Sharing my latest thoughts on money and life, with an eye to empowering more women to financial confidence.

I'VE BEEN PONDERING

Not Just How Much, But What For: Money as a Full-Body Experience

Most people are trained to think about money as a number. A balance. A total. A figure that is or isn’t enough. But numbers alone don’t tell the story of what money is actually for.

Think about buildings for a moment. A house can be four walls and a roof. It can also be the smell of something cooking, the glow of a lamp at the end of a long day, the sound of familiar voices, the feeling of being home. Both are real descriptions of the same building. One is just information. The other is an experience.

Money works the same way.

There is a long-running conversation in architecture about what buildings are supposed to do. One school of thought treats them as machines for living—efficient structures for shelter and function. Another treats them as something more: shelters for daydreaming, spaces that shape how we feel, remember, and connect. Both are legitimate. But most people don’t fall in love with a machine. They fall in love with a place and how they feel when they are in it.

The same is true of money. It can be a machine—a store of value, a spreadsheet, a set of accounts that grow through compound interest. It can also be something more. It can be what makes a shared meal possible. What lets us live near the people we love. What builds a story worth passing on.

Why the Body Matters

There is a technique in therapy called grounding. When someone feels overwhelmed or disconnected, they are guided to name what they see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. It works because the body needs the awareness of more than one sense at a time to feel steady. A single input isn’t enough. The senses—together—hold us in place.

Money treated as a single sensation cannot do this. When money exists only as a number on a screen, a colorful pie chart, only something we see, it stays abstract. And abstract money is often exactly the kind of money that feels cold, anxious, or never quite enough. There is no anchor for the body to grab onto or sink into, because we have given it nothing to grab.

Thinking about money through experience is different. A weekend in a place that made us feel alive. A dinner with people we love. A room in our home that offers complete rest. These are not the frivolous parts of life disconnected from finance. They can and often are, if we think with our whole bodies, the parts that make money feel real—and the parts that make the rest of the plan feel like it is for something.

Making money feel tangible is important, for instance, there is research suggesting that physically handling money can lower our sense of pain (Zhou, Vohs & Baumeister, 2009). This doesn’t necessarily mean walking around with $200 in your jeans, but it is valuable to note that something can shift, mentally and physically, when we move from thinking about money in the abstract to actually experiencing it.

Cozy Money

Some money is meant to be counted. Some money is meant to be felt. The trick is remembering that both are worth planning for.

Let's call the second kind Cozy money, whose purpose is to try to invoke contentment in the body. Cozy money is the kind that shows up as comfort, connection, memory, and safety. It might mean living closer to friends and family. It might mean spending on the third place—the café, the studio, the park—that becomes part of who you are. It might mean investing in a home that isn’t just a house, but a place people want to gather. It might mean saving for something long enough that it becomes a story worth telling later.

A Few Questions Worth Sitting With

If any of this resonates, here are a few questions to consider before your next conversation about money:

• Think of a time you spent money and can still feel it—not in your account, but in your body. What made that different from the other things you bought that year?
• If your money was infrastructure, what would it be an infrastructure for? Who would it be serving? What experiences would it be making possible?
• What is a place, a memory, or a person that money has helped you get closer to? What would it take to build more of that into your life on purpose?

We don't want our financial planning to focus only on the machine—the accumulation, the growth, the number at the end. Of course this part remains important. And there is another conversation worth having alongside it: what is the money for, and what kind of life is it meant to make possible?

RECENT SIGHTINGS

I'm honored to have contributed a couple of thoughts to the October issue of Kiplinger Personal Finance magazine, which focuses on "The Great Wealth Transfer" -- the supposed $124 trillion in assets expected to be inherited in the next 20 years or so. A big theme is how unprepared families are for the change that will bring.

They also compiled tips and information on improving family conversations on the topic, here.

LET'S CONNECT!

Does the term Cozy Money strike a chord for you? What's your most frequent bodily feeling connected to money?

Stephanie

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