The Money Honey
My strained relationship with money, how I learnt to respect money and what it gave me in return
Two weeks ago, I attended a dinner gathering organized by one of my former business associates. He came from the US for a 2 day visit and wanted to gather his team to meet each other as they all worked remotely and having been a part of their humble begginings, I was invited to join too. As the dinner went on and both former and present members joined the table, an all too well recurring theme started becoming the center of conversation. Money!!! It all started when one former employee of the firm began sharing his experience of working at a leading position for one of the largest weapon manufacturers in the world. From his humble upbringing in the outskirts of Skopje to his meteoric rise to a junior account position, his journey covered the incredible leap from poverty to working alongside the 1% of the world’s most powerful and richest leaders. Not only was it one hell of a story and one of the most inspiring life journeys I’ve had the pleasure of hearing, but it was also an extremely humbling experience. Torn between two drastically different mindsets, it seemed to me that this person was tiptoing the fine rope that bridged the chasm between the two different realities, holding on for dear life, trying to balance the wobliness in an effort not to lose himself.
The following week after that I got reminded again of his story, when I came upon Steven Bartlett’s experience with a waiter pouring his water for him while he was in a restaurant meeting his first investor.
And then few days later, as I was working on creating a budgeting stategy around the grant we got approved for, I thought of this person’s story again. Somehow it burnt a hole through my head and for whatever reason his story stuck with me. Seeing as how this medium has become sort of like my confessional booth, as I got reminded of it for the third time in two weeks, I felt compeled to share it here, but it also got me thinking about my strained relationship with money and how throughout different periods of my life the meaning of it drastically changed, moulding into something different each time to evolve to what it is today.
Counter to what this guy was experiencing, I got to experience it in reverse. I come from a well off family, some would even say rich. I wouldn’t dare to go that far, but the truth is that I was comfortable throughout my entire life. Growing up, having the security of a roof over my head, food, access to good education and opportunities for traveling and cultural experiences made me perhaps see the world a little bit differently. It just might have been even what ignited my delusion in the first place, thinking I could do anything I set my mind to (or maybe that was Hollywood movies), who knows really. What I do know for sure is the fact that having access to all these luxiries early on in life made me think of them as necessities and during some periods of life I did take them for granted.
While in college and during my master, I received a montly allowance and the mindset I was in back then was to spend it all, primarly on clothes, traveling and enjoing food. Being a hedonist, shopping and traveling seemed to bring some sort of happiness to me. You see despite the fact that my dad was pretty scrappy with money, I was very careless. And I don’t think the reason for my carelessness was that it wasn’t my own money I was spending, because I treated the same way, the money I earned from doing student work, as they too were there for the sake of entertaining purposes. I call this period of my life the appearance of the uneducated careless asshole.
The concept of fiscal responsibility came later on in my life, when I was too proud to admit that I needed help and didn’t want to ask for money from my family anymore. So I made the conscious decision that whatever amount I was earning, I was gonna live on it. In order to do that I needed to learn how to budget them correctly and thankfully having lived for so long by myself, I learned early on that in order to see how much you’re left with you need to cover your bills first. It was my first lesson in budgetting. But despite this important lesson, I continued disrespecting money, treating them as an occasional lover, rather than a constant life companion. For a while there, this passionate affair was fun, until this occasional lover decided to leave me for good.
Fast forward to 2020 when life got real pretty fast with my dad ending up on a breathing machine in a hospital, I got slapped pretty hard with the notion of just how unprepared and uneducated I was in personal finance. Reading the biography of Oscar Wilde (Oscar: A Life) didn’t help either. The whole book started to feel more like a cautionary tale of what happens to a hedonist when they don’t get their shit together. So the first thing I did after my dad got better and I finished the book was to enroll my ass for a stocks and shares course in an effort to become more responsible with money. Now as a creative, I suffered through it literally. It was a torture. Maybe the reason that I found it so numbly boring was the fact that I never really fully understood the way it works until I realized that you don’t actually need to understand the nitty gritty details of it. You just need to find a company that has a good track record of working with mutual funds that understands the complexities of investing, research them thoroughly and then invest 10% of your money and leave it to them to manage it.
Which brings me to a podcast I listened to this Friday which sort of confirmed this. You can find it here
Now back to present day, while my relationship with money is still on the rocks, I do feel like if there’s one thing that entrepreneurial life has taught me it was the hard learned lesson of nurturing and forging a responsible relationship where I no longer see money as means to an end, but the ultimate end itself. Needless to say after that sobering experience, my whole mindset changed.
My unshakable belief up until 2020 was that you only live once and being irrevocably convinced in that I sought to pursue experiences that only left me satisfied for a few days and angry for the rest of the year, as I was scrapping to make ends meet, because I splurged on a holiday I couldn’t actually afford. Instead I learned that pursuing financial security is much more satisfying and fulfilling. Being aware that you have assets that could bring a passive income to you at any given time gives you comfort and that in return provides you with a constant satisfaction throughout the whole year. I still splurge every once in a while on small luxuries which feed my soul, but throughout my 12 years of experience as an entrepreneur those impulses have become much more rare these days.
Becoming financially literate is one of my goals this year and one of the things I’m planning to start with is reading this book “The Psychology of Money” by Morgan Housel, followed by “The Algebra of Wealth: A Simple Formula For Financial Security” by Scott Galloway . In the meantime, if anyone out there has a better recommendation, send it my way. I’d love to know what you think.
I know time these days is a precious currency, so thank you for reading.
Hasta la vista until next Sunday lovelies,
with ❤️
from my Salad Brain 🧠
Money is such an interesting topic and everyone has widely different perspectives on it. Loved reading yours!