Hi, it's Neil Cowmeadow here with episode 447 of the Tutor Podcast, the Monday morning shot of over-caffeinated uncommon sense for anyone who wants to start, grow, and love their own tutoring and coaching business the same way as mine.
My aim is to bring you the ideas that have helped me in my business journey and life, as a teacher, property investor, mentor, and parent (even in a no-nonsense no-BS kind of way), in the hope that it helps you to ave as much fun at work and in life as I do.
Although I'm here to share, I'm also here to listen. If you have any ideas that you think might be of interest on the show, or any questions, then get in touch. It's info@neilcowmeadow.com or you can find me on X, where I am @TutorPodcast. Maybe you can help me to learn something new, something different, something better maybe, and maybe I can help you and share what you learned.
If you're good with all that, well okay, let's crack on with today – and we need to talk about money: Talk about the fear of money. This is based on a conversation I had with one of the listeners. He is an extremely smart wonderful person but he's afraid of money. So my excellent friend and all my excellent friends who listen in, this one's for you.
I did a little bit of grubbing around to try to investigate fear of money and it turns out there are three principal ones:
Chrometaphobia, which is an extreme fear of spending money. This makes misers out of successful people. If you fear to spend money and use money as a tool, the tool controls you.
Peniaphobia, which is a persistent irrational fear of poverty. A long time ago this would have been a completely rational fear since there was no safety net of state benefits for anyone. A hundred or so years ago, back in the day, society and your community would probably look after you so you didn't die of malnutrition or exposure. These days you have to work quite hard to be in absolute abject poverty.
Plutophobia, which is an intense fear of wealth or success. This is possibly the most bizarre of these fears. If you have plutophobia, the intense fear of wealth or success, ask yourself: How is that ever going to help you to do well in life? You would have to be mental to believe that, wouldn't you?
Who knew?
I didn't even know there was such a thing as a fear of money but I've met lots of people who have peculiar relationships with money: from the tightwad who never wants to put his hand in his pocket to the guy who seems to make his money disappear as soon as it lands in his bank account, and all points in between. From people who save incredibly hard and spend nothing to people who spend everything and save nothing - We all know people like this, don't we?
How you got the fear is something you can't really go back and do anything about. The chances are it will have come from parents, teachers, peers, or some experience along the way that fundamentally shifted your relationship with money.
What I'm more interested in is developing a healthy and positive relationship with money, finance, and making things work better for yourself.
First of all I think it's vitally important to understand that money is really just the counters in a game called life. It's completely made up. Money is a fiction that makes society run more smoothly than if we all had to carry around a pig under our arms to barter with.
I think we all need to get over the idea that there's some inherent value in a particular piece of paper or plastic and that the numbers on the screen of your bank app mean absolutely jack shit.
That's why banks can create money out of thin air on a bank screen and lend it to you, thus exerting vast amounts of power over you and your behavior whilst extracting additional value (interest on the loan) from you on something that they conjured out of thin air. That is fucking magic.
I'm not here to tell you if that's right or wrong. What I am here to tell you to do is acknowledge the fact that it's just a game and you're playing the game. Stepping back from understanding the rules of the game will not make you a better player. It will make you a bigger loser.
It's vitally important, and this is my big point for today, to realize that money isn't good and it isn't bad. It is, at its heart, completely neutral. What makes it good or bad is how you or I choose to use it. Like any tool, a knife can be used to kill or to perform life-saving surgery, to murder or to prepare dinner for your loved ones. The knife itself is morally neutral and so is money.
I love the idea that money is an amplifier. It will allow you to do more of what you already do. If you're a charitable giver you'll probably give more if you have more money. If you're a dick you'll probably do bigger-scale dick things if you have more money to finance your dickery. This is the reason so many people who win lotteries or, back in the day, the football pools, would often go broke very quickly.
Money doesn't do anything other than reveal who you really are.
Speaking very personally I've been able to do a lot more good as I've done more in business and property. I've been able to help more people because I've had more money to do it with - Just like owning better tools and more tools has allowed me to do more interesting jobs.
The money is just a store of value that can be deployed, or spent, or invested as you please.
It is convenient and reduces friction in society, that's its job and it's very good at it.
What money isn't is the end point.
If money is the end point of everything you do, you have a serious problem. There is always more money. You can't have it all so you'll always be chasing something that cannot possibly be achieved.
Frankly if you were to acquire all the money in Britain, for example, you'd find that the government would simply print a whole lot more. That new print of money would cause the buying power of the money you already had to fall in value. This is inflation and it's built into the system. In a real money system there would be no inflation and the currency would be stable. However governments successively have inflation targets, which function just like another stealth tax on your overtaxed earnings.
So - If you're afraid of spending your cash or investing your cash - just remember that you should be more afraid of leaving it in the bank earning very low returns (because its buying power is being systematically eroded by inflation, completely by design).
And as far as your phobias go, start exposing yourself to the things you're afraid of. Initially this will be uncomfortable but that discomfort will diminish over time given exposure.
Growing up in my family, we didn't really talk about money, so My brothers and I left school and went into the world of work with very little understanding of money. Pretty much no idea of saving, and it took years and years to get past that and to think in terms of saving, investment, then later into business and entrepreneurship.
I've always tried to teach Alex, my son, how money works and he's starting to get it.
Money is not difficult but the rules are hidden in order to keep you poor and compliant. What I want you to think about today is breaking away from your servitude to money and the slavery of debt and taking control of your money so it works for you instead of for the banks and the government.
This is your wake-up call. The future starts now and it's looking bright.
