My Money Story (Part 1)
Where the story begins
One of my first money memories involves my Uncle Dominic.
A funeral in Pennsylvania. I was seven, maybe eight. He handed me a crisp twenty-dollar bill, and before he could even say a word, I started chanting, “CD, CD, CD.” He looked confused. He thought I was trying to hand his gift to the bank. I meant a CD player. The distinction didn't matter. What mattered were the feelings of gratitude and pure excitement, with no anxiety, no question about whether I deserved it or what it meant.
That was how money showed up in my house.
My father talked about money the way he talked about other good things—with optimism, with possibility, like it was something that worked with you if you treated it right. He told me to pay myself first. I didn't fully understand what that meant, but I understood the energy behind it. Take care of your family first because no one else will. There will always be more. It wasn’t reckless or naïve. Just grounded in a belief that money was something you participated in, not something that happened to you.
I didn't hear my parents argue about it. I didn't feel the silence that descends in households where there's never quite enough. We didn't have everything, but I never felt the absence of it as something threatening. Money, for me, was always going to be okay.
I say this not to claim some perfect origin story. I know how rare it is, but it is the origin of my money story.
Most people's first money memory carries weight. The overheard argument. The look on a parent's face at the register. The feeling of being the kid who couldn't go on the trip, couldn't get the shoes, couldn't ask for the thing they wanted because they already knew the answer. Money entered their lives as a source of fear before it was anything else.
That kind of beginning leaves marks. And even when the income changes, the marks often don't.
Mine didn't carry that weight. And yet.
Even with a healthy foundation, I carried something into adulthood that I didn't discover for years. A belief, quiet and persistent, that wanting more money was greedy. That somewhere in the pursuit of abundance was a moral line I might cross. I knew how to make money. I believed it was energy. I believed it flowed. But when it came to genuinely desiring more, not just what I needed, not just enough for my family, but more, something in me would slow down and pull back.
Who did I think I was?
The irony isn't lost on me. A healthy relationship with money, and still, a shadow found its way in.
I've spent time sitting with that belief, and I'm not entirely sure where it came from. It wasn’t my parents. Maybe it was something absorbed from culture, from religion, from the way ambition gets framed as selfishness in enough sermons and stories that it becomes background noise. What I do know is that it didn't serve me. And more importantly, it wasn't true.
Because when I got honest about why I wanted more, the greed wasn't there. I want to give more. I want to help more. I want to build something that extends beyond my own life into other people's. That isn't greed. That's purpose. And purpose, I've come to understand, is exactly what money responds to.
My money story, like most, is a mix of gift and shadow. A foundation built by a father who spoke about money respectfully, without obsession, with trust that things would work out. And yet, a quiet narrative that snuck in anyway, asking me to shrink just when it was time to expand.
The story isn't over.
I don't think it ever is. But I'm paying closer attention to what I believe, to where those beliefs came from, and to whether they're actually mine.
That, I think, is where the real relationship with money begins.
Not in a spreadsheet.
Not in a strategy.
In the willingness to look at your story and ask, “Is this true?”
Keep pursuing,
JC
Note: This was inspired by my recent work in the Anya Institute for Human (R)evolution Integrated Wealth Advisor program, focused on defining my wealth narrative and conditioning. This is the first in a series of posts inspired by my answers to the course exercises. I don’t know how many posts there will be, but they will help me tell my wealth narrative.
