Was it better when you had no money at all, or now, when you worry about it?
The Monevator (a blog I rather like reading that is 100% money), talks about how having more money seems to be more problems for him than when he was in his 20s and carefree about it all.
He talks about a 5-figure claim that he could easily absorb but is loathe to, now that he has more assets than when he was younger. It seems like the more he has, the more he feels he is unable to lose (loss aversion is real, y’all), which is so contradictory because he COULD lose the money and take a small hit to his net worth but it wouldn’t devastate him.
I see some truth to all of this.
Even losing money on the stock market, just a few hundred dollars, makes me a little edgy. It’s why I don’t babysit my investments.
When I was younger, I was blissfully unaware of compounding interest, savings, interest rates, and investing in general, so whatever I made, I saved and I spent.
It wasn’t until I started attacking my debt head on, and really getting into investing and seeing my money grow, and amassing a lot of money that I realized it was so much more than just what I could buy – it was what I couldn’t buy in a store (freedom, choice) that really made money make sense in my head.
Now, yes, losing a 5-figure claim would be a small hit in my net worth and WOULD hurt but it wouldn’t crush me, and yet I am feeling more pain in this hypothetical loss of 5-figures than I would have before when I was younger.
I mean, I easily spent/gave away over $20K or more over 2 decades having been in love-filled but money-clueless relationships, and doing altruistic things I probably shouldn’t have done if I had taken a step back from love-filled goggles and really inspected the situation.
I can even think of a recent house claim we had as a dispute, where we were asking damages in the amount of $2500 (?) for the both of us.
I felt a keen sense of loss when we ‘lost’ that money due to the lack of evidence (it was a ‘he said, she said’ situation), even though it wasn’t really my money to begin with and we would have ‘won’ it so to speak.
There is some grain in truth in that the more money you have, the more you feel its loss because now you have all of these #GOALS and you’re trying to level up to the next stage in the money stratosphere.
When you have less, you don’t have much to lose anyway (certainly not 5-figures), so you don’t mind with a few hundred dollars here and there, even if it adds up to thousands at the end of 10 years.
NZ Muse
Not having money means you worry about surviving! I would much rather worry about losing money than worry about paying the bills. I feel like this is a weird and false dichotomy.