Transcript
A money mindset is my opinion about money, usually either a negative one or a positive one, some people are very neutral when it comes to money. But the main question here is not whether it’s positive or negative, it’s more what it does with you. What are the consequences?
So let me give you an example. If you have a negative money mindset and you believe only the greedy people take care of their finances or investing is only for the rich or, I should be a good person and good people do not think about growing their assets, then I will sabotage myself in a way that for sure I will never be in this place where I do have a certain net worth or where I feel that I’m worth earning a lot of money.
So the money mindset actually comes from multiple thoughts. So one is the culture you’re living in, and this really drives how appropriate it is to talk about money, what to think about money. So for example, we realized that in Asia it’s very different from, for example, Western Europe, which leads to the fact that in Asia women are a lot more engaged in making money and dealing with the money. So for example, in Western cultures, it’s kind of separated, it’s not like women are not in charge of the money, but more about the purchasing decisions. Whereas on the other hand, men are more in the long term investment decisions engaged. So that’s kind of like the culture that forms what role are appropriate.
Then obviously things like how is your family dealing with money and your friends, if your family thinks, again, like only rich people should invest, only greedy people are thinking about their finances, that forms how I think about money, right? So I want to be also socially acceptable, so I act in that manner and that drives my behavior. Sometimes it’s very subtle, right, so even if I think, yes, I want to make money, but internally I don’t feel I’m worth it to make more money, then I sabotage internally myself. And that’s where I think the head and the heart sometimes work against each other. And here, one of the things I personally really like to talk about is to understand really what are the thoughts, what are the emotions, what are the opinions in my close environment and how they might affect my personal way of thinking about money?
The money mindset for women is actually interesting from two points. So from a factual point of view, women have currently the so-called gender wealth gap. So women own less money than men do, for multiple reasons. So first of all, we’re typically in jobs that pay less, that’s what we call the gender pay gap. They usually work more often in part-time to take care of maybe their children or their loved older ones. But also, the fact that women invest less and they save more and they’re not really utilizing the so-called compounding effect. And at the same time, they actually live longer. So they need more money when they go into retirement. But at the same time, everything they do before, it doesn’t really help to build more wealth, than men do.
So this is really on the factual part. but on the emotional part, it’s really about empowering yourself, feeling worth it, getting the confidence, otherwise money I am not putting to my future self. So myself that goes into retirement, which I personally want to have as a nice retirement and not really as a retirement where I’m like, should I have asked for more? And I think when at some point, when you start to think about the mechanisms, you feel more confident about asking also for more and putting your money to work, instead of you working for the money.
