Tami Simon: You’re listening to “Insights at the Edge.” Today my guest is Spencer Sherman. Spencer is a graduate of the Wharton School, was named one of the top wealth advisors in the US, and is a cofounder of Abacus Wealth Partners. Spencer’s expertise in finance has landed him appearances on CNN and CNBC, and in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He’s the author of the book The Cure for Money Madness, and is currently working with Sounds True on The Money and Spirit Online Workshop, an online workshop designed for integrating our spiritual and financial lives. It’s a six-part online course that begins on March 21, 2011.
In this episode of “Insights at the Edge,” Spencer and I spoke about taking back from the experts our own financial wisdom, the importance of understanding childhood messages about money, and whether it’s really best to rent or buy our home. Spencer also showed us the practice that he calls the “money breath,” and how we can use this practice on the spot in financial situations in our lives. Here’s my conversation with Spencer Sherman.
Spencer, I’m someone who’s extremely interested in spiritual unfolding, spiritual awakening, and also I love money. I love having money and having plenty of it. Do you think there’s any contradiction or need for there to be any kind of split between loving money and loving the spiritual process of unfolding? Any problem there?
Spencer Sherman: Hmm. It’s a funny question that I often hear, and I’ve certainly wrestled with that issue myself. I see money as just a form of energy. Money is this powerful tool that can be used for incredibly good things or not-so-good things in the world. To say that money and spirituality can’t be in the same room together is sort of insane, because money itself is at worst—in some ways it’s neutral. It only becomes good or negative based on how we influence that money. It’s all about our behaviors with this substance, this energy of money, that can transform it into the most amazing vehicle for spiritual and environmental and planetary transformation, or degradation. It can go in either direction.
TS: So you’re saying that money is itself an inherently neutral form?
SS: Yes. I think that money is something that— We’ve been conditioned to believe that money is bad, or that we can’t handle money, it’s taboo, it’s something we need experts for. What I’ve been a voice for is that no, money is something we all can master, we all can master this field, and that money, instead of being an obstruction to our spiritual growth, can actually be an enhancement, can actually be the vehicle that takes us there.
One of the reasons is that we think about money so often. It comes up in every interaction we have with other people: at work, going to the bank, the ATM, buying things online. And we can start noticing, just as in a meditation practice where one notices the breath and what the breath is doing, how do you respond to all of these money interactions? What’s happening with the breath? What’s happening inside the body? What’s happening with the emotions? You’re just using money as a teacher, instead of as some kind of enemy.
TS: OK, so let’s say I want money to be my teacher, and one of the things that I notice is that it’s a topic that I don’t feel very masterful about. I mean, you said, “We can all master money,” and I’m imagining the person listening who says, “OK, I’ve got a long way to go between where I am and mastery!” So what do you suggest? I start noticing how uncomfortable I feel. How do I become a master?
SS: Well, the first step is to become aware of your tendencies, the predispositions that you inherited during your childhood, sort of your money karma. Notice that. Become aware of that. How did your parents and ancestors handle money? What did you learn about money, and what are the messages that you received that aren’t working for you in your life, the unproductive messages that you’ve received? How are they working or not working for you in your adult life?
That’s the first step, and then it’s to continue, as you said, Tami, to feel into and notice the breath, notice the body each time you’re in a money situation. So you’re about to ask your boss for a raise. Notice what’s happening to the breath, and see if you can start to expand that awareness of what’s happening inside as a way of coming into a presence with what’s really true, instead of reacting to the past, which is, “I’m not allowed to ask people for more money.” That’s a message a lot of us received. Maybe by just being with the fear that’s underneath that, we can get in touch with the truth, which is that asking for more money is actually a win-win for me and for my boss.
Those are some of the first steps, and then what you said about mastering money. This field, money, is unlike any other field. Other fields take lots of years of training and practice to actually master, and money is the opposite. It’s really all about this conditioning that we’ve had that leads us astray with money or has us ignoring money. When we start to engage with our money behaviors, the feelings inside the body, the breath, then all of a sudden things start to shift, and we recognize that we don’t need to get an MBA. I have an MBA from Wharton Business School, but one doesn’t need that to master this field, because we see the most educated people in this field making the same silly mistakes that all of us make with money. It’s a unique field unlike any other, where one can master this field in a relatively short amount of time.
I’ll just add onto that, Tami. Particularly with investing, I would say, when it comes to investing money, this is a world where the experts are telling us that we need to time the markets and forecast what’s going to happen and listen to professionals, and just the opposite is what’s true. The evidence all shows us that nobody has a reliable crystal ball, and that the best way to invest money is really in a sort of a Buddhist approach: It’s a witness approach, where you witness everything that’s happening, but you don’t react to what’s happening in the world, and that leads one to a very diversified portfolio. That approach, building that very diversified portfolio, is actually the approach that’s made the most money, but that’s not the approach that’s followed by most people, and certainly not the approach followed by most professionals.
TS: Now Spencer, this is very curious. Here you are, you’re a professional money manager, and yet you’re saying that expertise isn’t really needed, that all of us can be experts when it comes to managing money. Isn’t that ironic? Here you are! You’re a professional money manager!
SS: Yes. It’s very humbling to be in a field where my wife, who knows nothing about money really—she was educated in that generation where her brother got a money education, but she didn’t—can do as well with investing as I can, even though I have an MBA and I have over 20 years of experience investing.
TS: Well, maybe I should let your wife manage my money instead of having you manage my money! This is a little ironic!
SS: You know, the truth is, Tami, that as soon as you learn a few simple rules around managing money, you can do it yourself and beat about 95 percent of the experts. You won’t beat all of the experts every year, because some of the experts get lucky with their very concentrated, crystal ball–like strategies, but you’ll beat the vast majority of people.
TS: OK, but Spencer, doesn’t this make you want to quit your job and just teach people instead how to manage their own money?
SS: That’s what I’m doing! I feel like my role is really as a financial healer, to help people heal the tendencies that they have, the fear that they have around money, that we all have! We’re all brought up in this culture of “You shouldn’t talk about money, you shouldn’t want money—but you should want money.” It’s a very confusing world! It’s more taboo, in many ways, than talking about sex or anything, and yet it’s a vital part of our health. I think we have more stress around money than anything else. The American Psychological Association did a study that found that more people are getting divorced over money issues than anything else.
Somehow, we’ve allowed ourselves to go astray with money. You know, we know when we overeat, or we know when a friend overeats, and we know what that does to our body, but somehow it’s OK to overspend. We just do it! It’s automatic. It’s part of our culture to overspend or to be impulsive with how we invest money.
By the way, overeating/overspending? Another analogy can be made to undereating/underspending. All of them are not really necessarily serving us when we act in those kinds of ways, when we either hoard money or we overspend it. There are certainly more overspenders in this culture, where we’re running our lives on empty: no oil in the engine, no gas in the tank. How can we expect that to lead to a healthy money life, or a healthy life in general?
TS: Now, you use this phrase that you think of yourself as a “financial healer,” and that’s very curious to me. I’m curious: What do you think financial health looks like in a person? What would a financially healthy person look like?
SS: It’s having a sense of equanimity with this financial world, with your money life, regardless of how much or how little money you have. It’s coming to peace with money and having the ability to communicate about it freely, so that when a friend says to you, “Let’s go to a five-star restaurant for lunch,” you say, “You know what? I’m really focusing on my spending right now. Can we do a potluck lunch instead?” versus lying to the friend and saying, “Oh, I’m busy!” or what probably a lot of us will do, which is to say, “Sure! I’ll go to the five-star restaurant! Let me just get my credit card, which is already over the limit, and bring it along.”
TS: So you’re saying being at peace with whatever amount of money you have?
SS: Yes.
TS: Now, I can see being at peace if I have what I think is plenty of money or enough money, or enough money that I’m not too stressed out about how much money I have, but how can I be at peace if I have debt and I don’t feel like I have very much money?
SS: Well, first it’s to recognize that your wealth has something to do with how much money you have, but your wealth includes so much more! This whole notion that self-worth equals net worth is so much a part of our culture, and has gotten people into so much trouble! I mean, people have committed suicide in this last financial crisis. There was this German businessman who committed suicide because he went from having ten billion dollars to five billion dollars or something like that.
The first step in realizing that how much money we have in the bank has very little to do with our self-worth is to see our self-worth as much more than just what an accountant might call our “net worth.” An accountant might say our net worth is what’s in the bank, and our broker might say our net worth is our brokerage accounts minus our debt. And unfortunately, with this culture, we’ve equated the two, and our health is left out of the picture. Our health is certainly worth a lot. Who would you prefer to be: Somebody who’s got lots of money and is in mediocre health, or somebody who’s very healthy, with no money? When I ask that question, hardly anyone ever says they’d prefer to be the person with lots of money and mediocre health. So health has something to do with it, and certainly our earning ability has something to do with our wealth, but yet that’s not accounted for in our net worth statement.
What I would say to the person who has very little money is: you come to peace with it by simply recognizing everything else that you have in your life—recognizing the health that you have in your life, the friendships that you have in your life, the community, your untapped creative skills—and then start to become aware of some of the messages you received early on that might be preventing you from allowing money to come into your life.
An example is a message that a friend of mine who’s the son of a minister got. He got the message that you should never have to charge for your services, so he had no money and ended up going through a foreclosure because of those messages he received early on. As he became aware of those messages, as he became aware of the tendencies inside himself, the feelings around those messages, and stayed with them instead of impulsively acting from them, he started to change his money life. He’s now in a much better financial situation than he was five years ago.
TS: It seems, Spencer, that you put a lot of emphasis on people’s early experiences with money: family and inherited beliefs. Is that true, that this is an area that you put a lot of emphasis on?
SS: I think yes. I think with money, we’re basically like children, a lot of us, because how can you explain? I mean, I just went to see a symphony yesterday, and everyone up there playing violin has been doing it for decades, and they were all stunning! They all played so well! You don’t see this in the money field. You don’t see people who have been doing finance their whole lives and who handle money well in their own lives. You just don’t. The smartest money people I know are doing the most foolish things. It must be that there’s something else going on. There are all of these emotional, spiritual forces around money, which in my belief started early on, that are keeping us—even the most savvy among us—from being at peace with money, from being successful in my definition of success with money.
This is, Tami, what really excites me about this field: mastery is accessible to everyone. This is one field where you do not need to do four hours of yoga every day for the next 30 years to be above average at yoga, or to get into some contorted yoga posture. Here, you can get to the top of the class very easily. You just come into balance with your finances. You just start to access the wisdom that we all have inside of us around money, start clearing out these cobwebs of these emotional forces from the past, and all of a sudden, you’re going to be in the top five percent of all human beings in terms of how you relate to money. You’ll be one of the most successful people around money.
TS: But Spencer, it’s interesting because you make it sound easy and simple and very accessible, and yet I think most people’s experience with money is that it’s very fraught, it’s very difficult, and even if they could tell you about their early childhood memories around money, that’s not the same as feeling free of those patterns, that those patterns seem very deeply embedded in their being.
SS: Yes.
TS: It doesn’t seem that simple to sort of shake off whatever these childhood messages are.
SS: Yes, I’ve seen it for all different people. For some people, I have seen shifts very rapidly. For others, it might take years to have shifts. But what I have seen, Tami, is I have seen people take on an investment strategy that came from a wisdom place instead of an impulsive place, and they started making lots more money than they ever had made in their lives. I’ve seen people very quickly develop some ways of working with their spending and coming into balance with their spending. Now, these people still have a lot of work to do on the emotional forces from childhood, but they’ve been able to achieve a certain mastery very quickly in the outer realm of money.
Is it simple? In a sense. I guess it depends on how you hold those terms. It’s simple, but not necessarily easy to become free, as you say, Tami, of the shackles of childhood around money, or the conditioning that we got around money early on. I agree with you: that takes time to completely undo. But I think you can change the way you act around money in a very short period of time. I’ve seen that.
TS: What would you say were the messages you received in your family? And then I also know that you’re a father. I’m curious what messages you think your children are receiving about money.
SS: I asked my father, when I was eight years old, “Dad, how much money do you make?” and he gave me a look that terrified me. I was filled with shame for even having asked the question. I’d thought I’d asked such an innocent question, because my friends were talking about how much money their dads had made that way, so I asked him the same simple question. He never answered the question. He just gave me this terrifying look.
The message I received from that incident was that money must be the most important thing in the world, and that’s why he was not answering, and it must be that you can’t have enough of this stuff called “money.” If you could have enough of it, somehow he would have said to me, “Well, I make this much, and you need to make this much.”
That led me on a course of being very aggressive with acquiring money, and somehow thinking that, if I acquired lots of money, it would set me free. I can just tell you the short bottom line to that story, Tami: it didn’t work very well! It was a very painful path to pursue, to think that money, just acquiring more and more money, would somehow solve my issues and produce freedom for me in my life.
TS: Were you successful in making a lot of money?
SS: Yes, I have been successful in making a lot of money. And I would say that I’ve become successful because I feel like there’s a certain balance in my life now. It’s not like I have unbelievable amounts of money, or the amounts of money that I dreamed or thought I’d need to make when I was much younger, but I have a sense of balance, and I don’t feel the need to have a lot more money in my life. There’s a sense that, yes, it would be wonderful, from a philanthropic perspective, but I have a sense that it’s not necessarily going to add anything to my personal life to have any more money in my life. If that happens, so be it, but it’s not like I need it for me to feel a sense of equanimity with my finances.
TS: And just before we go on to the messages that your children might be receiving from you, what was the painful part of your life story, and the breakthrough that occurred around money?
SS: Well, there are a couple things. One very pivotal experience was that there was a fire in the office building I was in in my midtwenties. It was the largest fire in Philadelphia’s history, and I was so attached at the time to my material possessions, to money, in a sense, that I somehow convinced the fire marshal to let me back into the building before it was safe for anyone to be in that building. There were chances of electrocution. I was walking knee-deep in water in darkened hallways, arriving at my things, which were completely destroyed anyway by the time I got to them. So here I’d risked my life to gather up these worthless material possessions. That was a day of awakening.
TS: And did something shift in you after that event?
SS: It did. After that event, there was an opening to “What is going on here?” It actually took me on a deep path of meditation, and I started doing many silent retreats. That’s when my yoga practice started. I was on a mission to understand the forces that drove me to go back into that building, to suggest that my computer and my files and the shoes that I’d had in my office were more important than my life!
That day, I feel, was one of those—well, I think everyone has a series of best and worst days in their life. That was one of my best and worst days, because it really got me to open up, to understand what is going on here, and set me on a whole new course, to see that yes, money is important, yes, it’s vital, and yes, it’s fine to have it, but it’s got to be part of a much larger context called my life.
TS: And now let’s just project ahead, let’s say 30 years from now, and your children are being interviewed, and they’re talking about the environment they grew up in and the beliefs they inherited about money. What do you think they might say?
SS: Well, a few things: “Even though my dad was a financial advisor and really good with money, I always had to remind him to pay me my allowance.” That might be one thing.
Another thing would be that, “Somehow I got this sense that we didn’t have that much money or we weren’t wealthy, and yet we had the biggest house of all of my friends.” I think they might have some messages around that.
I think that they’ll also say that they really enjoyed saving up for things together. We’re saving, as a family, for a trip to Europe in a few years, and every week all four of us put money in this beautiful wooden box that my wife got me for my birthday several years ago. We just keep putting cash into this box. It’s one of those things that I tell clients and others to do in my workshops: When you want to save up for something, save up money in a box for it. Or if you want to control your spending on clothing, designate a shoebox for that and put money in it each month. I think that they’ll have that sense.
They’ll also have the sense that “Dad gave a really good interest rate on the money we saved.” I give them a 50 percent return on any money they save each year!
TS: Wow! That’s a very serious incentive!
SS: It’s a pretty healthy interest rate compared to what they’re getting at the bank!
You know, my son and daughter are completely different. My son doesn’t like to spend money, and is completely frugal. My daughter loves to spend money! She’s also younger. She’s seven, so she’s also just coming to see the benefits of starting to delay gratification and save some money.
TS: Now, you mentioned, Spencer, when you were going back into that office building on that day to get your possessions, that you had a kind of reckoning with the person you had become, and that it was from that day forward that you became interested in meditation. I’m curious: You teach something, which obviously comes from your meditation practice, that’s called the money breath. What’s the money breath?
SS: Wow. If I’d had that money breath, Tami, back in my midtwenties, I would not have gone back into that building to retrieve those worthless possessions in that building that was still on fire! The money breath is designed to give us spaciousness, which is exactly what we don’t have around money. There’s no oxygen around money. Did you ever notice that? The impulsiveness, the thought to buy the cashmere sweater over the wool sweater happens in a nanosecond. It’s justified by “I’ll get more miles on my credit card” or “Oh, well, I didn’t buy something last month, so I’ll buy it this month.” Or the thought to sell our 401k investments when the market goes down. All that happens when the oxygen is absent from our bodies. We have no time to reflect and access the wisdom, which I declare that all of us have.
All of us have wisdom around money. This is the other thing: The financial professionals have tried to make it seem like you need us. You don’t need financial professionals. You need yourself. You need yourself, your own wisdom that’s beneath all the conditioning that we’ve received around money.
One of the tools to access that is this money breath. It’s a simple inhale and then an exhale that’s twice as long. The inhale is through the nose. The exhale is through the mouth. The breath focuses the mind. It also creates this pause, and that pause is revolutionary. It’s the difference between somebody doing something completely foolish and not doing that thing—investing in Florida real estate in 2009 and not investing in Florida real estate. It’s that oxygen that feeds our brain and enables us to think better. What I’ve noticed is that when the subject comes to money, all of a sudden really smart people are not able to think.
TS: Now, are you suggesting that I do the money breath every time I have to make a financial decision, or anytime I feel uncomfortable about money? How do I put this into practice?
SS: I designed the money breath to the count of three on the inhale, and the count of six on the exhale, and a one-count pause at the top of the inhale. So it’s a ten-count breath, perhaps a ten-second exercise, to do one money breath, and I usually suggest doing three money breaths. At the end of the exhale, I say, “May my money wisdom increase.”
That’s what we’re heading for here: “May my money wisdom increase.” Not “May my money, may my bank account increase,” but “May my money wisdom increase.” Maybe for you, it’s going to be something else. Maybe for you, it’s “May my peace around money increase for me.” Whatever fits for you, but I’ve been using “May my money wisdom increase” now for years.
I use this money breath whenever I’m in a spending, investing, or communicating situation around money. If I’m about to talk to my wife about money, or about to talk to my employees about money, or I’m about to buy something or sell something, I do the money breath. You can do it in your car. I also do it as part of my morning practice. I do the money breath because every day I’m working with people’s money, and I want to make sure that I’m talking from a wisdom place as much as possible, and not from the conditioned place.
TS: So how might the money breath affect, for example, your investment strategy or how you approach investments?
SS: As you do that money breath, and you feel that sense of peace at the end of the breath, and that calm, from that place, there’s perhaps a recognition that nobody has a reliable crystal ball, nobody knows the future, that you don’t know the future and nobody does. That money breath puts us back into the beginner’s mind, that mind that just doesn’t know. And when it comes to money, nobody knows what’s going to happen with investing.
From that place, you realize that investing in every category of investment out there, being completely diversified, is the strategy that makes the most sense. It’s the only strategy that makes sense in a world where nobody knows what’s going to happen. It’s also going to lead one to take this much more patient path, because being diversified is not as exciting to the ego. It’s not impulsive, and it’s not quick. The ego wants a quick turnaround. Investing in a start-up solar energy company that might become a billion-dollar company overnight is very exciting, but the money breath gets us back to that place of “don’t know,” of beginner’s mind, where we know that yes, these things have an entertainment value, but it’s unlikely that our bet on that solar energy company or that lottery ticket is actually going to pay off over time. And there have been many, many studies on this, Tami.
So by coming into right action with money, we choose this diversified portfolio. I call my diversified portfolio the rainbow portfolio, because it’s an assortment of 14 different colors in a pie chart. Anybody can access that rainbow portfolio. There’s nothing proprietary about it. Anyone can do it, and you certainly don’t need to have an MBA in finance to do it.
TS: What I notice in this conversation, Spencer, is a theme where you keep wanting to empower the everyday person to use their common sense about money, this idea that we everyday people have what it takes to manage our money wisely. As I hear that emphasis, that sort of empowerment emphasis in the way that you speak, what I’m reflecting on is why people, in general, have so disempowered themselves around money, and why we all think—well, not all of us—but why so many of us think that we’re retarded or crippled or incapable, or somehow we don’t have what it takes? Like we might be able to be successful in other areas our lives, but this area, I don’t quite have it. Why do you think we have this collective idea that we’re not up to it when it comes to handling money masterfully?
SS: Let me say one or two things. You use the term “common sense,” and I think you hit the nail on the head. It really is about common sense. You know, just one example is buying or renting a house. Why is it that the collective consciousness is all about buying homes? I think it’s cultural, our collective conditioning that leads us to believe that we need to buy a house, or that we can’t handle our finances.
You’ve asked the question, “How come we have this sense that we’re retarded around money, or we can’t do it?” I think there’s heavy cultural conditioning. It goes back into literature; Dickens wrote about it. We’ve inherited these ideas from generation to generation. Every family has the most incredible stories around money. You ask people about their family money histories, and you’ll hear horror stories of fortunes lost because of the most silly decisions made, or impulsive decisions, or aggressive kinds of decisions made to do certain things, or fearful decisions that were made. We’re just coming from so much fear around money.
Getting back to that house example, of buying a house versus renting a house: OK, so let’s look at those two. You know, we all want a warm, beautiful home to live in, so who cares if you rent it or if you buy it? But yet there’s such a huge conditioning that we have to own this home. Now, when you actually look at the numbers, one finds that, in most situations, renting is actually much better than owning. And yet that’s completely ignored. Somehow we’ve been led to believe that owning is what you should do, and it’s just not true. For most people who don’t have a commitment to live in a particular home, a particular neighborhood, for a long period of time, buying a house versus renting a house is a great illustration of how our conditioning has led us astray, because when we look at the numbers, it’s a very complex comparison, and often renting turns out to be better than buying.
Renting a house is very different from renting anything else. Like when you rent a car, it’s clear that if you rent a car on a long-term basis, you end up spending a lot more money than if you own a car. With homes, this just isn’t true! When you look at all the costs of ownership, all the repairs and the utilities and the taxes, you quickly discover that renting is actually a pretty good option, but it hasn’t gotten the recognition it deserves. Somehow it’s seen as downtrodden to rent, but this is starting to shift.
With this housing collapse, I think that people are starting to see that houses don’t automatically increase every year. And if you make the assumption that houses only increase by two or three percent a year, instead of five, six, seven, or eight percent a year (which is what we were experiencing in the 10 years up to 2007), then you see that renting can actually be better for many people, especially when you’re not committed to a certain house in a certain neighborhood or town for a period of seven years or more, or you don’t have reserves of cash available to fund a repair.
So this is a case, Tami, where if we could look at it with new eyes, with fresh eyes, with that beginner’s mind, we might make a different decision, but my friends who buy houses often just rush into buying a house. They never consider the rental option. I’m not saying “Don’t buy a house,” but I’m saying “Look at a rental along with the house that you’re looking to purchase, and see if it still makes sense.”
TS: How would you suggest somebody go about making the decision whether to rent or buy a home?
SS: Well, I’d suggest looking at all of the costs involved, and then looking at what’s realistic as to how long you’re going to be in that house, and what’s realistic in terms of your cash reserves in order to handle the repairs that are inevitably going to come up with that home, and then to really try to find a house as nice that you can rent. People have this sense that renting is throwing money down the drain, so they’ll see a rental for 3,000 or 2,000 dollars a month, and they’ll think that number is insane, to pay that much money for rent. Somehow it feels OK to pay that much money in a mortgage payment, but when you actually do the math (and there are lots of calculators online to do this, and my book talks about this whole rent versus buy issue), you start to see that it’s not so simple, and you might be better off renting.
One other thing about owning versus buying: The thing that I think gets people to buy homes often is that the mortgage payment represents a forced savings plan. So if you’re not going to own a house and have that mortgage for your forced savings plan, then you need to either set up some kind of forced savings plan for yourself, or hire a financial advisor to help you set up a forced savings plan while you’re renting. Otherwise, I think that buying the house is likely to come out better if you’re not able to save the difference when you rent. Does that make sense?
TS: I’m curious. This is such an interesting take from a financial advisor, about the advantages of renting. I’ve never heard this before. Are there other issues like this, where you think that we sort of have the collective wool pulled over our eyes?
SS: Well certainly, as I’ve mentioned, in the area of investing, we have the wool pulled over our eyes. I mean, all of these entertainment shows on television trying to predict what’s going to happen with the markets. It’s all nonsense! It’s not going to help anyone! Fidelity had Peter Lynch, and then they spent a fortune hiring his successors—and Peter Lynch even trained his successors, and Peter Lynch was someone who was able to beat the markets, and yet his successors couldn’t beat the markets. We have to recognize that it’s just not possible, through reading the newspapers or newsletters, or getting an inside scoop on things, that we’re going to actually beat the average bear. I think there’s great wisdom in that, in recognizing that.
It’s a step toward humility also, when I recognize that in myself. Even though I want to get my face on the cover of Time magazine—“This guy has been able to top Peter Lynch’s record, and he’s helping all of his clients achieve these amazing financial returns!”—I recognize that nobody can do that on an ongoing basis.
I think that certainly another area where we have the wool pulled over our eyes, Tami, is just the whole area of spending: that if we spend more, if we buy more things, somehow we’ll bring more into our lives, our happiness will increase if we acquire more. That’s certainly an area.
Or if we make more money, we’ll be better off! I was just talking to somebody who got a huge raise, and it backfired on them, because with that huge raise, they’ve increased their lifestyle, and now they’re dependent on this higher level of income for the rest of their lives, as they see it, unless they can now step backward, which is much harder. So now they’ve put themselves in a very stressful financial situation.
I’m not saying that it’s always a bad idea, Tami, to make more money, but the idea that it’s always a good thing when you get a raise is not necessarily true. We tend to spend exactly what we earn, so if you’re making $50,000, you spend it all. When you make $100,000 or $200,000, you spend it all, but now you’ve gotten addicted and attached to that higher lifestyle, and now you’ve got to figure out: How do I fund that lifestyle for the rest of my life?
TS: Mm-hmm. A very sobering point. Now Spencer, just one final question: You use this phrase that you see yourself operating in the world as a “money healer,” and we’ve been talking about money healing and the individual, and yet you’ve pointed out how a lot of the messages that we receive are from the culture as a whole. I think we all know that our culture, as a whole, seems to be upside down in so many ways when it comes to money. What would be your healing message for the culture, as a whole? What would be the top, let’s say, three cultural healings, if you could wave your healing hands, that would help us relate to money as a whole, as a collective?
SS: I would say sufficiency is the first: to recognize that what you have is enough, to go for enough-ness instead of more. Sufficiency is not Madison Avenue’s advertising plan, but it’s what will actually produce happiness. Instead of “How do I make more money, or get a bigger house or another house, or a nicer car, or a newer iPhone?” it’s “How can I find contentment with what I have?” Make that your challenge in life: “How can the amount of money that I have in the bank today be enough?” “How can my income, my current income, be sufficient?” Come from that place of sufficiency. “How can my time be enough?” instead of, well, money and time are often the same. We treat them the same way. There’s a scarcity of both, and the scarcity is at all levels.
People think that multimillionaires don’t have that sense of scarcity, and I’ll tell you they do! I’ve worked with multimillionaires, people who have $100 million. They do have those same fears, that same scarcity. So instead of saying, if time were money, “I don’t have enough time,” “I’m running out of time,” “I need more time,” what if we came from a place of “I have enough time” and “I have enough money” and see what happens from that perspective?
That is where, I think, people end up getting really creative, when they think that way. I tell the story of a friend of mine who couldn’t make her finances work. She kept coming from a place of really wanting to do her creative work, wanting to be an artist, and suddenly the idea came to her that she needed to drastically reduce her living expenses, and somebody gave her the idea about India. She’s been living in India for the last five years, leading a very rich life there, spending very little money, making her life work with what she has.
I think we can actually collaborate with our friends around our financial issues. We don’t have to see money as this dark secret that we have to keep hidden in a closet somewhere. We can have dinner parties and say to our friends, “Here. How do we find a way to find abundance or sufficiency with what we already have?” Or sometimes I’ll make it more challenging for people, or more sobering, Tami, as you use that word; I’ll say, “Find it on half or two-thirds of what you now have.” And you’d be surprised how people get so energized, and they come up with such incredible ideas when they have to think like that. “Wow! If I had less money, half as much income, I’d have to get rid of a car. I’d have to do this, I’d have to do this. Wow! When I look at the whole picture, my life would somehow be simpler and better!” I’m not saying that’s always true, or that the person should even go down that path of getting rid of their car, but just the acknowledgement that they’re not trapped by money, that even if my income went down, I’d still have a rich life. That is freedom!
The second thing I want to leave people with is that our self-worth is so much larger than our financial net worth, and if we could all recognize that we have so much going for us already, independent of our finances, we’ll be much more relaxed around money. And ironically, we’ll end up earning more money, making more money, because from that relaxed place, we’re able to access our wisdom inside instead of being impulsive and responding from that conditioning, which hasn’t really worked for us.
The third healing gift is to recognize that the most accomplished, most expert financial people in the world are making the same foolish errors that all of us are making around money. When we recognize this, then all of a sudden the separation between us and them evaporates, the sense that we can’t do it and only they can do it evaporates. And we start to take on feeling empowered around our money instead of feeling like a victim, or like “I can’t do it because I didn’t get educated! I didn’t get an MBA” or “Because my parents didn’t educate me.” It doesn’t matter! We’re really accessing our common sense around money, and that common sense is blocked by those messages we’ve received early on. As we can wade through that mess of money conditioning, we can start to clearly see our wisdom and common sense, and move from there. All of us have this ability to master this topic.
TS: We have been speaking with Spencer Sherman, with a very empowering message. Spencer, along with coauthor Brent Kessel, has created a home-study course for Sounds True, called The Money and Spirit Workshop. The Money and Spirit Workshop will also be offered as a six-part, online series beginning March 21, 2011. Attendees of the online series will have a chance to interact directly with Spencer and Brent, and they’ll be able to answer questions you might have about money and spirit.
Spencer, thank you so much! Thanks for bringing such real, down-to-earth clarity to the whole question of money and equanimity.
SS: Thank you, Tami! It’s been wonderful to speak about this topic and give people a sense of empowerment that we all can do this.
TS: Very good. That’s what we need. Break open the taboos.
SS: Yes.
TS: Thank you so much.
SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
