The Family Groove | Money Matters | THE SECRETS TO FINANCIAL WELLNESS

MONEY MATTERS
SPENCER D. SHERMAN, CEO OF ABACUS WEALTH PARTNERS AND AUTHOR OF
THE CURE FOR MONEY MADNESS, GIVES YOU THE TIPS YOU NEED TO CREATE
REAL AND LASTING FINANCIAL SUCCESS FOR YOUR WHOLE FAMILY

IN A CRISIS: THE SECRETS TO FINANCIAL WELLNESS

The Secrets to Financial Wellness The financial crisis is a spiritual/personal growth test.
Will we see this moment as an opportunity to practice
living a life of equanimity regardless of the circumstances?
Or will we succumb to panic and fear? It’s not so difficult to kayak in still and calm waters. But when the rapids arise, how will we navigate the challenge?

The financial crisis has all the characteristics of a wooly mammoth: It threatens our survival, our confidence to make the right decisions about money, our faith in our ability to foresee danger (“Why didn’t I see this coming?”); it threatens our sense of fairness (“I worked so hard for this money and this job and they’re gone!”); it threatens our trust in our government, capitalism, the world economy. It feels like a betrayal and a loss. And it awakens the volcano of fear that lies dormant in us most of the time.

What is this primal fear and where did it come from? This question is the silver lining in the crisis. Here is our chance to transform our relationship with money—to experience financial wellness, a sense of freedom and clarity around our finances regardless of how much we have (or how much we had).

Begin by recalling your earliest childhood memories about money. Were your parents arguing about money? Was there not enough for the things you or they wanted? Did they ignore money and hope for the best? Did they covet material wealth? Did it leave you with powerful messages about money, e.g., “You can never have enough money,” “You have to own your own home,” “Money makes the world go ’round” and “What will the neighbors think?”

When I was 8, I asked my father how much money he made. He didn’t answer. But the glare he gave me produced intense feelings of terror and shame within me. The 8-year-old boy’s feelings combined with his distorted perceptions led to three conclusions: “Money is security,” “You can never have enough” and “Don’t ever talk about money.” Many years later, I received an MBA in finance from Wharton Business School. But even with all my higher knowledge, it was the childhood perceptions of money that really drove my financial decisions and my ability to communicate about money.

Thankfully, there’s a way to temper the effects of childhood money conditioning. In my book The Cure for Money Madness, you can learn simple techniques and processes to penetrate and open this fear and resolve it. With more awareness of and spaciousness around our fear, we gain access to our wisdom and equanimity. Without old fear and anxiety guiding us, we step into our adult financial power and wisdom. Conversely, we can allow fear to drive us to unwise or impulsive action, or we can retreat and ignore money (ostrich-style). But we now know that it was impulsive action that got many of us and our financial leaders into this financial crisis.

In addition to transforming our emotional relationship with money, we have the chance to seize real economic opportunities. As people flee the market and businesses fail, fortunes will be made by clear-seeing, centered people who are unafraid. This is how people prospered (by buying businesses and commercial real estate) during the Great Depression. Take advantage of this financial crisis to mine and transform your financial fear and then learn new emotion-free methodologies for spending, saving, investing, earning, borrowing, giving, and communicating with friends and one’s intimate partner. We have the ability in this moment to develop a peaceful relationship with money, realize sufficiency, and free up enormous energy and time for the other things that matter in our lives.

Spencer Sherman is the author of The Cure for Money Madness and the CEO of Abacus Wealth Partners. He lives in Northern California with his wife, two children and their bichon frise. For more information, go to www.curemoneymadness.com and www.abacuswealth.com.