Money Maturity

Remembering my guru George Kinder and summing up some of the learnings –

Money maturity –

If people understand their relationship with money, they feel peaceful.

Money can be seen as a place where our internal self engages with external world.

If either side – internal or external, self or money – is slighted, the whole of life suffers.

When we think about money, we always think in terms of “How much?”

But the right question is – What does Money have to go with who I am?

Kinder shows seven ways of understanding your own conflicts, dilemmas, difficulties and pain around money and taking steps to resolve them.

3 major parts:

A) Childhood – Innocence and Pain – We have conscious and subconscious influences in childhood from parents, family and surroundings.

1) Innocence – In the innocence stage, we hold beliefs and thoughts dear, in spite of many of them being untrue.

These beliefs affect all our decisions made about money as we grow up.

2)Pain – Pain is the result of living in Innocence.
Some examples of such beliefs-

Live for today, who knows what tomorrow may bring is an innocent belief.

You may end up with no savings and when the money is needed for Children education or Retirement, it is not there.

In childhood we make painful discoveries about the money. Some people are richer than us and we are richer than some people and that we will need to work hard for money and the things that we want.

B) Adulthood-
Knowledge, understanding and
Vigor – in adulthood these lessons are learnt in pain.

These lessons should ideally be a warning signal to correct things that are wrong with our lives.

3)Knowledge is the process of financial planning, the essence of integrity.

Without integrity both economic systems and relationships will fall apart.
With integrity we can create a roadmap with a desire for freedom into concrete goals.

This will include budgeting, investment, taxation, etc.
This is one of the most difficult stages for anyone to learn.

4)Second stage of adulthood is described as understanding.

It is necessary to be aware and understand that life will not always be fair.

There will be situations which you want to alter but they will be beyond your control.

Beneath several financial difficulties, there will be varied emotions of greed, envy, guilt, shame, jealousy, humiliation etc

Accepting and resolving these emotions will make us act efficiently.

5)Once knowledge and understanding is in place, we need vigor to discover our purpose in life and put full energy into it to achieve that purpose.

Vigor enables us to find that freedom for us the world of money

Vigor means strength, energy or force required to achieve something

C. Awakening-
6)Vision
Once you are at peace with money and have discovered the purpose in life, there will be desire to go beyond your own self and give back to the society. This is vision.

It can be a small thing which will make life better in society and will make a difference to the people around you.

7)Aloha- The compassionate goodwill that allows one to use money to perform acts of kindness.

Wishing you the money maturity which helps to understand the spirit and value of money in your life.

Kavita S Devi, CFP CM