I had a friend who didn't.
A decade ago, I was doing the personal bookkeeping for my friend Tracey, who got money from being a real estate agent, and her husband Mark. She was the type of person who bought products and services from people to give them business -- not necessarily because she was interested in what they were selling, though in the case of my bookkeeping services, having some numbers tallied did help at tax time.
They were a typical middle class family. Not a lot of extra money to spend, but her husband, who worked at a bank, had been frugal before they met, and dutifully put away money in retirement and some other savings.
So, one year, when I was gathering their annual numbers, I told Tracey, "I can't figure out where some of this money went. Last February, you took $25,000 out of one savings account, but it doesn't look like it got transferred anywhere. And then, from your checking, there's $15,000 drawn out, but I don't see where that went, either. Did you buy something, or move that money to another account that I don't know about?" She thought for a few moments, but said she couldn't remember any such transactions. I found that rather appalling, mostly because she seemed thoroughly unconcerned. I couldn't help but ask, "You have $40,000 withdrawn that you don't know what happened to it?" She seemed to shrug it off but said she'd ask her husband.
She later got back to me. "That $25,000 and $15,000 was money Mark drew out to pay for his new pickup truck." Oh. Still, I couldn't imagine not remembering such a large transactions a few months later.
Yet, while I was flabbergasted that someone could treat a $40,000 transaction so casually, another part of me was thoroughly envious. What a wonderful state of being -- to be so unconcerned about money, even if you didn't fall into the category of "wealthy", that you never had any stress about it. Tracey was that way. I've never known her to stress about money, or ponder a purchase. Though we never discussed it, she seemed to be a believer in spending money liberally, so that it would spread around to everyone else and eventually make its way back to her.
Seven or eight years later, she and her husband had moved back near their families, in a small rural southeast Colorado town, to be beekeepers. The old town had had a failing economy for years, and parts of it were like a ghost town. Yet, Tracey and her husband bought yet another new pickup truck -- this one so fancy that it cost more than a house in the area. When I visited, she took me for a ride in it. It was a tax write-off more than anything, to help offset income from their thriving beekeeping business.
What Tracey's outlook emphasized to me was that when you don't worry about money, you don't have money problems. When you worry about money, you have money problems. The amount of money one has or doesn't have has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not one has money problems.
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