I always assumed I had money issues because I was the problem.
Not my circumstances, not my education, not the specific messages I’d absorbed about money growing up.
Just me—some fundamental flaw in my character that made me bad with finances in a way that other people, somehow, weren’t.
I’d spend money I hadn’t budgeted for and feel guilty about it for days.
Then I’d spend more, almost as if the guilt itself needed to be outrun.
I’d avoid looking at my bank balance for stretches at a time because what was there felt shameful in a way I couldn’t quite articulate.
I’d tell myself I’d get serious about saving when things stabilized—and then things would stabilize and I’d find a reason that still wasn’t the right moment.
It didn’t occur to me, for a long time, that none of this had started with me.
The money anxiety, the avoidance, the spending that felt almost compulsive in moments of stress—these weren’t personality flaws.
They were patterns.
Learned ones, absorbed gradually from the environment I’d grown up in, from the things that were said and unsaid about money in my household, from the specific emotional charge that anything financial carried before I was old enough to question it.
That realization didn’t fix everything. But it changed the frame completely. Because you can examine a learned pattern.
You can decide whether to keep it.
Here are the things I learned and had to take a good look at.
1. I learned that money was a source of anxiety
The feeling came before the understanding.
Before I knew what a mortgage was or what it meant to be overdrawn, I already knew that money was something that made the adults around me tense. Something that caused arguments. Something that had a particular energy around it—tight, slightly panicked, not to be discussed casually.
I absorbed that charge without absorbing the information I would have needed to do anything useful with it. So I entered adulthood already emotionally loaded about money, without any of the practical knowledge that might have helped me manage it. The anxiety was the inheritance. The tools for addressing it were not.
2. I spent money to emotionally regulate without realizing it
Hard day. Stressful week. Feeling low in a way I couldn’t quite name.
The solution was always the same, and it wasn’t conscious. I’d buy something. Not always something expensive—sometimes something entirely trivial. But the act of spending produced a brief, reliable release that nothing else was providing in that moment.
It took me a long time to see that this was a coping mechanism, not a character flaw. That I’d learned, somewhere and somehow, that acquiring things was a way to feel better—and that I’d been running that program for years without ever examining whether it was working or what it was costing me.
3. I avoided looking at my finances because I felt ashamed
The bank balance wasn’t just a number. It was evidence.
Of whether I was responsible, competent, and together. Of whether I had the kind of adult life that a person my age was supposed to have. Looking at it meant confronting the gap between where I was and where I thought I should be—and that gap, whatever its actual size, felt too loaded to face on an ordinary Tuesday.
So I didn’t look. For days at a time, sometimes weeks. And the not-looking meant the problems got quieter in the short term and larger in the long term. The avoidance wasn’t stupidity. It was shame management. Which is its own kind of rational, even when it isn’t helpful.
4. I thought not talking about money meant I was being dignified about it
In the household I grew up in, money wasn’t discussed openly. Not because things were necessarily desperate—but because talking about money was considered somehow gauche. Transparent in a way that felt undignified. Private people didn’t discuss finances.
That message produced a specific problem in my adult life: I had no idea how to talk about money with the people I was in financial relationships with. Partners, roommates, and family members with whom I split expenses. Every conversation felt loaded with the discomfort of crossing a line I’d been taught existed.
The not-talking kept me from negotiating things I should have negotiated. From asking questions I should have asked. From getting information I needed because seeking it out loud felt like admitting something I’d been trained to keep private.
5. I didn’t plan financially because planning felt presumptuous
Somewhere underneath my avoidance of budgets and savings plans was a belief I’d never examined: that planning for a financial future was something other people did. People whose security was more guaranteed than mine. People who could reasonably assume that the future would arrive in a form that made the planning worthwhile.
I didn’t consciously believe the future was bleak. But I also didn’t quite believe, on some level, in my own stability—and planning requires a relationship with the future that I hadn’t developed. The people around me growing up had largely managed month to month, and that was the horizon I’d internalized without knowing it.
6. I used money as a way to feel generous when I felt powerless in other areas
Picking up the check. Buying the round. Sending the gift that was more than I could strictly afford.
The generosity was real—I genuinely wanted to do those things. But it was also doing something else. It was producing a feeling of adequacy that other parts of my life weren’t always providing. I could feel capable, warm, like someone who had something to give—even when the bank account was telling a different story.
The spending on others wasn’t separate from the anxiety. It was part of the same system. A way of using money to manage feelings that had nothing to do with money.
7. I didn’t know what “enough” felt like, so I couldn’t recognize when I had it
The goalposts moved constantly.
When I had very little, I told myself I’d feel secure when I had more. When I had more, the threshold shifted again. There was always a next number that would finally feel like enough—and because enough was always somewhere slightly ahead, the current amount could never quite feel safe to relax into.
I recognized, slowly, that this wasn’t about the numbers. It was about the absence of any felt sense of security that money could actually produce. Because the anxiety predated the money. Because the feeling of not-enough had been installed before I’d ever had anything to count.
8. I made decisions based on emotion and justified them with logic afterward
The decision to spend came first. The rationale came second, usually quickly and convincingly enough that I could almost believe it was how the decision had happened.
I needed it. It was a good investment. I’d been disciplined lately and deserved it. This was a good deal and good deals don’t wait.
All of those things were sometimes true. But the truth of them wasn’t usually why I was buying the thing. I was buying the thing because of how I felt in that moment—and the logic was what I told myself afterward so the decision could feel like a considered one. It took me years to see the sequence clearly enough to interrupt it.
9. I inherited a scarcity mindset that didn’t match my actual circumstances
There were stretches of my adult life when I was doing fine—not wealthy, not without concerns, but genuinely okay. Stable income. Bills paid. No immediate crisis.
And I still operated as if the floor might give out at any moment.
Still made decisions from a place of lack. Still felt a tightness around spending even on reasonable things. Still carried a background hum of financial anxiety that didn’t match what the spreadsheet, if I’d been willing to look at it, would have actually shown.
The scarcity mindset wasn’t a response to my circumstances. It was a template laid down in earlier circumstances—genuinely scarcer ones—that had never been updated even as the situation changed. I was running old software on a different machine. And the old software kept telling me we were in danger when we weren’t.
Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy.
