What I Believed About Money When I Was Broke (and What Changed)
It wasn’t the bank account that needed to change first. It was the brain.
When I was broke, I didn’t just have a money problem.
I had a money belief problem. And it took me years to realize that the second one is what was actually keeping me poor.
Let me explain.
At 29, I had four kids, an unexpected divorce, no degree, little experience, and no plan. I drove a forklift at Lowe’s by day, worked as a teacher’s aide by night, and squeezed in college whenever possible. I moved my daughters into my bedroom and rented theirs to pay rent. Money always felt just out of reach, chasing me with a constant sense of fear and scarcity.
That’s the external story money told.
But beneath that, I had another story: what money meant, who it was for, who I had to be to have it. I didn’t know I was telling it. That’s how beliefs work—silent, constant, shaping your choices.
Here’s what I believed about money when I was broke. See if any sound familiar.
Money is for other people. Not for me. They had families ready for it, went to the right schools, had connections, parents for the down payment, or friends backing business ideas. I was not one of them, so their kind of money wasn’t an option for me.
Wanting it makes me greedy. Wanting more than enough to pay the bills made me selfish. A good mom, a good educator, a good woman didn’t fixate on money. She kept her head down, made do, and trusted that things would work out. Wanting wealth was vaguely shameful — like wanting to be looked at.
I’ll always be one bad month away. No matter how much came in, the part of me that had been broke didn’t trust it. Even good months felt like luck running out. I held onto money because it might disappear, so I never used it to make more.
A stable paycheck is the only safe answer. Risk was for people with safety nets. The smart move was to get my education, become a teacher, and stay there. Entrepreneurship was for people whose failure wouldn’t take their kids down with them. (Reader, I now run two businesses and own a real estate portfolio. Work the irony out for yourself.)
If I just work harder, I’ll get there. This was my favorite lie. It is the lie of every working-class kid who grew up watching parents grind. Hard work is necessary. It is not sufficient. You can grind for thirty years and still be broke if your beliefs about money are designed to keep you broke. Don’t ask me how I know.
I didn’t have rich beliefs. I had survival beliefs. And survival beliefs build survival lives.
What started to crack it open
Three things shifted me. None of them was dramatic.
The first was sales. After ten years of building a new business sales territory in CA, I learned, in the most unsentimental way possible, that money rewards specific actions. Asking is one. Showing up consistently is another. Caring about the person on the other side of the table is a third. I learned that money is not personal. It is not a referendum on your worth. It is a measurement of how much problem-solving you put into the world this month. That alone changed me.
The second was real estate. When my husband and I bought our first piece of property — really, when I rented out our spare room — I felt the most foreign sensation I’d ever felt with money: it was working for me, not the other way around. A bed I wasn’t sleeping in was generating income. The house I lived in was paying me to live in it. Eight doors later, I still feel that same quiet drone every time a unit goes on a lease. Money making money is real. It’s not a meme. And once you feel it, you cannot unfeel it.
The third was watching my own kids. Watching how the way I talked about money got absorbed into them, whether I wanted it to or not. Watching one of them tense up when I sighed at a credit card statement. Watching another one inherit a kind of guarded smallness that I knew, knew, did not come from nowhere. I realized — this isn’t just my problem to fix anymore. Whatever I believe, I am teaching. And I do not want to teach scarcity to a child who has every right to think bigger than I did.
What I believe about money now
Money is a tool. Not a god or a villain. It amplifies who you are: generosity grows with more, so does anxiety or lack of clarity. Get clear. Then get more.
Wealth is not the same as income. Income pays the bills. Wealth pays the bills when you are not working. The whole game is moving from income to wealth, and most people never make the move because they confuse the two.
Wanting it is a feature, not a flaw. The desire to provide an extravagant life for the people I love is not greed. It is leadership. The desire to be free of the next-paycheck math is not selfishness. It is sanity. Stop apologizing for the want.
I deserve it. So do you. Poverty thinking is the actual obstacle, not poverty itself. Poverty thinking will keep you broke in a hundred different ways, even after the money shows up.
What you can do this week
You will not Excel-spreadsheet your way out of a money belief problem. Start here.
Notice the lies. When you feel the small, tight feeling about money this week — when a bill comes in, when you say no to something you wanted, when you talk yourself out of charging what you should charge — pause. Write down the exact sentence going through your head. I can’t afford it. People like me don’t get that. It’s not a good time. I’d be greedy.
Read them back to yourself, out loud. Most of them will sound, in your own voice, like the ridiculous lies they are.
Replace one. Not all of them. One. Pick the one that runs the most, and write the truer sentence next to it. I can’t afford it because I am not currently allocating money for that. (See the difference? One is a verdict. The other is a choice.) Read the truer one out loud. Repeat tomorrow.
That is it. That is the whole exercise. Do it for 30 days and tell me what changes you notice.
Here’s the key takeaway: Shift your beliefs about money first—your bank account will follow.
Remember: Your beliefs about money are the foundation for real financial change.
— Tricia
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