Idiot Money
Go to the bookTwitterSign up for updates
  • Hello.
  • Whole-Brain Personal Finance
  • #1: The correlation between having money, managing it well, and living a good life
  • #2: Don’t know where to begin sorting out your finances? It’s not where you think it is
  • #3: Your relationship with money is complex. But it needn't be complicated.
  • #4: Spending £450k on being bad parents
  • #5: Idiot Profile: Private-Jet Guy
  • #6: What the bloody hell is a ‘relationship with money’ anyway?
  • #7: What fund managers can teach us about what really matters
  • #8: “I want money so I don’t have to think about money”
  • #9: Idiot Profile: An oligarch with a gun
  • #10: If Kanye West were a financial adviser
  • #11: If all the world's a stage, then what does it matter where you stand?
  • #12: Financial Independence: An (Actual) Idiot’s Guide
  • #13: Let’s talk about money, baby
  • #14: New Year's Non-Idiotic Financial Resolutions
  • #15: New year, old message
  • #16: "Just tell me what to do"
  • #17: How to choose better investments
  • #18: You cannot count. This leads you to make idiotic financial decisions.
  • #19: What's your number?
  • #20: 7 magnificent money lessons that have nothing to do with money
  • #21: The merits of money are negative
  • #22: The psychoanalysis of money, or How to screw up your children’s financial worldview
  • #23: The ghosts of money... and how to bust them
  • #24: My favourite way to think about investing, part 1
  • #25: The ABC of money, part 1: the three self-deceptive poisons
  • #26: Consider the pineapple: the perfect symbol of idiot money
  • #27: The ABC of money, part 2: financial nobility, an overview
  • #28: My favourite way to think about investing, part 2
  • #29: The ABC of money, part 3: financial nobility, step 1
  • #30: My favourite way to think about investing, part 3
  • #31: The ABC of money, part 4: financial nobility, step 2
  • #32: The idiocy of ignoring impermanence (the ABC of money, part 5)
  • #33: The six financial stress responses: what's yours?
  • #34: My favourite way to think about investing, part 4: betting beyond the basics
  • #35: The ABC of money, part 6: financial nobility, step 3
  • #36: My favourite way to think about investing, part 5: cost-benefit investing
  • #37: The ABC of money, part 7: financial nobility, step 4
  • #38: The best diet advice and the best financial advice are the same
  • #39: The ABC of money, part 8: The Eightfold Path and interdependence
  • #40: The dance of becoming wiser with money
  • #41: Building a better money brain (the ABC of money, part 9: neuroplasticity)
  • #42: The dumbest damn thing I’ve ever read in personal finance (part 1)
  • #43: The dumbest damn thing I’ve ever read in personal finance (part 2)
  • #44: A story of lions and loss
  • #45: The ABC of money, part 10: what meditation isn’t
  • #46: The ABC of money, part 11: what meditation is
  • #47: Idiot Profiles: Lord and Lady Jewellery Addiction, Teenage Ozymandias, and me
  • #48: Living mindfully with money (the ABC of money, part 12)
  • #49: Give, give, give, me more, more, more
  • #50: Our most costly money problems are the ones we don't see
  • #51: Align what you care for with what you care about
  • #52: Do what only you can do
  • #53: Money for many means happily ever after… but after what?
  • #54: The ABC of money, part 13: financial enlightenment
  • #55: Identifying your hidden money addictions
  • #56: Treating your hidden money addictions
  • #57: Idiot Money Maths #1: How much does it cost to keep you happy?
  • #58: The ABC of money, part 14: the secret shackles of financial freedom
  • #59: The ABC of money, part 15: freedom to, freedom from, freedom for
  • #60: If you go there blindfolded, you probably won’t like where you end up
  • #61: Idiot Money Maths #2: What is your default unit of spending?
  • #62: Balance isn’t stillness
  • #63: A problem shared
  • #64: How to live well, even in a palace (the ABC of money, part 16)
  • #65: Denunciation is still attachment (the ABC of money, part 17)
  • #66: “What do Blackheath people do?” (a story about how not to do financial planning)
  • #67: The ABC of money, part 18: Addicted to a dream
  • #68: What hot new financial knowledge are you likely to find in 2022?
  • #69: Red Pill Financial Planning: Escaping the Money Matrix
  • #70: The nasty narrowness of number-governed living
  • #71: Getting into Financial Flow
  • #72: The ABC of money, part 19: Denunciation bad, renunciation good
  • #73: I, Robot? Money and the misleading mechanisation of life choices
  • #74: Kondo your credit-card statements
  • #75: The rule of 72 (and its oft-overlooked implications)
  • #76: Forget about improving your decisions. Focus on improving your decision-making skills
  • #77: Seeing your financial world more clearly (the ABC of money, part 20)
  • #78: How to lose 2 1/2 stone in 6 months: an intro to the best non-fiction book I've ever read
  • #79: Your money worldview is (literally) half-brained
  • #80: Cost-consciousness beats cost-cutting
  • #81: Financial change that doesn’t start from your financial worldview is selling you short
  • #82: The overlooked truth of reality that is messing up how you live with money
  • #83: How money hijacks your hierarchy of attention
  • #84: The value of (almost) everything to you is nothing
  • #85: Financial philosophy > Financial psychology > Hot investment tips
  • #86: Five regrets of the rich
  • #87: Sum malfunction: a sure-fire way to spot if you’re being a financial idiot
  • #88: The Micawber Fallacy, or what your Dickensian maths misses about spending wisely
  • #89: The tell-tale signs of a poor financial worldview
  • #90: Wanting wisdom, craving financial fortune cookies
  • #91: You don’t need a scammer to be scammed: your desperation for an ‘answer’ will do almost as well
  • #92: Are you reading the wine list the wrong way around?
  • #93: Some personal finance puzzles and how not to solve them
  • #94: The main reason your relationship with money is so messed up
  • #95: The tyranny of the takeaway
  • #96: Deep wealth v shallow wealth
  • #97: What seeing your financial life more clearly looks like
  • #98: Making more of your money isn’t a maths problem
  • #99: Is what you’re doing for and with money working?
  • #100: Where to start, where to go, what to do about what’s stopping you
  • #101: The life cycle of a financial idiot
  • #102: I can read your financial mind
  • #103: Don’t worry about playing a game better when there’s a better game to play
  • #104: Reflections on two years of this newsletter, and why I’m taking a six-month break
Powered by GitBook
On this page

Was this helpful?

#23: The ghosts of money... and how to bust them

22nd February, 2021

Previous#22: The psychoanalysis of money, or How to screw up your children’s financial worldviewNext#24: My favourite way to think about investing, part 1

Last updated 4 years ago

Was this helpful?

Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter. The newsletter that is still waiting for Christmas.

This week: becoming wiser with money by understanding that extraordinary, instant change is possible, but it requires an extraordinary change of view.

Stop being frightened about money… start being haunted.

Behaviour change is a puzzling thing. It’s everywhere in talk, and nowhere in action. No one’s said anything new about habit-making since William James’s 1890 Principles of Psychology, and despite a million more people saying the same things in a million different ways since then, this only makes the gap between intention and action even more ridiculous.

There are many intriguing sides to this problem. The one I’d like to focus on here is why it often takes being truly terrified to bother making a proper stab at changing behaviour – even when that change, as it so often does – boils down to doing nothing other than choosing to see the world in a different way, and can thus (theoretically at least) be done instantly.

Because money is so deeply woven into the fabric of our lives, worldview-change is far more important than isolated behaviour-change. Not only do all your important behaviours change themselves if you see your world more clearly, but the non-important behaviours become just that… non-important; pesky imps to be ignored, rather than vampires sucking money, time, and energy out of you.

Because worldview changes are an effortlessly sustainable energising dance, rather than a constantly fatiguing fight, potentially the most powerful behaviour-change book of them all is Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Ebenezer Scrooge goes, overnight, from hating himself and others to loving them both. And he does it because he sees his relationship with money differently when he wakes up to when he went to sleep.

Becoming wiser with money presents us with a quandary. The skills you are trying to acquire to transform yourself are those possessed not by the person you are, but by the person you are becoming. How does the person you are now know what it will be like to become what you could be? How do you know that becoming that person is even a wise move? We need a way of testing before we can’t turn back. Leaps of faith are terribly exciting, but sometimes it’s better to build a bridge.

We need a philosophical bridge that tempts us with an inkling into a more illuminated world, shows us how to get there, and which, when we have travelled across it, becomes part of our expanded, wiser, self. A bridge that allows something to contribute to and inspire our current experience without actually being part of that current experience. This is the function of a symbol – an aspirational spark that illuminates the path of becoming.

*

It’s not a scary message about how you probably aren’t saving enough for retirement. It’s shining a light on the haunting idea that how we use our money is expressing someone we, in some sense, would rather not be, and that every time we use it in an idiotic way – one that doesn’t make our life better – it’s not a minor blip, it’s a vote for making it even less likely we’ll make a wiser, more conscious decision next time.

As psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz explains:

Scrooge doesn’t change because he’s frightened – he changes because he’s haunted. We can be frightened of gaining weight, but that alone probably won’t cause us to change our diet. Haunting is different. It makes us feel – makes us alive to – some fact about the world, some piece of information that we’re trying to avoid.

What knowledge is Scrooge trying to avoid? […] Ultimately Scrooge changes because the ghosts unpick his delusion that you can live a life without loss. They undo his delusion by haunting Scrooge with the losses he has already experienced, the losses now being endured around him, and the inevitable loss of his own life and possessions.

A large part of our resistance to change is clinging to comforting, but disabling, beliefs that ‘that’s just how I am’. If we weren’t so desperate for certainty, it would be a lot harder to sell it to us.

If the world woke up one morning and decided to believe en masse for just one day that money maybe didn’t need to be an impossibly scary, boring, complicated thing, then all the shysters and financial snake-oil salesmen would either have to get an awful lot better at explaining the value of what they actually do for clients (and actually doing it!), or they’d be out of a job.

Dickens’ story teaches us another lesson: Scrooge can’t redo his past, nor can he be certain of the future. Waking on Christmas morning, thinking in a new way, he can change his present – change can only take place in the here and now. This is important because trying to change the past can leave us feeling helpless, depressed.

On the one hand, money is high on everyone’s lists of things to get a better grip on, to behave better with. On the other, have you ever tried suggesting to someone that they maybe, possibly, perhaps, now and then, make dumb choices with their money?

It’s not the homework, but what it reveals that’s unwelcome. I learnt the hard way that asking someone to contemplate what their spending says about their life inspires more terror than asking them to contemplate their or their partner’s possible death.

And yet, assuming you actually traded money for things that made your life better, wouldn’t reliving those moments bring you joy?

You can read A Christmas Carol as a great novel. You can also see it – and use it – as a symbol. As explained :

is about systematically overcoming self-deception around your finances, to see your relationship with money more clearly, so you become capable of improving it, rather than floundering around in the dark, flung from one unacknowledged and remotely controlled addiction to the next.

Haunting makes us alive to . The stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves… are they true? Do they have to be true? What would the world look like if they weren’t? If they didn’t have to be? Are they something that fulfils us and helps us face our fears? Or something that we hide behind?

This will to delusion is, I believe, stronger with money than with anything else. Sometimes, to take a few hours to grasp the relevant lessons about personal finance.

Universally in financial planning, – if indeed it’s not declared eaten by the dog and gleefully abandoned altogether.

Step into Scrooge’s slippers. Embrace your present. Understand that . Put down the mouthy but trouserless self-help book, and let your ghosts guide you through your surgery.

here
Money Blind
whether we really know what we believe we know
even £10 million isn’t enough
of all the pieces in the initial information jigsaw that marks the start of a new adviser-client relationship, the expenditure breakdown is always the last one to be slotted in
all behaviour change is brain change
pick up your philosophical scalpel