How Your Early Money Memories Impact Your Life

Have you ever thought about how your early money memories might impact your life? I'm specifically referring to an early interaction with money that left a big impression on you. If you're not sure what I mean or why it matters, what I'm describing here is a process where the interactions you have with money when you're really young, form part of what's called your earliest money paradigm.  

This paradigm shapes everything about your interaction with the world around money and these ideas get solidified when we're really young. So I'd like you to try and go back, and see if you can remember your earliest interaction with money because these events can have a huge impact on your life.  When these money interactions go unchallenged, especially if you've had a negative interaction with money,  then they start to form part of your money paradigm. This means you carry beliefs about money that show up in your money patterns as you're growing up and they also continue on as you're an adult.

When it comes to your relationship with money, you've got your ability to make money, your ability to keep money, your ability to save and then also being able to enjoy spending money. Some people might actually make quite good money but for different reasons, they've carried guilt into their adult life when it comes to earning a lot of money and subsequently spending it.

Your current money results are usually a reflection of early money beliefs and what lies beneath is often a lot of pain that you've been carrying since childhood. Most people are not even aware that they're carrying childhood pain around money because the triggering event may not seem directly related to your finances today.

I'm going to get a bit raw and personal here and share one of my first money memories that impacted my life massively. This memory goes back to when I was four or five years old and I had just started primary school - it was like a prep year before Grade One, called Kindergarten. To give you a bit of context, my parents moved to Australia from Mauritius when I was two years old and French was my first language so I struggled a lot with English and I was actually going to repeat my first Kindergarten grade because I couldn't speak English properly. So I don't think I understood the world around me that well in English and I remember being really quiet and introverted, sort of like I was silently observing the world.

In this particular incident, I remember I used to have a friend who ended up leaving the school a year or so later but we were quite close at the time. I think I just used to follow her around and her mother used to volunteer in what we called the 'tuck shop' - like a canteen or a cafeteria.

So I remember my friend's mum used to volunteer in our canteen and I used to wander in with my friend and her mom would give us bags of lollies, ice blocks and other snacks. I didn't think anything of it at the time and I had no idea that I was supposed to pay for these things.

Now, I remember walking in one day without my friend, and I decided to up the anti a little bit and instead of asking for a five cent bag of lollies, I remember asking for a strawberry frozen yogurt because I remember seeing them on the board and I thought they looked amazing! So I asked for this frozen yogurt and then my friend's mum said to me "oh you know that's a bit expensive, you're going to have to start paying for these things".

In that moment, I completely froze, I think out of sheer embarrassment, because I didn't know how to respond. I didn't know what to do and I may have brushed it off and said something like "I don't really want it" or "I'm not hungry". The part of remember the most is feeling so completely humiliated and I wanted to disappear.

Even though this impacted me so harshly, I never told my parents about it. Instead, I pretended it didn't happen and I vowed to never feel that humiliated again - which unbeknownst to me, had a MAJOR impact on my relationship with money. Interestingly I've told this story a number of times to other coaches and without fail, someone always gets triggered by it and shares their own early money story.

The piece I really want to address is explaining the significance of a memory like that. On one level it really started to shape my future experiences with money because all of a sudden, I realised that to get these things, to get a frozen yogurt or even what I thought were the free bags of lollies, you actually had to pay for them. That's when I realised that the sizes and colours of coins and notes actually mattered!

It was also at that point that I really started to notice that they were 'rich' kids and that I wasn't one of them. I determined at the age of four that kids who bought ice creams, frozen yogurts and snacks every day, had money, and that then expanded to observing what brands of shoes the rich kids were wearing. 

I don't think I spoke to anyone about the conclusions I had formed in my mind. Whether they were correct or not, the most significant impact of that memory is actually the feeling of intense shame and embarrassment that I experienced in that moment - because when you're four or five, you don't know how to process those emotions and what I ended up doing is associating money exchange with shame and embarrassment.

A simple conversation with my parents could have corrected that response - but I was so embarrassed, I buried it instead. And the effect of burying it is that I stored those emotions in my nervous system - and shame thrives on secrecy. So to play this forward, I would have carried these emotions all through my school life, as a teenager and it would have peaked in my early adult life when I started earning my own money and having financial responsibilities.

An example of shame and embarrassment that adults experience can include the humiliation of going through a checkout at grocery store and not having enough money to pay for their groceries. When friends and clients share these experiences with me, they will often say that they felt the dread before they even got to the register. It becomes a pattern for them because they don't realise they've been carrying a lot of fear, dread and shame from an earlier childhood experience that they've just continued to store in their nervous system and in their belief system.

A similar thing happens with credit cards. If you've ever had a credit card bounce because you've maxed it out, you would know how humiliating it feels, and then a feeling of dread builds up that and it surfaces in future transactions, even if you don't have any credit debt down the line. So again, that's earlier stored feelings of embarrassment that find an outlet because you've never dealt with the emotions properly.

And then you know for those of you who have been able to crack through that income barrier and you're earning great money, what a lot of my clients share with me is that the way it really stings is experiencing embarrassment about the fact that you're making great money. It feels like it's wrong somehow and it should be kept a secret because it's hurtful to other people who aren't as well off.  Other people experience it as feeling guilty when they spend money, especially spending on luxury items.

So these are some of the ways that early money memories impact us as adults. When I think back on that childhood memory and I hear of other people's memories, it makes me a little bit sad because I think about how so many children, just like me, had no awareness of what their money memory meant, and therefore they took on misguided feelings of fear and embarrassment around money.

This is why I love helping people fix their money mindset - because it's never too late to identify and clear this trauma. The challenge for most people is that they're not armed with the skills or tools work through these issues; they just experience the trauma in the form of a bad relationship with money. 

So I'd like you to reflect on your earliest significant money memory. If you can get a few quiet moments to yourself, then it helps to meditate on your childhood and to ask your mind to show you what that first significant memory was. If you find that something quite painful comes up, then please hit 'reply' and reach out to me... I'd love to help you clear that trauma. 

To your success,

p.s. Whenever you're ready to experience a massive money mindset breakthrough, here's how I can help you: 


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