The Millionaire Mindset & Abundance

Hello and welcome to my brand-new financial coaching blog!  I’m so happy you’re with me today.  ­This summer we are going to spend a lot of time together doing a deep dive into what the millionaire mindset looks like, how to achieve abundance in the realm of personal finance, and what to do about the obstacles that will surely present themselves as you level up your finances (and your overall relationship with money)!  I am so excited to be here writing about these topics because I am currently on the journey to financial abundance as well.  I have made the decision to dedicate my career to learning everything I can about financial abundance and how to achieve it, and then helping others on their path to affluence and a wonderful relationship with money!  

So abundance.  What is it, exactly?  At the core, I’d say it represents the ultimate freedom from poverty, lack, scraping by, and want.  There’s a great scene in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol where the Ghost of Christmas Present lifts the edge of his velvety green robe to reveal two waifs in rags huddled there for shelter.  The children’s names are Ignorance and Want, and Dickens was perhaps one of the first great minds of the late 19th century to recognize how our modern industrial societies were going to create a lot more of these starving little strays in the future.  He wasn’t wrong: just drive around in any major city for long enough and you can see the very sad state the homelessness epidemic is today.  Here in the US an estimated 13 million children are currently living with food insecurity, which I just find atrocious. 

Industrialization drew many into the cities to work in factories, and away from a more traditional agrarian lifestyle.  While farming in the 19th century was difficult and backbreaking, it tended to provide everyone with something they could work at, young and old, skilled and unskilled; fewer people ended up in the slums due to not being able to find work.

Today, most of us must do some kind of hourly/salaried labor, be a business owner, and/or create a product, service, or concept that we can sell to make money. This hard-earned money then pays for necessary but boring things like rent and utilities and groceries, and possibly entertainment and vacations and other fun things if there’s some left over.

Unless you are an actual farmer, not too many of us would survive longer than a week on what we can grow ourselves: it’s just not part of our culture anymore and things like HOAs across the US have particularly sanitized the inner farmer out of us (one neighborhood we looked at buying in not only banned the usual urban farming things like keeping chickens, but also specified what kind of bird seed you could put in your bird feeders).  Personally I can tell you that the tomatoes and herbs I’m growing this summer wouldn’t cut it for survival purposes!  My great-grandparents were in Oklahoma building their own home and managing to be pretty much self-sufficient during the Dust Bowl hardship years of the 1920’s and 30’s; today I start feeling annoyed if the employees at Whole Foods take too long to bring out my curbside grocery order to my car!  What can I say, we live in a different era. 

So many things are better than they used to be (farming was really tough back in the day), but I will say that in other ways life has gotten trickier: our modern survival and quality of life is very much dependent on how much money we’re able to earn. Or go into massive debt for, which I DO NOT recommend if you’re trying to achieve a truly abundant lifestyle.  I know one too many couples whose marriages ended in divorce trying to live the good life and impress the Joneses on debt, buying homes and cars and going on vacations that everyone around them suspected they couldn’t actually afford (and were secretly wondering if they robbed banks at night to make it all possible!).

Additionally, all the glitz and glamor on social media can leave us feeling like our lives are flat and boring, but creating affluence with debt is not the answer…even though banks will often offer to loan us FAR more money than we have any business borrowing, and FAR bigger lines of credit than we have any business carrying around daily in our wallets (speaking from experience here, but more on that another time). 

There is a better way to escape from poverty and want, a better way to upgrade your life into a place of sustainable abundance.  You don’t even have to win the lottery, win a lawsuit, or unexpectedly find out you’ve inherited a fortune to make abundance happen in your life.

Your abundance starts here.  With your mindset about money.  With your relationship with personal finance.  With developing new skills in the areas of budgeting, paying off debt, saving, and financial goal-setting.  How fabulous is it that by combining a fresh new mindset towards money with new financial skills, you can soon create a sustainable, abundant life for yourself and your loved ones?

While I’m here to guide you on this journey, please know that I’m also on it myself, and will probably spend the rest of my life learning more about how to create abundance in my personal finances and in my life in general!  It’s an exciting, lifelong process (since last time I checked we will need money in some form or other until we reach the pearly gates, and at that point I dearly hope there will be enough resources for absolutely everybody, as I would love to live in a world where poverty doesn’t exist). 

The good news is that as you start to make small, sustainable changes in your money mindset and in your financial skills, you will start to see positive improvements in your entire life.  Money is one of the biggest worries many people have; money is one of the main things couples consistently fight about.  Why not be the one who gets to live a life of financial abundance, so that money isn’t keeping you up at night and ruining your most valued relationships?  You can start building that life and future filled with financial abundance right here, right now! 

Millionaire Mindset Journal Prompt

Take some time to journal about what abundance looks like for you.  It doesn’t just have to be financial abundance, it can be in any and every area of your life!  We are each unique and so abundance for one person might mean a bigger home, while for another it might mean having the financial freedom to work from anywhere in the world while travelling in an Airstream!  Maybe abundance is about being free from money worries during retirement.  Maybe it’s about putting your kids through a really top-notch college or university without using debt to fund it.  Maybe it’s about living simply and having a debt-free lifestyle.  This is YOUR life and you get to paint the picture here!  Have fun with this one and I can’t wait to read your thoughts on abundance in the comments below

Sarah