Books about money teach you how to invest, live with less, save for retirement, etc. They teach you critical practical aspects, but they don’t teach you the essence of stopping worrying about money. Here’s the problem: these are band-aid solutions. They may improve your financial situation, but they neglect much more profound and more significant underlying questions:
How much money do I need?
What is a healthy relationship with money?
How can I escape the hamster wheel of trying to make more money?
Today, I want to give you some tips on how to think about money constructively and philosophically. Asking yourself practical questions to examine your relationship with money explains the link between money and the good life. Knowing how to control money worries is much more helpful than learning how to control money.
These are valuable thoughts on how to stop worrying less about money that will change how you view money forever.
Table of Contents
1. Why do you think about money a lot?
Money makes our lives so difficult for two reasons: money problems and financial worries.
Sound confusing? Here’s the difference: Money problems are hard and urgent. They occur when your car breaks down unexpectedly, and you don’t have enough money to fix it, when you can’t replace your worn-out clothes, or when you can’t put enough food on the table. On the other hand, financial worries are more about the fear of not having enough money in the future or the stress of managing your finances. They are not immediate problems but concerns that can affect your mental well-being.
Financial worries are a completely different story. They do not reflect the struggles of reality. They are personal and entirely invented by ourselves. Billionaires don’t have money problems. But your money worries can be as intense as a bankrupt gambler’s (and probably are). Worries are about what’s happening in your head, not just what’s happening in your bank account.
Unfortunately, our culture has become obsessed with advice for money problems. This is a big obstacle because money is much more than paying your monthly bills. It’s also about things like power, status, freedom, and work. That’s why ” earn as much money as possible” is a double-edged sword. Most people who follow this path have solved their money problems for a long time, but they continue to create money worries.
“The question is, ‘ How can I get more money?’ “Ideally, it should be asked only after I have determined how much money I need and what I need it for.
2. How much money do you need to live
The way most of us worry isn’t exactly productive. And not only in the economic aspect. We worry about worries. We get anxious just to be nervous. As a freelancer, it can be particularly stressful. As a good human, when I see that my monthly earnings are lower than expected, my mind launches a sequence of worries like dominoes:
I’m not making enough money → I’m doing something wrong → I’m not productive enough → Am I burning out? → I don’t feel inspired anymore → I can’t do this → I’ll never make enough money → I’ll land on the street.
As you can see, my thoughts are entirely separated from reality. And so, I turned a single spark of worry into a bonfire of despair. The solution to worry less about money is to identify the concern, ask the right questions, and come up with an insightful answer. Then you can ask yourself these four questions to reduce money worries:
“What do I need the money for? What is important to me?”
“How much money do I need to do that?”
“What’s the best way for me to get that money?”
“What are my financial responsibilities to other people?”
Please take about an hour to do this exercise just for you. There are no distractions. If you can’t give 100% accurate answers right now, that’s okay. Take your time and repeat these questions as many times as necessary.
When I started doing these exercises, it felt like a cool shower washed away the muddy financial worries in my mind. And honestly, I was surprised. I only held back with some of my money calculations and even included monthly savings. But the final number my calculator returned was still far below what I expected.
A good life requires less money than most of us like to believe.
Whenever you feel worried about money, ask yourself these questions and give yourself a bath of mental freshness.
3. What is the secret meaning of money?
What is money besides a number in your bank account? Money means something different to each person. It’s a medium of exchange, for sure. Money can store value. It can turn into a lot of exciting things at almost any time. But what does that mean for our relationship with money?
There are three ways money affects our quality of life:
How we turn money into other things — like possessions and experiences.
How we turn work into money.
And how the two interact.
How to avoid an unhealthy relationship with money. Now pay attention to the following:
Our relationship with money becomes unhealthy when we remove it from this cycle. Knowing this, it’s easy to see where our biggest financial worries come from:
Your efforts feel like they could be more valuable. Your work is more significant than what you get out of it.
You need help to turn money into meaningful possessions and experiences.
Or you fight a combination of the two.
I’m going to give you an example so you understand better:
Let’s say you buy a house. Many people would see this as an investment. And that’s fair enough. Money becomes bricks, cement, glass, and steel. And someday, you can turn the house back into money. The problem? Money is always the primary consideration. And, therefore, a source of stress. Paying taxes and damage to the house is unpredictable. Real estate market prices rise and fall.
The result is that house worries turn into money worries. You have separated your investment from the money cycle, and therefore, you will feel that it adds no value to your life.
Fortunately, that’s not the only way to think about it. Houses are more than real estate. They are also places to call home, to make memories, to invite your friends to dinner, to educate the children, to express creativity, and to relax and unwind.
Our relationship with money becomes healthy when we stop treating everything we buy as materialized money. And instead, we start making meaningful purchases with worthwhile effort.
In other words, buy a house, not real estate.
4. Why money is necessary, what is its purpose
One goal of having money is survival. But what happens once we meet our most basic needs? Why are we so desperate to keep making more and more money?
Here are two common answers:
We want more money in the hope of leading a happier life.
We want more money to feel better about ourselves.
Money can buy the symbols but not the causes of serenity and buoyancy. Directly, we must agree that money cannot buy happiness.”
Research confirms that there is a “saturation effect.” The more money we earn, the less it contributes to our well-being. We need to reconsider our money goals. But how?
Flourishing in life means reaching our full potential and making the best use of our time and skills. Money alone cannot help with this, but most things in life are complicated without cash.
For example, money doesn’t make you a better pianist. But you can buy lessons, music books, and a grand piano.
In this sense, money can act as an ingredient for action. It is an enabler of possessions, power, and influence. And in contrast to happiness, the return of flourishing and money is unlimited.
But you should still try to earn as much money as possible. Again, it is crucial to know why you need or want money. Only then will you be able to answer how much money you need? Consider the following questions:
What are my real goals? (This could be a lovely home, improving a skill, or creating a better life for the people around you.)
What (other than money) is essential to achieve these things?
What does money bring?
To fully understand this concept, you must understand the following points:
5. What are the basic needs
It should be clear that your needs are crucial to your money worries. But what are needs anyway?
The problem is that we often confuse our actual needs with wants. For example, we might fall into the trap of modesty: “Oh, I shouldn’t buy this because I don’t need it.” We really mean that this item is not part of our most basic needs: food, shelter, safety, etc.
But here’s the thing: No one stops needing money because it covers their basic needs. Our actual needs run deeper. They are our basic needs, plus everything that helps us thrive. A key question you can ask yourself is: “How well will it be for me to have this in my life?”
In this sense, buying something affordable and desirable is a bad idea. You might have enough money to upgrade your phone. But does it help you flourish? Probably not. Ideally, it would help if you always defined your actual needs first and only then looked for your price.
It is important then to consider, to go deeper into this point, that in the end, what we seek by having more money is not the money itself; it is the experiences it gives you and how that money amplifies who you are. If you like being with family and giving gifts, money helps you be more of all this. The problem arises when we think we can do it when we have more money and not right now.
For example, I used to think that money was freedom. So, I questioned my concept of freedom. Was he in jail? Was I locked in, or couldn’t I move? I was indeed looking for the freedom of having a schedule that I would be pleased with, but freedom was already in my life, and I had decided to put a price on it. Now that I have rethought everything that money meant to me, many of my worries are gone, and if they appear, I know how to handle them.
To finish, I encourage you to ask yourself what money means: What is money? What values does it represent? What emotions does it produce in you? And then decide that none of this is true; it’s just what you’ve subconsciously decided about money. Question why you have decided to relate money to happiness, freedom, generosity, etc., and analyze how you can experience more of them without using money as an excuse to achieve it. In the end, money is not the goal; it is the experiences we can expand (not the ones we can reach) from what we already have or can experience daily.
