When I was a kid I definitely did the cliche things like checking under my bed for monsters, thinking there was always one behind me in dark or low lit areas…wait I still do that… and I just knew there was a monster that lived in a cave down at the end of my street. I don’t even think there are caves there. I think it’s just houses but my imagination was a lot.

Let’s be honest. It still is and I’ll bet we can find monsters we all still run away from or are scared of.

Becoming and being an adult is about learning how to manage those monsters or even become friends with them. Most of the time to be able to do this we will have to tell a new story to believe a new belief.

Is money your monster?

What does your money monster look like?

Mine has changed a lot since I’ve brought it into the light but when it was in the dark scaring me it was really ugly. It was green with envy. It was always hiding behind every corner trying to scare me. I believed that money was hard to get. I used to believe that money didn’t grow on trees. Even though I knew that it actually grew on trees. Crazy, right!

I used to think that there wasn’t enough for everyone and that money was in high demand. I believed that money could make you a bad person if you were’t careful and had too much. I also used to think that wanting money was a bad thing.

I didn’t want to be greedy. I did’t want to be bad. I wanted to be a good person who worked hard for my money and that’s exactly what I did.

Until I changed my thinking about money I was always pinching pennies. Stressed out if I got close to any late payments or overdrafts. Yelling at the credit card lady because I paid my payment the day it was due and put my paycheck in the same day but my paycheck didn’t clear until the next day so I got an overdraft fee. I thought that it was worth the stress to worry about those things. I used to stress if I paid more anywhere for anything because I worked so hard for my money. I was somewhat grouchy around money. Because I believed that it was a monster…I became a monster.

I was not living with an abundant mindset. I thought I was doing it right because I made sure every penny was exactly where it was supposed to be at every moment.

I’m not saying that you don’t need to know what’s coming in and going out. I do think you should know what’s going on with your money and treat it with care. I just don’t think there’s any value…and I mean NONE…to being a stickler with your money. I don’t enjoy living a life where I was when I was sure where everything was going and when it would be there and being sure that nothing was being under or over paid. It wasn’t any fun when southing didn’t go my way. Because no matter what you do. No matter how much you think you have it locked down there is room for error. And losing your mind over that or stressing yourself out over those sorts of things is worthless.

I started to shake my old monster loose. I started to bring it into the light by starting to believe that money can be easy.

Money can be fun.

Money isn’t very scary at all if you just start talking about it and start looking at it in it’s face.

It’s not a monster at all. IT’s just money.

We have so many weird traditions in our culture about money. One of them is that you shouldn’t talk about how much you make. I’ve always thought that was so silly.

I’m not going to run around announcing it to everyone but I’m also not going to hide it. I love being able to talk about financial freedom. When I bought my new car a friend asked me how much it was. I told her it was $42,000. She said, I’ll bet the payment on that is a bit of a change for your monthly bills. I said, no. We pay outright for our cars... Continued.