Living Well With Wealth, Not Just For Millionaires

What happens when you get more money?

Peace, happiness, contentment...

Not always. Can you say decision overload syndrome. While we would all love to believe that having more money solves all problems, more often than not it does not. Believe it or not, having more money can mean more work.

As we have access to more money we have more decisions to make. Remember the good old days in college when you only had $100 in your bank account. What did you do for dinner? Probably the cheapest pizza you could find.

There are different ways in which people's wealth increases and depending on the path it can have a big impact on how they relate to wealth.

Here are four broad pathways that people enter into wealth
1. They earn it - in earning it this may happen over a life time of slow and steady saving, professional advancement, or successful business.

2. They marry into it - this does not mean they married for money, but perhaps they married someone one socio economic level up.

3. They inherit it - a family member leaves behind an unexpected lump sum of money.

4. They are born into it- the parents create wealth while raising their family and the children grow accustomed to a certain life style.

Along each pathway there are many different intersections, unique characteristics that come along with the wealth that an individual lives with. Yet each of the these paths is not equal in helping someone live well with wealth.

There is a real challenge to living well with wealth. The more money that you have, the more decisions that you are responsible for either directly or indirectly. By indirect decisions I mean that you hire other people to help you make financial decisions. Which is a big challenge. If you have ever had to hire someone for anything, then you can appreciate the difficulty in trying to hire the right person to help you with your wealth.

For those people who create wealth for themselves over a longer period of time they have a chance to learn many important lessons about managing and maintain financial resources. Compared to the person that comes into wealth, where they have had no chance to develop the necessary skills to manage wealth well.

Living well with wealth is a skill and one that is refined over time. Imagine being dropped in a new country that you have no knowledge of and you are told to live well there. What would you do? Which rules would you play by, chances are you do not know the rules. Is it going to take you some time to learn the rules of the land? Absolutely. This too is true of living with wealth.

As we think about the path to living well with wealth, it is one that takes time, maturity and relationships to master. Living well in life can not be done alone. Remaining open and willing to learn about what it means to live well with your level of wealth will depend on your perspective. Take time to slow down and think about where you need to grow in order to live well with your wealth.

Saving Financial Face

We implicitly know and experience pressure to use our money in certain ways. If we don't behave in expected ways we anticipate experiencing a wide range of "negative" emotions. Instead of facing the emotions head on, we save financial face.

The reality is that we all have unspoken rules about how we are supposed to use money. Have you ever been sitting in church and felt obligated to put money in the offering plate, because the person next to you did? You think to yourself, what would they think if I don't drop something in the plate.

Or what about being out to eat with a group of friends. Everybody is ordering drinks, appetizers, entree's and deserts, but you don't want all that. At the end of the meal you feel the pressure to split the check evenly, when all you wanted was an entree. Our families are often another area where we feel it is necessary to save financial face. Can you say Christmas. Perhaps you are expected to pay for meals, vacations, clothing, health care, etc. because you have the good job, you are the father, you are the fill in the blank.

Depending on our role in family, marriage, and friendship, defines many of the decisions we ultimately make the the money that is within our control.

Other common places that we feel the pressure to save financial face include the membership at the country club, health club, swim club, children's sports, gymnastics, kids birthday parties oh and the list can go on for ever. The reality is that we get sucked into social relationships only to learn later that there are many more expectations on how we act and spend money than we had originally expected.

One of the classic examples is moving into a nicer neighborhood. The young couple is so proud that they got to buy their forever home. They tell themselves that they will keep it simple, they won't try to keep up with the Joneses, but those empty rooms yearn for filling and so before long the young couple is of to the furniture store, and not just any furniture store. One of those nice furniture stores. You know where the "good" stuff is.

So where, when, and what makes you feel like you have to save face financially? Have you taken the time to think about this. Have you taken the time to talk with your spouse about what situations make you feel uncomfortable and yet you still go with the flow.

We may never fully free ourselves from the situations that are going to evoke a desire to save financial face, that is without holing up in our house, not interacting with anyone, or ever going to the store. So what are we to do? First we need to increase our awareness around what makes us feel financial pressure.

The long term strategy is to work on our sense of maturity. This is really easy to say and often hard to do. Those people that I have met that are mature and have a healthy sense of themselves, also express low levels of pressure to save financial face.

 If you are ready to say no to saving financial face, and yes to keeping your financial priorities then try saying no to a request of you to spend money. The response might just surprise you.

What Do You Say About Money?

I know that I am not the only one walking around with voices in my head. No, I am not crazy, and neither are you. We all have these different voices playing back messages to us about who we are and how we should live our life. Many sound like the messages our parents told us. In psychological terms, these voices are called scripts. They are messages that replay over and over again in our head and guide the way that we make decisions and live our life. 

In Mind Over Money: Overcoming The Money Disorders That Threaten Our Financial Health by Dr. Brad Klontz and Dr. Ted Klontz, the authors talk extensively about scripts and how they are formed and influence our financial decision-making. The book highlights nine common relational money scripts, several of which I recognized as my own, and others as ones I have heard from people with whom I work. 

Take a few minutes to review this list of common relational money scripts and see which ones resonate with you. Think about why that may be the case and where you learned them. 

- Take care of your children now and they’ll take care of you later.

- You can tell how much someone loves you by how much they spend on you.

- If you hold others financially responsible, they will reject you.

- Spending money on others gives my life meaning.

- One of the ways to keep friends and family close it to give them gifts and loan them money.

- There will always be someone I can turn to for money.

- I’m not competent enough to take care of myself financially.

- I don’t need to learn how to manage money.

- It’s my duty to take care of less fortunate family members.

Each of these scripts has elements of truth but often gets distorted and misguides the way that we make financial decisions. The challenge is that, when we live out these scripts, they usually end up having both practical and emotional consequences on the way that we view and use money. 

Let’s take one script for example: "Spending money on others gives my life meaning." While this is one of the greatest truths of our culture and spiritual lives and grows out of a teaching that is it is better to give than receive, when taken too far, we rob ourselves of financial security and deny the receiving party the opportunity to learn how to support themselves. When we give too much to one person or group of people, they become dependent upon us, and they lose the opportunity to learn how to support themselves. 

Continually taking time to evaluate your scripts for their truths and distortions can start to set you free in the way that you handle your finances. To start identifying other scripts you may replay in your head, ask this simple question: “What do I believe to be true about money and relationships?”

Feel free to give me a call to talk more at 980-275-1627.

Ed Coambs

Edited by Reena Arora of Arora Media, connect on Facebook

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The Dreamer and The Practical's Dilemma

“Help - I married a visionary! They have all these great dreams and ideas for what they want in the future, but I have no idea how it will ever happen. All I can think about is how much it’s going to cost and how we are never going to be able to afford bringing all of those visions to reality.” 

Does this sound like a problem in your marriage? In many relationships, there is often a dreamer and a more practical person. It does not always start out this way, but there is an inherent need in life to dream about the future while managing the demands of the present. Over time and throughout marriage, we unofficially decide who gets permission to dream and who gets to be practical. Why does this happen? Because each person has a history that they want to fulfill; part of it is their personality, and another component is station and place in which they live now.

Let’s start with history. Each of us draws heavily from our childhood experiences and its influences. Our parents and our position in the family (like it or not) heavily influence the way that we see the world. Perhaps your parents told you to dream and shoot for the moon, which naturally lays the foundation for a visionary. If not, maybe your parents expected perfection and high marks in school, and for you, that meant hard work and discipline. No time for dreaming there. While most of us probably had a blend of both attitudes, it is these early years of our childhood, and our family values that shape our orientation toward dreams and dealing with the practical matters of living. 

From our early influences, we start to see the world in a certain way. That is the nurture component of who we are. The nature component, on the other hand, leaves us with predispositions toward dreaming or practicality. The formation of our personality is semi-fixed by the coding that we are born with. Personality profile tests have shown the consistence with which certain characteristics remain constant over time. A common example is our preference for extroversion or introversion. Please note that I said “preference,” which means most of the time that is the way that we experience the world. We inevitably all experience to varying degrees the other end of the continuum, too. 

Combining our early childhood experiences with our given personality type, we end up in the adult world ready to forge our path. Whether we are aware of it or not, our history and personality shape the decisions we make about where we live, who we spend time with, the type of work we engage in and ultimately who we marry. It is in marriage that we find two worlds of history and personality colliding over what we think is love, which in reality is a deep need to be connected with another human and to have unfulfilled needs met. 

While in our culture we are infatuated with romantic love, we must come to see that it is far more complex and dynamic. A quick Google search of "types of love" will produce loads of interesting results. Yet what is important to keep in mind is that there are various types of love and needs we are trying to fulfill. The question is why? Often, opposites attract to meet unconscious and unspoken needs. Fulfilling the need to dream and to be practical is a major part of living and an inherent part of the person that we marry. Every person has the capacity to dream and be practical, but it is because of each person’s unique path in life that they tend toward one direction or the other on the continuum. As one partner moves in direction A, there is a natural need for the other partner to move in direction B to keep things in balance. 

Here is where it gets tricky: most couples are dynamic. One person is not fully responsible for dreaming while the other is fully responsible for practicality. The roles often shift given different areas of living, such as parrenting, saving for the future, or careers. It is as if couples dance through life trying to manage their unfilled dreams while meeting the demands we all face. They are constantly calling their partner back into balance, as their relationship can only handle so much tension.

Remember that when you are getting frustrated, angry or overwhelmed with your partner’s preference for dreaming or practicality, it is often their reaction to your opposite response. Spend time coming to the other end of the continuum, it will change your dynamic. 

Feel free to give me a call to talk more at 980-275-1627.
Ed Coambs

Edited by Reena Arora of Arora Media, connect on FacebookFor all your communication needs, she is all you need.

Affluence Guilt and Shame

What is “affluence guilt?” It is when you feel insecure, frustrated, or shameful that you have more financial resources than another person or group of people. At a global level, we can sometimes feel this as U.S. citizens. Even if we personally don't think we have that much money, when we are told that we are the richest nation in the world and look at what a less affluent country has in comparison, it can induce guilt and shame.

Researcher and shame expert Brenee Brown defines guilt as coming from what we have done and shame as coming from who we are. 

At the individual level, affluence guilt and shame comes into play when recognizing that you have more money than your family, friends and community members. This realization often leads to feelings of insecurity, frustration or embarrassment. What if you have truly pursued your passions and have ended up in a position where you are able to earn a great living and have more than others --is that something to feel guilty or shameful about? No. There are however five groups of people who are likely to experience affluence guilt and shame.

1. First-generation professional athletes

2. People who are making substantially more money than their family (typically those with an advanced college degree)

3. Successful entrepreneurs who end up making more than they ever imagined

4. People marrying into a high-income/net-worth family

5. People who receive an unexpected inheritance/windfall

From psychology we know that, when we feel guilt or shame, we will use a variety of different coping mechanisms to release the guilt. The challenge is that, while the coping mechanisms often provide short-term relief, they are not a long-term solution.

So, what impact does affluence guilt and shame have on the way that you manage your resources and relationships? The most common and easily recognizable impact is the under-accumulation or rapid spending down of assets (i.e., net worth impact). For every level of income, there is an expected ability to manage your resources in a way that will be able to support your current and future needs. Yet those who feel guilt and shame about making or having large amounts of money will tend to under-accumulate resources because they can't imagine themselves as being the person that has sufficient resources. Having negative connotations attached to affluence causes subconscious actions to occur and sabotage efforts at appropriately managing resources.

Affluence guilt and shame also impacts the way that we manage personal relationships. Let’s say that you have a friend who you know is making much less than you are, and you feel bad that they do not have the same resources as you. You may find yourself buying things for them that they didn’t necessarily want  because you feel insecure about your level of affluence. So, you take deliberate and intentional action to make sure that they are provided for. Unfortunately, all too often, this reinforces the divide in resources and can lead to resentment and withdrawal from the relationship. 

The journey of living with affluence takes work. It has its own unique set of challenges and opportunities. When you take intentional steps towards learning to live with affluence it can provide both great personal satisfaction and positive change for the world.   

Feel free to give me a call to talk more at 980-275-1627.

Ed Coambs

Edited by Reena Arora of Arora Media, connect on Facebook

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Going Deep With Diver Ed

On a recent family vacation to Maine, I learned some important lessons about the value of depth.  We went on an amazing tour with Diver Ed, and while we stayed in the boat, Diver Ed dove into the cold Atlantic Ocean to share with the tour some of the amazing sea creatures that live below the surface.

Diver Ed is no ordinary diver. He is the most excited and engaging person you could ever want to meet. His passion for getting below the surface of the water and sharing with his tour participants what he finds is infectious. For a few moments, I was so excited by his findings that I thought I might want to also put on a dry suit (a special type of wet suit for cold water). Then, I reconsidered, as my passion does not lie in the depths of the ocean, but rather in the depths of the soul. There, too, are amazing things to discover. Diving into the soul can be both dangerous and rewarding, but when we come back to the surface after times of reflection, we develop a new appreciation for who we are.

Diver Ed talked a lot about how he would find different critters living at different depths. I think this is also true of our soul. As we move deeper into our understanding of our soul, we come to know more of who we are and the complexity of what makes us up. This is why we connect so deeply with incredible artists. They have come to terms with the depths of their soul and express that through their art. The end result is moving and immediately knowable. When we live life from the depths of our soul, we give off a sense of authenticity with which others connect.

Going deep is something that we often fear, but when we have a tour guide like Diver Ed, we can be encouraged to embrace the discovery of who we have been made to become. I personally have been on a transformational journey and am still on one in which I am connecting my life with who I have been created to be. A big part of this transformation has been in training to become a counselor at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. I have had the chance to explore both psychology and theology. I have examined both what others understand of these subjects and what I understand of these subjects. Additionally, my experiences with a unique and special spiritual direction program that’s directed at attending to the soul have helped me to prune away unnecessary baggage and grow more into the person I have been designed to be.

What I have found to be true is that our familiarity bias that calls us to leave well enough alone limits our ability and desire to go deeper. Yet that is the very thing that can pull us out of the situations we find ourselves in and no longer want to be in. Becoming comfortable with soul exploration will have a transformative impact on your life. It will reorient some, if not all, of your goals or reasons for doing things. Life reorientation is a risk we all know intuitively exists and often stops us in the tracks of transformation. The great mystery about soul exploration is that, as you are making new decisions about your life, the old ways no longer seem relevant. Leaving behind what once was important is no longer a big deal.

Let’s come back up to the surface of soul exploration. By engaging in soul exploration, you will begin to reorient the way in which you approach life and those matters that cause you the most difficulty. Be it in your marriage, your finances, friendships, or work, as you enter into soul transformation, your perspective and approach begin to shift in ways that allow you to engage life in a more meaningful way.

To go further in your exploration, I recommend checking out Creating a Rule of Life by Steve Macchia.

If you are ever in Bar Harbor, Maine, and you have young children, I highly recommend Diver Ed's Dive-In Theater.

Feel free to give me a call to talk more at 980-275-1627.

Ed Coambs

Edited by Reena Arora of Arora Media, connect on Facebook

For all your communication needs, she is all you need.

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