your parents, your peers, your neighbours and yourself?
You might look at me now and think I’m financially savvy, but it certainly hasn’t always been this way. For many, many years I was scared of making money, losing money, saving money, spending money and deserving money. I was trapped in a mindset of scarcity where I had a warped view of wealth, how much I needed, how much I deserved and what I needed to do to achieve it. It took a lot of work, self-development and self-analysis to get to a point where I see money not as the enemy, but as an ally to help me achieve my purpose.
When I called my mother to ask about my financial upbringing before sitting down to write this chapter, she admitted that when my sister and I were little she did feel like a black cloud of worry was hanging over us. Just to put my own childhood into perspective, we were far from poverty-stricken. In fact, after our country upbringing in our pre-teen years, if we hadn’t been raised in Sydney’s affluent eastern suburbs and instead had a house in the deep west of the city, we probably would have been the richest in our neighbourhood. As it happens, we were definitely some of the poorest kids in a private school, the smallest house on the best street, the lowest percentile in a high percentage. Yet, as a single parent, my kind and sensitive mama was terrified of getting sick and not being able to support us, was adamant that she didn’t want to take any handouts from family, and felt weighed down by financial responsibility. Even if I didn’t realise it at the time, this does have a knock-on effect when you’re an impressionable kid, and money became the monster under our beds, a dirty word we shouldn’t mention and something that, for many years, I personally felt I didn’t deserve.
I don’t think I’m the only child to be raised around such fears, often by no fault of the parent who was just trying to do their best with the resources they had (while dealing with their own money memories passed down by their own parents, our grandparents, who have their own money memories passed down from our great-grandparents and so on). Even if you had a blissful childhood where money was abundant, it can still warp your perception of money in adulthood.
I remember watching a hilarious skit that the New Zealand comedy duo Flight of the Conchords recorded for Red Nose Day a few years ago called, ‘Feel Inside (and Stuff Like That)’. They sat down with schoolchildren and asked them, among other things, about the economy. How much is a lot of money? Answers ranged from “a million” to “10” dollars and “your whole house full of money?” And, how do you make money? “We can get money from selling oil, gold and the crystals,” replies one little girl, “I saw that in a movie I watched, The Muppets.”
If you asked any child these questions, I’m sure you would get very different but equally cute answers. In a similar vein, Jeffrey Pritchard, an American financial blogger, asked his seven-year-old daughter to answer some basic finance questions. What is money? “Change. And you could use it to buy stuff.” How much money do you need to have to be considered rich? “Two thousand, ten hundred.” What job do you want to do when you grow up and how much will it pay? “Farmer. Five dollars every day or every month.” How much do you think a new house costs? “Ten thousand, fifty hundred.” A car? “$548,060.” At what age do people retire? “Probably 26.”
However, all jokes aside, could these inaccurate perceptions have a lasting impression? Will these kids grow out of it? Will their ideas really shift, change and evolve as they age? Or do many of the associations we place around money as a child actually stick with us, like a secret fear of the dark, the belief that if we step on a crack it might break our mother’s back, and an aversion to the taste of olives, though you haven’t let one pass your lips since your older sister force-fed one to you in pre-school?
Don’t be fooled into thinking your relationship with money began the day you cashed your first pay cheque, because I firmly believe that our attitude to money is deeply ingrained in us from our earliest experiences – when those mystical gold and silver coins that can be exchanged for lollies and marbles suddenly become a source of excitement, disappointment, terror or resentment, depending on the expression on a parent’s face as they gaze at the number that flashes up on an ATM screen. When we learn to cheer on Cinderella in her rags, to fear the Wicked Stepmother in her finery, when Robin Hood battled Prince John, and we’re taught that wealth makes you selfish, mean and a ‘baddy’, whereas poverty is associated with the ‘goodie’ and the eventual winner. And when we chose, very early on, where we would sit on that moral scale.
In his book, My Life and Work, the great Henry Ford (now there’s a man who knew how to build a brand) wrote, “We teach children to save their money. As an attempt to counteract thoughtless and selfish expenditure, that has a value. But it is not positive; it does not lead the child out into the safe and useful avenues of self-expression or self-expenditure. To teach a child to invest and use is better than to teach him to save.”
I learned a lot of long-lasting lessons during my childhood that had both positive and negative connotations – money is scarce, you shouldn’t take it for granted and the need to budget strictly. The same lessons that have allowed me to grow a business out of nothing have also nearly broken me, and for a long time stopped me living as the fullest version of myself because I refused to invest in myself, back myself, enable myself or ask for what I was owed.
I am not here to tell you to wipe your mind of all childhood associations (if only it was that easy!) but to examine your attitude to money, which associations are working for you and which are self-sabotaging. I hope that I never, ever stop picking 5-cent coins up off the street, even if I become a multibillionaire, because it is that jingle of coins in my pocket, the superstitious belief that money can bring magic, which continues to drive me, to ground me, motivate me and inspire me. (Side note: a friend of mine in America told me recently that a few weeks ago, he found 13 cents in the street and picked it up, much to the amusement of a passer-by walking near him. At the time, money was on his mind because he needed a plane ticket home to Australia but couldn’t afford one. A few days later he was taking a domestic flight across America and the airline had overbooked the flight and offered anyone who was prepared to stay a day and get the flight tomorrow US$1300 as compensation. Can you believe it? So this US$1300 paid for his ticket back to Australia. The universe works in mysterious and wonderful ways if you stay open to it. It is that reminder that money can be lost and found so instantly, which stops me becoming too attached to it, ensures I remember that wealth is subjective and fleeting, can grace anyone’s palm and burn a hole in anyone’s pocket.)
I recently watched a TED talk by Tania Luna, an entrepreneur originally from the Ukraine, who left her hometown with her family after Chernobyl to take asylum in America. In the talk, she recalls living in a homeless shelter (“We think that it’s a hotel – a hotel with lots of rats”) and the moment she and her sister, as schoolgirls, discovered true treasure in the street. “So, we find this penny kind of fossilised in the floor and we think that a very wealthy man must have left it there because regular people don’t just lose money,” says Tania, “And I hold this penny in the palm of my hand and it’s sticky and rusty but it feels like I’m holding a fortune. I decide that I’m going to get my very own piece of Bazooka bubble gum. And in that moment I feel like a millionaire.”
These are the kind of childhood lessons that should never be forgotten, that we should lock up in a safe and pass down to our children with their inheritance. I’ll never forget the sense of pride when I cashed my first pay cheque shortly after my 15th birthday, as a proud employee of KFC, where I just remember sliding across the floor at the end of a shift like an ice-skater in my white plastic shoes, complete with the deep satisfaction of tucking into leftover chips dipped in potato and gravy on the walk home. However, I also have to check myself when I am tortured with guilt over spending $2 on a bottle of water, when I’m tempted to undercharge a client or want to avoid my accountant’s phone calls.
