After Being Poor, Your Financial Anxiety Remains

This is not a brag post; this is me trying to grapple with new wealth and financial anxiety when I have no family or friends to discuss this with. It’s also me still dealing with the same anxious mindset I had when I was an underemployed college graduate, one who was very aware there was no familial (or much governmental) safety net if I happened to fall.

In early February I wrote about hitting the $200,000 milestone in personal wealth. In the 1.5 months since then my net worth went up another $20,000. The bulk of this is thanks to a sizeable bonus, tax returns, and short-term investment growth in my index funds. There was a point in my life that I measured reaching my first $20k over years; now the same growth can be measured as a matter of weeks? Days? That’s so fast already and I hear it’s going to get even faster as time goes on. At this rate I’m definitely going to hit a $250k net worth later this year, assuming overall market returns are at least 0%.

Which is to say: I’m good. I understand that.

Does that mean I actually feel good? No.

Because now I’m going through the steps of making my first major purchase post-college in buying a car. The final paperwork should go through next week and make me an official vehicle owner, which is what I have told myself I’d do in 2021. And the thought of spending the thousands of dollars to get it is, unexpectedly, dredging up my old mindset of money anxiety and hardship.

My lizard brain is screaming “DON’T DO IT!” and my body is physically tensing up when I think about writing that check. Logically, I don’t understand why I have this financial anxiety. You guys know how much money I make and have; it’s more than what most 26-year-olds have in this country, let alone the world. It’s not like this car purchase is going to put me into debt, either. I’m buying a nice used car with all cash so no car payment, ever. The sales price is also less than four percent of my overall net worth; if you had $1,000 to your name, it’s the equivalent of the SUV being $35. Car insurance, maintenance, and all the other little expenses a car needs are easily covered by my cash reserves and paychecks. And even after all of this I’ll have close to five figures sitting in cash.

So this?

It makes me feel so uncomfortable when I know it shouldn’t.

Having a car would be awesome. I could go on road trips whenever I wanted to. I could easily visit friends in Vermont and Maine without dealing with rentals. Oh my god, I could pick up my own furniture with a big enough car. The national highway system could be mine for the taking! All I need to do is get past my fear of spending so much! And it’s harder than it realistically should be!! Why is doing this nice, affordable thing for myself bringing my fight-or-flight response to the forefront?

Financial Anxiety from a Lifetime in the Poverty Mindset

there's a PTSD that comes from being poor that nobody talks about when you start getting money.

— holistic mami✨ (@LeArielleSimone) March 9, 2021

I want to reach out to this lady and interview her about this tweet – she summarized my feelings perfectly in less than 100 characters. She also made me think about how my current financial anxiety might have it roots in the 1990s instead of my 2016 Year of Fear. See, I’m not sure if my family was ever poor growing up, but my parents’ money habits/poverty mindsets made it feel like we were. I never felt like I could ask for nice clothes; whenever my mom would bring us kids to Kohl’s my younger sister and I would stick obsessively to the 80% racks, combing through them for something we wanted badly enough to nervously request.

The same nervousness around money spent permeated everything; at one point in high school my mom full-on screamed at me because I used a lot of (regular, Grade A, white) eggs while making dinner. Apparently eggs were expensive in 2011? Not something I would’ve known.

Stress and poverty go together like flies and manure. And it’s no secret both play some very concerning games with your brain. “There’s a PTSD that comes from being poor,” indeed.

It’s hard to think about how much this still affects me years later. Logically, I’m very obviously ahead of the financial curve. But logic alone doesn’t conquer the deeply ingrained money psyche I’ve developed throughout my first two decades of life.

Even today I still struggle with just buying things I want for myself. I’ve repressed the desire for things for so long and so thoroughly that now it’s a struggle to even identify the things I want. I need to consult a list on my Notes app titled “Things to Buy” because my mind goes blank if I try to remember what I wanted to get while in the store. I’ve programmed myself to go without going back into my childhood. Debugging that now is not a simple task.

Because I Still Have Financial Anxiety After Being Poor, That’s Why

Since my college graduation in 2016, the most money I’ve ever spent was in a first month, last month, and security deposit put down for my current apartment ($5,100). I remember freaking out about that decision too, despite it being an amazing decision for my quality of life. (Not to mention how phenomenal it’s been in a yearlong pandemic.) The logical lady in me has crunched the numbers and measured this car’s compatibility against my goals and dreams. I WANT a car. The one I’m getting is a good deal. It’s in my budget and I have more than enough cash to pay for it. Yet all of these calm, logical points don’t make much different in the panic-stricken lizard brain still stuck in impoverished times. Anxiety isn’t that big on critical thinking.

And financial anxiety is no exception.

It’s so tiring to know I have to deal with these money worries when they’re no longer serving me. Sure, those thoughts and physical responses stopped me from following the standard fallacies in mismanagement when I had very little to my name. That is now a far cry from my reality and I want off this train. If I want to get rid of this ridiculousness for good I’d need to do some inner work to finally banish it. You’d think the numbers I have in my investment accounts would be enough, right?

I really wish it was; doing this internal processing and analysis on this is unearthing a lot of negative feelings I didn’t know I still held onto. Feelings of shame, of trauma, of fear. It’s not something that gives me the warm and fuzzies to dwell on, to put it simply.

If someone doesn’t have that money growing up, it’s like being shot through with too much energy […] There’s this undercurrent that money equals love, power, security, control, self-worth, self-love, freedom, self-esteem — all those loaded things that money supposedly can do, but doesn’t.

Therapist Olivia Mellan in the New York Times

So despite possessing a net worth that continues to boggle the mind, it takes me time to process plunking down this much money on, well, anything. Once I buy a house I’ll likely need someone with a defibrillator on standby, just in case. Spending money at all used to be outside my comfort zone, and it was thanks to budgeting giving me “permission” to spend that I actually did start buying healthier groceries and whatnot.

The Rise to Wealth on a National Scale Shows I’m Not Alone in This

I even see this cycle on a national scale and find it sad. How many Boomers were lifted out of poverty thanks to parental sacrifice or their own career prospects, only to turn around and sneer at the succeeding generations for struggling? For that matter, how many multi-millionaires have a rags-to-riches story and STILL can’t fathom why they should try to aid those impoverished? I think their relationships with money, like mine, are warped. They’re terrified someone’s going to come along and take it all away from them, so they take their fears out on the less well-off and hoard instead of help.

I’m relieved to note my money issues won’t propel me to that level of impotency – in the next three years, for example, I’m going to set up a scholarship at my hometown community college, which I am so excited about I almost can’t wait to do. The main thing standing between me and that hot mess is my financial literacy, which is, unfortunately, a rare skill in this country. Leaving my money issues to fester would practically give my financial anxiety carte blanche to run my life. Going down that road would lead to me living in a shack eating grass for sustenance despite being wildly rich.

When you’re in the circumstances to need to do this, you’re IN IT. Once you get out of those circumstances, the residuals stay with you.

Seeing Financial Anxiety Play Out Throughout the Present Day

At the core of it I keep expecting something to come up and wipe my wealth away. You hear of it happening, sometimes. Sometimes hearing those stories changes my behavior for the worse, too, in very stupid and embarrassing ways. Here’s a more humiliating anecdote, for perspective: a few years ago I got hit by a van (yes, HIT BY A VAN) and didn’t go to a doctor to check if I was okay. A friend of mine had to convince me to go get looked at, rightfully telling me how senseless that was.

And despite her making sure I knew the dangers, to this day I’m still reluctant to see a doctor if I notice something funky going on. My weird poverty mindset rushes in and bellows hey, I have the money for now, but maybe that’ll change if I go in and they discover cancer or some other expensive disorder. Then where would I be?

Like, okay Darcy, you’d be healthy? You’d get treatment and be okay? Or the doctor might not find anything and simply charge you $40 for the appointment. Which will still make you feel bad because that’s $40 you could’ve saved. Which means you’re back to the start of the cycle and need to go through the justifications all over again, ad nauseum. Just because you get a high-paying job doesn’t mean your relationship with money is automatically stellar.

Understanding how to manage your money makes life 100% better. There is no way I would have reached $220,000 otherwise; it’s wholeheartedly worth it. What I didn’t understand was how much my time on the edge of poverty would shape me and continue to influence my moods and decisions.

I seriously cannot wait to be able to drive all around New England. I can go visit friends flung all over Maine and Vermont! Hiking whenever I want! So much less hassle visiting far-flung places!! All I have to do between now and then is deal with my financial anxiety. Which is a surprisingly tough task, no matter your net worth.

Cover image credit: Fabian Møller via Unsplash