Money & Happiness: Feelings About Money

If money is a person, what personality would it be for you?

Researchers Bradley and Ted Klontz coined the term ‘money scripts’ to describe the feelings and beliefs we have around money and how these affect our financial behaviors. According to their research, these scripts tend to be inherited from the family and culture you come from. “Money scripts are typically unconscious, developed in childhood, passed down from generation to generation within families and cultures, contextually bound, and often only partial truths.”

Different Feelings About Money

People have different feelings about money depending on the situation, and they are influenced by what happened in the past. Happy experience with money creates happy feelings toward money, and painful experience with money creates painful feelings. You might have seen or heard somebody who had a terrible experience with money, which made you feel terrible.

Money Ideas Affect Our Lives

These ideas about money are affecting our lives today. People make decisions to avoid experiencing negative feelings. People live their lives for money at the expense of who they really are. These negative ideas about money are disempowering to us. It’s the pain in the past and fear about the future that worries us, not allowing us to be alive in the present moment. The experiences in the past are not meant to disempower you. They are meant to empower you so that you have a greater chance of success and happiness in your life.

Positive ideas about money are empowering to us. Ultimately, it’s a question of whether you control money, or money controls you. Instead of living in fear and give up on what we desire, we can choose to believe in ourselves, believe in our lives, and take on new opportunities and experiences and find joy and happiness in our lives.

People Who Are Happy With Money

There are people who are so happy and experiencing abundance without needing to have a lot of money. They say they have more than enough to live the way they wish to. They won’t spend a lot of money, but they spend money on what they love. They do not work for money, but they work for joy. Even when they have downtime in their money life, they do not get stressed. trust that everything will work out ok, and they can find happiness no matter what.

What is enabling their happiness is gratitude. They have gratitude toward what they have, the things they buy, what they do for work, and the people they meet. And they have gratitude toward money for making it happen.

Money Can Be a Great Force For Good

You may have seen, heard, or read negative stories of money that happened in the world. Famous rich people were found guilty of money crimes. Big corporations were found to make money by deceiving consumers. Bad people making large money illegally. With these stories, it is easy for us to connect money with negative feelings. Unfortunately, these stories are affecting many people’s lives. However, it is their intention and behavior that are deceiving. It is their ideas about money that was negative. Let me tell you this: Money Is Innocent!

There is nothing wrong with money itself. It just happened to be in the wrong hands. Money changes its personality depending on whose hands it is in. With your pure, beautiful, compassionate intention, money can be a great force for good.

Here is a shortlist of stories that money was utilized for service to others:

• Bill & Merinda Gates Foundation – $50 billion assets, helped 122m people (as of 2017) by enhancing healthcare and reduce extreme poverty in developing countries and expanding educational opportunities and access to information technology in the US.
• Anthony Robbins Foundation – Baskets of food and household items for an estimated 2 million people annually in countries all over the world.
• Robert F. Smith – Pledged to pay off $40 million in student loan debt for Morehouse College class of 2019.
• Anonymous – Giving a donation for people suffering from car accidents in Japan every year since 1974

What’s the difference between the bad stories? The intention of the people who use the money. People feel the intention of others, and it works like a magnet to attract like-minded people, who bring even more good actions, opportunities, and good use of money.

You Have Control Over Your Money Feelings

If your happiness is dependent on money, it is difficult to stay happy because it’s always changing and there are uncontrollable factors. But you do have control over your feelings. By having happy and positive ideas about money, you can establish a happy relationship with money and create more happiness in life, because happiness comes from within.