Money isn't food - do you treat your pay like it has an expiry date?

I have a long-held theory that, on some level, many of us secretly treat money like it’s food. We don’t do it on purpose, but our poor old monkey brains struggle with the concept that we keep a stock of otherwise useless tokens in order to trade them for the things we need later. Why would anyone give you a thing you want in exchange for a useless token? Make money even more abstract (just a number on a screen) and the monkey mind gets completely fuddled. Why are we keeping the numbers high? What use are they? They are only useful when they get us stuff. Stuff is real. Numbers on a screen are not real.

I think for some (read many) people our subconscious minds try to make sense of money by deciding it’s just another type of food that we ‘eat’ by spending it.

It’s well-documented that people whose eating is disordered also often have money issues. This is not only because some eating disorders are expensive, but because the same attitudes of perfectionism, self-denial and shame and around pleasure and self-care that drives much disordered eating, also affects our feelings about money.

So, if we unknowingly, secretly believe money is food and we get the value of it (eat it) by spending it, of course we don’t want to save it. If you save food for too long it goes off. I think some of us deep in some part of our brains believe money will too! This goes double if we’ve never saved successfully before. Until you have saved successfully you have no evidence that money can be stored and not decay.

Of course, the rising cost of living does, to some extent, reduce the value of money saved over time. To make sure money keeps pace with inflation and ideally outgrows it, that money must be put to work, i.e. invested. Here I think we can come to an analogy that might be ancient enough to allow our under-evolved brains to grasp it.

Money isn’t food, or at least it isn’t just food, money is seeds. If you can convince yourself that money is grain you can start to get a feel for what you need to do.

When you get your grain harvest (pay cheque) you don’t grind and eat too much of it, because you need what you can get for future crops. You plant it (invest) in the best locations you find, but maybe not all in the same field in case something goes wrong in that one field and you lose all your crop (diversify). You also hold a bit back in case the crop fails and you need to sow again or in case you miscalculated and your food stores run low (save).

Seeing yourself as a money farmer, instead of a consumer, makes it easier to remember what you have to do to shift away from living pay cheque to pay cheque, and start saving and investing for your future.

Now go out and tend your crops!

Does this post sound like you? Or someone you know? Share it and tag me in @marthalawton on Twitter or @squanderlustpod on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.

The first time talked about this idea was on the Seize The Moment podcast and you can watch the whole show here or jump to 3:25 where I talk about treating money like food.