Understand Money. Don’t Hurt Yourself.
There’s a person I knew in college that I thought one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. Here I’ll call them “Kit”. They had an incredible fashion sense, was phenomenally talented, and was a wildly creative soul. A while back I saw a post on Kit’s private feed discussing their current struggles. Specifically, about the sacrifices involved in becoming a full-time Instagram influencer and following a different career path. The issue: since influencers don’t rake in that much of a salary, Kit would have had to stay in a toxic home situation to live it out. Moving to their own place meant getting a job that paid well enough to afford it, at the cost of not yet becoming that person they dreamed about.
Kit bemoaned they’d be forfeiting their dreams in favor of getting therapy and better mental space – as if taking care of yourself is less important than those ephemeral dreams.
Look, I’m the last person to disparage someone else’s dream. That’s exactly what gives you direction in life and joy in climbing your way up to it. Dreams give you a glimpse of what your best life will actually look like. But listen: achieving your best life means gaining peace of mind, which, in our world, includes learning how to understand money. Reaching financial peace means having that peace of mind, especially because it enables you to untangle the hard-to-quantify mental state of “a human being that’s gone through some shit”.
Assets are Resources
Give yourself the resources to do so much more for you than fleeting fancies. Financial education opens a lot more doors for you than you even realize at the beginning. Why? Because then you’ll actually know what to do with money once you get your hands on more of it. You’ll know that getting started isn’t comfortable for the same reason Baby Boomers aren’t comfortable around computers: it’s this big scary thing dominating the world and it makes you feel intimidated and overwhelmed.
If you want to achieve even a modicum of your dream life, you’ll need to suck it up. Join communities of people learning and discussing the same things you need to know. Get exposed to more than one viewpoint. For finance especially, doing this will change your life for the better.
The connection between your money and your dreams is an unfortunate reality in our world. It’s also a reality you can hack, and a reality you can deal with with enough education and smarts on your side.
I say that with experience, because it did for me. I could almost count the amount of stress reduced by every $10,000 gain to my net worth. At $22,000 I felt damn proud and seriously capable. At $30k I felt I could breathe. $40-60k leaked the tension right out of my shoulders and back. Today I look at my number every morning as a daily reassurance: you can do THAT, so you can do a hell of a lot more.
With these resources I have so many more options, but it’s my educational assets that provide the real resources. It’s because I know how to do things like properly budget and score a high-paying job that I don’t need a toxic parent to provide me housing. I don’t even need someone else to split the rent! My life is so smooth-sailing precisely because I understand money. Refusing or neglecting to do the same will make your struggle that much harder.
I am the Dragon Breathing Fire
If I had the same dreams as Kit, these obstacles would hit me differently. Because I’ve got over $100,000 (and growing) I can continue living my life free of my own toxic home. More than that, I have so little stress that I’m usually scrambling to relate to everyone else’s complaints. (“Ouch, that financing’s got you down? Yeah, sure does suck…”)
Best of all, I wouldn’t have to choose between a happy career and a happy home. I’ve got the foundation to build both because I understand money and how to best utilize it. It’s human nature to build upon what we already have. With the means to build, we make beautiful things; those things become the resources necessary to build even higher and further than anything previously possible.
How would more money accelerate your path to your dream life? How high would you rate your own financial understanding?