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if only I had more money
The price of greatness is responsibility.
—Winston Churchill
I was in eighth grade when my parents split up. My dad moved out on December 1, 1988, leaving my mom, my younger brother, and me at home. We had a maroon, mid-’80s Buick Skylark that took the three of us everywhere we needed to go. I have no idea what the monthly payment was for that car, but I knew my mom borrowed money to pay for it.
I also knew that things were much tighter financially after my dad moved out than they were before. When I wanted to go on weekend church retreats with my junior high friends, I always had my mom’s permission, but I could go only if the church would give me a scholarship. It was the same thing with an overnight field trip with my science class. My mom wanted me to go, but I had to ask the teacher if I could pay a discounted fee because we couldn’t afford the full price.
No wonder I felt such hope when I heard my mom explain, “Carrie, next month is our last car payment. Then we will have more money.” I waited for the change, just like she did. But nothing changed. A few years later we lost our house to foreclosure and downsized from a four-bedroom, four-level home with a yard that backed up to a park to a two-bedroom apartment with a balcony. I was away at college by then, so I spent the summer months and vacations at my grandma’s, since she had space enough for me.
I mean no disrespect to my mom by sharing this story. She is a wonderful and caring woman who desired nothing more than to abundantly provide for her family. It wasn’t that she lacked will. It wasn’t that she was lying when she told me that things would change. To her core she believed that after our Buick Skylark was paid off, our finances would be better.
I Became My Mom
Why didn’t the extra money make a difference? Why did things actually get worse when our family had more discretionary income? I didn’t begin to understand it until years later when money-related conversations between Marco and me sounded like this:
Marco: I need a new winter coat. The lining in my old one is ripped.
Carrie: I don’t think we can afford it. The car insurance is due this month, plus our heating bill is going to be huge. We can’t handle a discretionary expense like that right now.
Marco: How can we make an above-average salary, have no kids, and still not afford a new winter coat? How is that possible? Where is the money going?
Carrie: I have no idea. But look, next month you get paid three times. We’ll get on track with that third paycheck. Then we’ll have more money.
I had become my mom. I waited for three-paycheck months because then we could afford things that were otherwise out of reach. I also waited for annual bonuses, pay raises, and tax refunds. I don’t think I’m alone. With almost 50 percent of American families living paycheck to paycheck,[5] I’m sure this conversation is more commonplace than just my kitchen table. For much of Middle America, we work hard, earn a livable wage, and don’t live extravagantly, but we still don’t feel very good about our financial situation. Maybe we are one paycheck away from missing a mortgage payment. Maybe we haven’t saved a dime for our kids’ education or retirement. Maybe we can’t imagine a family vacation to Florida without picturing a mound of credit card debt.
We wait for a windfall. Or a promotion. Or a tax refund. Or Grandma’s annual cash gift at Christmas. We wait for more money to arrive on our doorstep, believing that when it does, then we can begin to change our financial life. Some of us will wait a lifetime, always hoping the next big financial break lies around the corner.
The Heart of the Matter
Personal responsibility is the core issue. When we believe that our financial problems are caused solely by a lack of money, we refuse to acknowledge our current situation as something we’ve brought about. We deny the fact that the power for changing our future lies within us. And if we continue to deny this fact, change will never come.
For a plethora of reasons, we believe it isn’t our fault. “The chips just haven’t fallen in my favor,” you tell yourself. It may be true that your ex-husband made poor decisions and now you’re stuck dealing with them. Or an unforeseen medical emergency resulted in a pile of debt. Each of us has a backstory about how we made a decent living yet became stuck financially.
Imagine a young boy named Chris, whose father was a violent alcoholic. His mom worked multiple jobs to make ends meet, leaving him to fend for himself most of the time. When she was around, she attempted to shelter Chris from Dad’s ferocious temper, but it didn’t work. Dad’s words still cut deeply into Chris’s soul. Unsurprisingly, Chris got mixed up with the wrong kids at school and started dabbling with alcohol and cigarettes at age eleven. By the time he was twenty-two, his rap sheet included two felony burglaries and check forging. As part of a plea bargain, he ended up in treatment.
When his counselor asked “Why are you here?” Chris plunged into a lengthy story about his dad’s drunken rages and his mom’s neglect as she worked hard to put food on the table. “While all that is true and terribly painful,” the counselor told him, “you’re here because you chose to drink. Your drinking fueled other bad choices. Your childhood might not have been what you desired, but you have the power to choose your response to it. No one can ever take that away from you.”
You are responsible to create the future you want to have.
So it is with us and our money. Life may have dealt us an unfair blow compared to the kid down the street. Your choices to overspend, underinvest, and overborrow might have roots in your past. Your parents may not have modeled financial responsibility. Your former business partner might have cooked the books. Your investment advisor might have pilfered away your savings. You can’t change the fact that any of that happened, but you still have the power to control your response. No one can take that away from you.
Step one in taking personal responsibility is facing your past and accepting your current situation. From there you have to take responsibility for your future.
Money is not responsible for creating a different reality in your life. If you want something different, then you are responsible to create it with the money you have. Your money is a tool at your disposal with which you can carve the path you want to walk. It’s remarkable how much this change in attitude changes everything else. Budgets are good and spreadsheets are helpful, but long-term solutions come from changing your mind-set about money.
It’s Not How Much You Make
It doesn’t matter how much money you make. What makes a difference is how much money you keep.
It seems hard to believe that just a little more wiggle room in the monthly budget wouldn’t make some sort of positive impact. It reminds me of Luther Elliss’s story. He was a professional football player who made $20 million over ten years in the NFL. That’s about $167,000 every month for those ten years. Five years after leaving the league, which is half as long as he played, not one dime of the $20 million remained. Elliss was so destitute at that point that he turned to handouts from churches and friends to sustain his family while working as an insurance salesman, making less than $1,500 per month.[6]
Luther Elliss isn’t the only striking example of this truth. Economists studied a group of big winners in Florida’s Fantasy 5 lottery. Each won $50,000 to $150,000 via a lottery windfall. The winners’ average debt at the time of their big wins was $49,000. You might think that they’d pay off their debt and be set on a new course for their lives. But that didn’t happen. The study found that three to five years after winning the lottery, the winners were just as likely to file bankruptcy as the general population. The authors concluded, “The results show that giving $50,000 to $150,000 to people only postpones bankruptcy.” It doesn’t prevent it.[7]
A Wheel Is Missing
If you’ve felt like your financial life has not gotten traction, then personal responsibility is the first place to look. As your income has gone up over the years, you may have noticed that your expenses tend to grow and even outpace the increase. You feel more broke the more money you have.
On the other hand, maybe you haven’t gotten a raise or bonus in years. Or perhaps your income has even decreased. For you, it’s hard to believe more money wouldn’t change things, because all you’ve ever known is scrimping and saving. You’re sure, with your thrifty ways, that you’re an exception to what I’m talking about.
But still your financial life is missing traction. You’re like a girl whose bike is broken. After tinkering with it to no avail, she goes into the house and tells her mom that the bike needs a tune-up. Mom comes into the garage to check it out and says, “Honey, a tune-up won’t help because you’re missing the front wheel.” When a fundamental building block is missing from our lives, then no amount of fine-tuning can move things forward. That’s why we’re not starting with budget worksheets and expense trackers. Those are mechanisms for fine-tuning once we have a solid foundation.
I’ll Quit Eating Donuts
I need to pause and clarify something. While I am saying that more money alone is not enough to resolve your financial issues, I am not naïve enough to suggest that your bank balance or income level doesn’t play a role in your financial life. Of course it does. What I’m saying is that it is not the most important factor. For so long we have seen our current situation from a one-dimensional perspective, when it is really much more complex than that. We assume that having more money is the answer.
But money doesn’t change your fundamental makeup. Think of it this way: What if someone told you he would quit eating donuts once he got thin? The first thing you’d wonder is, how does he intend to get thin in the first place? Second, even if he did get thin, it’s not as if this will magically create new habits, mind-sets, and behaviors—like removing a craving for donuts. From my own many failed attempts at joining a health club (because hey, if I join it, then I’ll be motivated to work out), I know firsthand that this kind of thinking puts the cart before the horse.
Change Yourself, Not Your Income
My desire is that you experience real change—the kind of change that lasts beyond the time you spend reading this book. That kind of change is deep and internal; it starts inside you, right at the core of your beliefs about money and your relationship to it. You must open up to the idea that you played a role in creating your present situation. You need to embrace the truth that what’s inside you is the key to the future you desire. It isn’t a quick or easy process, but it is a lasting one. Once you change, you’ll be amazed at the changes that happen around you. New beliefs, new vision, new habits, and new opportunities become possible.
If more money really were the main thing, wouldn’t your financial woes have been resolved with your last pay raise or tax refund? No, the issues are too complex and interconnected to be fixed so easily. And if you focus too much on your own lack of money, it will keep you from noticing your overspending, underplanning, overborrowing, and undersaving behaviors that factor into your current situation. Left ignored, these harmful behaviors trump the benefit that comes from any windfall.
When you’re tempted to think that one simple answer—more money—would change everything, remember this: It took hundreds of thousands of individual decisions for you to arrive where you are today. You’ll only arrive in a better place when you have the ability to make decision upon decision that leads you in that new direction.
The Day Everything Changed for Me
Our first child was born in April 2007. She was healthy and so was I, and within days our family of three returned home. I laid Victoria in her crib that first night, then crawled into bed myself. I prayed a silent prayer: “Dear Lord, what have I done? I am pee-my-pants scared. I don’t know that I can take care of this child, but I think it’s too late now to change my mind. Please help me because I have no idea what I’m doing. Help Marco too, so we don’t kill each other in this process. Amen.”
If you’ve ever brought a baby home from the hospital, then you know that feeling and may have prayed a similar prayer. It was the second time in my life I’d prayed that way. The first was when we decided to get out of debt. It may sound crazy to compare this decision with the responsibility that comes with having a baby, but changing your lifestyle in order to get out of debt is a big deal. For a few weeks Marco and I talked about the purpose of our lives. We’d come to see that our debt-ridden lifestyle was hindering us from accomplishing all we were created to do. It was a serious thing when we decided that we would get out of debt and never go back there again.
I agreed with the plan, but the next day I woke up with a sinking feeling in my stomach. That’s when my silent prayers began. “Dear Lord, what have I done? I am pee-my-pants scared. I don’t know that we can pay back everyone from whom we’ve borrowed and never borrow again. I know it’s too late to change my mind now. Please help me because I have no idea what I’m doing. Help Marco too, so we don’t kill each other in this process. Amen.”
I don’t have enough money to be able to change my financial life,becameI have all the money it takes to establish my financial future.
Financially, we’d been through a defining moment.
In an instant I accepted responsibility for my current financial situation and accepted the responsibility to change. All my life I’d believed that if I had more money, then things would change. Now here I was. I didn’t have any more money, yet I had agreed to change. No more scapegoats. Sobering.
Becoming Responsible
Before I understood the things we are talking about here, I wanted someone or something else to change my financial life. As a college senior I met a bright young man who was part of the air force’s Reserve Officer Training Corps. He would graduate with a stable military career ahead of him. He’d have a debt-free start too, courtesy of the air force paying his tuition and a solid North Dakota upbringing. From the time he was a six- or seven-year-old kid, he helped his parents farm their land. He learned to save and invest and developed an abhorrence for debt. He was the only person I knew at the time who had a nice car—a sporty one at that—and had paid cash for it. As a twenty-year-old college student. In every fathomable way he was financially responsible.
Me? Not so much. I was about to graduate with $20,000 in student loans (which was a lot in the 1990s) and no confidence in my ability to provide for myself. I’d seen my parents struggle to make ends meet. We lost my childhood home to foreclosure. My parents experienced bankruptcy. If they had a hard time financially, what made me think I could do any better? I wanted to marry this young man in part because I believed he’d rescue me financially. We didn’t marry and I was never rescued.
I think about where I was as a young person and compare it to that of a roommate I had in my early twenties. She was part of the AmeriCorps VISTA program, which I always described as a domestic Peace Corps. She earned squat for pay. She had a living stipend that was well below minimum wage, and her agreement with the AmeriCorps VISTA program prohibited her from getting a second job. Her work was noble, but she made a small fraction of what I was making.
At some point she had a financial need. Whether her car broke down or something else happened, I can’t quite remember, but I remember her response: She told me she’d take money out of savings. I had nothing in savings, but here she had set money aside even while earning such a low wage. My friend didn’t wait for better circumstances to happen to her before she got her financial act together. She knew she had chosen a low-paying volunteer position. She also knew that she had to create the future she wanted. She took responsibility.
That friend is living in the future she was creating back then. She and her husband own a variety of real estate. They recently paid cash for a new car. I wasn’t surprised when she told me that, after being unemployed for nine months recently, she had more money in savings at the end of her unemployment than when she started. That’s what happens when you live responsibly.
Choosing to Change
When I was single, my house was immaculate. Every morning I made my bed. Dishes were washed and put away immediately after every meal. Each of my belongings had a designated home, and everything always returned there when I was done using it. Now, as a mom with small kids, it’s a different story. Marco and I constantly step over dolls, blocks, books, crayons, cars, and other toys I didn’t even know we owned. Since I’ve had kids, I’ve experienced an exponential increase in my tolerance for a perpetual mess, with one exception—when we’re expecting company.
When we’ll be entertaining guests, everything changes, and I face the facts. I usually have a high tolerance for Rube Goldberg machines made out of toilet paper tubes, but I won’t put up with them when friends or family are coming over.
Financially, today’s the day company’s coming over. What you once tolerated isn’t tolerable anymore. Just like my family gets busy cleaning and dusting when we’re preparing for company, it’s time for you to take action.
Your actions start with a set of deliberate choices. When you choose to accept your past and your role in the present, you can walk into a different future. The largest challenge to accepting your past is forgiveness.
Woven into the backstory of our financial lives are setbacks, hurts, wounds, and missteps. We all have them. Sometimes we’ve hurt ourselves with our own addictive behavior, or we’ve lusted for things and given in to overspending. Sometimes those around us have made financial decisions that have directly impacted us. Our spouse or children may have pilfered away savings, stolen from us, or made unwise investments. Other times uncontrollable circumstances have dealt a blow to us financially—maybe it’s a lost job, an accident, an illness, or a natural disaster. No matter the source, it’s our responsibility to forgive ourselves or others so that we can move forward into a healthier financial life.
Years ago I felt locked in an emotional prison, angry with myself and others for a string of injustices. I’d hear pastors and others talk about forgiveness, but I never understood exactly how to forgive. Then I came across Neil Anderson’s book The Bondage Breaker. In it, Anderson explains what forgiveness is and why it is a starting point to personal transformation. I’m living proof that he’s right, even in the financial realm. Anderson explains forgiveness by saying,
Forgiveness is not forgetting. . . . Forgetting may be the result of forgiveness, but it is never the means of forgiveness. When we bring up the past against others, we haven’t forgiven them.
Forgiveness is a choice, a crisis of the will. . . . But forgiveness is difficult for us because it pulls against our concept of justice. We want revenge for offenses suffered. . . .
Forgiveness is agreeing to live with the consequences of another person’s sin. Forgiveness is costly; we pay the price of the evil we forgive. Yet you’re going to live with those consequences whether you want to or not; your only choice is whether you will do so in the bitterness of unforgiveness or the freedom of forgiveness. (emphasis added)[8]
Today is the day to let go of your past and start focusing on your future. To do this, make a list of everyone, including yourself, that you need to forgive in order to accept your present financial situation. Feel free to list each individual offense so you can release them from each and every one. Then you need to make a painful choice. You need to choose to “bear the burden of their offenses by not using the information about their offenses against them again in the future.”[9] This is not about feeling like you want to forgive—it’s a matter of choice. Feelings may (or may not) follow this activity, but you aren’t seeking feelings. You are untying yourself from the past. Your past has kept you from accepting your present situation and, therefore, being able to take the reins of your future. With your list in hand (and maybe a box of Kleenex if your wounds are deep), it’s time to make the following declaration out loud. Through this, you are accepting personal responsibility for your financial situation, breaking the tie to “If only I had more money” thinking, and forgiving those who have negatively influenced you.
Quiz
Do you hold on to the false belief that having more money would solve your financial problems? Here’s a quiz that may help reveal your own internal attitudes. Using the following chart, place a number after every statement.
- I believe I have too little money left at the end of the month to save any of it.
- I don’t believe I can provide for myself and my family financially.
- I play the lottery.
- I dream of getting a huge salary increase.
- I believe my current financial situation is not my fault.
- I set up my tax withholdings so I get a huge tax refund each year.
Tally your scores. Your total demonstrates how strongly you hold the attitude that more money would solve your financial problems.
| 0–10: |
This attitude has minimal influence on your financial decision making. Other attitudes may need addressing first. |
| 11–20: |
This attitude is part of your financial decision-making process. For your long-term success it needs to be addressed. |
| 21–30: |
This attitude strongly influences your financial decisions. It is a priority to change this attitude. |
Discussion Questions
Here are a few questions to help you think through your financial situation, either by yourself or with a small group:
- When describing your financial situation, where do you tend to assign responsibility? Are there people you need to forgive in order to move forward?
- How were financial decisions handled in your household growing up?
- What expectations did you have about the future when you were younger that haven’t been met?
- Do you know anyone who has a low income but seems to be doing well financially? If so, what decisions do you think they’ve made to create their current situation?
- After reading this chapter, are there any beliefs you need to change about yourself or your money?