousins were already
there when I got back; everyone was in the kitchen; there was the noise of
everybody talking. “Where’s the bread,
Andy?” my mom said, and I had to say I lost the money. The room grew so quiet. Nobody said anything they were all just
looking at me. I didn’t get punished or
anything. I think everyone knew how bad I felt, and there wasn’t anything
anyone could do. We had our lunch with
the bread basket on the table but without the bread.”
When
he and his wife, Leslie came to see me, Andy said, “I was so overwhelmed by that loss, I think I never wanted to be in
control of my money after that.”
Leslie had never heard his story before, and even Andy had forgotten
about it until we did this exercise together.
But after Andy told the story, everything started to make more sense for
both of them. They had to come to talk
about investing for the future, but the two of them could never agree on the
kinds of investment they should make.
Most of these disagreements ended up with one or the other of them
storming out of the room to the point where they decided they needed professional
help. Leslie wanted to invest
aggressively; in their early forties they were young enough, she felt, to take
some risks. Andy, on the other hand, was
adamant about putting the money into a bank account, where he said, “it’ll be
safe.” He never understood why investing
scared him to death until he made this connection to his past.
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