Somewhere to start
Money
One of the five branches: the life being lived now.
What money makes possible, what it restricts and what you are asking it to provide.
Money is rarely only arithmetic. It carries safety, standing, freedom, obligation and whatever your family taught you about it before you were old enough to argue.
Two people with identical accounts can experience them completely differently, and the difference is almost never financial. It is what each of them is asking money to do.
Looking at money here means looking at the meaning as well as the sums. What it makes possible, what it quietly rules out and whether the story you inherited about it is still the one you would choose.
What this can help you notice
- What money is currently buying you that you would not want to lose.
- What it is being asked to provide that money cannot actually supply.
- Which restrictions are real and which are assumed.
- Where your idea of enough came from.
- Whether the arrangement is working and simply needed looking at.
The book treats money as a branch like the others: consequential but not the trunk, and much easier to think about once it stops standing in for everything else.
Where people usually start
Workshop, around twenty minutes
The story underneath
Work out where your money rules came from and which ones you still hold.
Why it is relevant here: Goes to the story underneath the figures, which is where most of the feeling sits.
Workshop, around thirty minutes
What money is for, in practice
Look at what money means to you alongside what it is actually being spent on.
Why it is relevant here: Works out what money is for in your life in practice rather than in principle.
Workshop, around twenty minutes
What enough might mean
Explore what enough looks like for you, in practical terms as well as feelings.
Why it is relevant here: Puts a definition on enough, in your words, with nothing to sign up to.
If you want to go further
Four things made by other people, chosen because they are useful rather than because they agree with us. None of them is homework, and none of them is a view TAIU is asking you to hold.
READ · Morgan Housel
The Psychology of Money
Why this may be useful: Morgan Housel writes about money as behaviour rather than arithmetic, which is usually where the discomfort sits.
harriman-house.com ↗ (Opens in a new tab)LISTEN · Shane Parrish with Morgan Housel
Morgan Housel on getting rich versus staying rich
Why this may be useful: A long conversation on the difference between getting rich and staying comfortable, with almost no product in it.
fs.blog ↗ (Opens in a new tab)READ · Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Mellers
Income and emotional well-being: a conflict resolved
Why this may be useful: Two researchers who disagreed publicly, then worked out together what income does and does not do for daily life.
pnas.org ↗ (Opens in a new tab)READ · Anandi Mani, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir and Jiaying Zhao
Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function
Why this may be useful: Evidence that money worry takes up thinking capacity, which is worth knowing before judging your own decisions.
science.org ↗ (Opens in a new tab)
Reading it, and keeping it
Everything listed on this page can be read and worked through without an account. Nothing you write in a public session is sent anywhere or stored by us.
Signing in adds one thing: your own words stay, in My Tree, so that when you come back in six months you can see what you thought at the time rather than reconstructing it.
Take this in any order, or take one and stop there. Deciding that nothing needs changing is a real answer, and it is worth knowing why.