Why is money hard to imagine? I mean it’s not, in small amounts, but try to imagine receiving ten thousand dollars or five hundred thousand. How about 10 million?
Maybe it’s just me. If I imagine counting a large amount, I remember that large amounts of cash are considered suspect. If you deposit amounts totalling up to $10,000 in cash, the total of your deposits will be reported to the IRS.
So instead, I imagine I receive a million dollars. I see it in my bank account. Except that bank deposits are only covered up to $250,000 per account.
Writing this, I just figured it out though. I can imagine a check. Like the Publishers’ Clearinghouse checks (am I dating myself?), those giant checks that they record giving to the winners.
Okay, I don’t need a giant check, but if I see a check, I don’t have to deal with my mind trying to figure out the next steps because there’s too much money in the bank to be protected.
Which makes me wonder, why banks don’t offer a service that would instantly create a new account for every amount over $250,000, unless you specifically ask them not to. That way, if you deposit $500,000, you know your money is completely safe because the bank takes care of making sure everything is covered.
Do you struggle with imagining finances?
I have a friend who shared one time that they struggled with earning over $200k. They had earned more than that before, but when they had it, they ended up spending it until it was down to a comfortable amount.
I remember when I was little, helping my mom put up the laundry and in their top dresser drawer, I found a bank envelope with ten $1000 dollar bills. I felt them, I counted them, and as a result, I always felt, growing up, like we were incredibly rich. It didn’t matter that my parents saved pennies whenever they could (actually, they literally saved pennies…we had a big container full of them); I had seen the money, almost more money at that young age than I could imagine, and for the rest of my life, I knew we were rich.
Nony, on the other hand, grew up with rich family around, but his dad always felt poor and as a result, money fell through his fingers. So our first years of marriage were a struggle of opposites.
I think how you feel about yourself related to finances determines how your finances play out. Almost everyone needs money to live, so money isn’t a bad thing. Some people grow up believing that money is the root of all evil, and since their families usually struggle with money, it seems to prove the saying true.
But go back and look at the verse. It’s really, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” (1 Tim 6:10) There’s another verse too, that gives a little more insight, Matthew 6:21 “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
If you feel that money is bad, you push it away from you, first mentally, and then physically. There’s an obvious problem with that, but the not quite so obvious problem is that then your focus becomes becomes money. You’re pushing your treasure away and the love of money becomes one of your biggest focuses…not the having, the needing and the pushing away.
We’ve probably all known people like this. They preach against being wealthy, but it seems to be a primary topic of their conversation. And they wonder why they’re struggling.
Money shouldn’t be the be all and end all of our lives, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need it.
In one of Neville’s lectures, he talks about a woman who approached him wanting to lose weight. He told her she would lose as much weight as she wanted and then some. LOL A few weeks later, she approached him because she’d lost too much weight. But that idea stuck in my brain, and I’ve been using it for finances as well…as much money as I want, and then some.
How about you? What are your thoughts on money and using imagining to receive it?
