A key concept in Meaningful Consumerism and improving your financial health and is to understand our perceptions of money and how money operates as a component of our financial health. However, most people who I work with tell me that they don’t have any money, don’t have enough money, can’t save money, don’t know how to budget their money, and/or feel stressed about money.
So before we can really get any deeper into the discussion on financial health, I recommend that we should probably have a little bit better understanding of this term “money.” So I’d like to ask you…What is Money?
In all my years of teaching, I have never met anyone who wouldn’t like to have more money. In fact, the vast majority of my students view more money as the ONLY solution to their financial troubles – their golden ticket to being able to stick to a budget, save money for the future, improve their credit, reduce the amount of stress they experience in their daily lives, and to have a good life. So, what is money? When I pose this question to one of my classes, the responses I get are typically verbalized with vigor. Money is power! Money is status! Money is opportunity! Money is evil! Money is freedom! Money is worry! It’s bad, no, it’s good. It’s paper, it’s electronic. It’s imaginary. It’s government conspiracy. It’s control. It turns out to be a lot of things.
Let’s use our imagination for a moment. Imagine you had a hammer sitting on a table. Does the hammer have any use just sitting there on the table, without a human to interact with it? No. The hammer can’t get up and start pounding nails into the wall on its own. All it can do is sit there on the table, patiently waiting for a human to pick it up and use it. On its own, it has no use. Sitting there on the table, the hammer merely represents the ability to do several things – some good, some not so good. It could put nails in walls, take nails out of walls, knock something loose that was stuck or push something into place. On the other hand, it could also smash your thumb, knock a hole in a wall, make dents in things, or potentially seriously injure or even kill someone. The hammer is simply a tool. You get to determine how to use it and until it is being used it is neither inherently good nor bad. It just is.
Money is really no different. If left sitting in the wallet, it will do nothing. If left sitting in the bank account, it will do nothing. It might draw some interest, but until it is used, the interest will do nothing too. By itself, money doesn’t do anything, and it doesn’t do anything to us. It does not move without us “willfully allowing” it to leave our possession, a behavior commonly referred to as spending. In order for money to leave your possession, you have to willfully allow it to do so – always.
If you have a $10 bill in your pocket, it can represent many possibilities – but it is neither inherently good nor bad, it just is. If you have $100,000 in the bank, it might mean a lot of different things to you, but until it is being used, it is neither inherently good nor bad, it just is. That $10 or $100,000 can be used to make purchases that will be beneficial, or it can be used to make purchases that are not beneficial. In the same way that you get to determine how to use a hammer or any other tool, you also get to determine how you will use your money.
So, as a reminder, money is simply a tool. Money might come in many different forms, like paper, coins, or electronic information, but ultimately, it’s still just a tool and we get to decide how to use it. All of those other things that we think about money, they are just reflections of what money represents to us. And it is good to know that about ourselves as well. But we will come back to this point over and over, money is a tool and it is a neutral object that we use. Money does not use us.
MEANINGFUL CONSUMERISM 