Ask AltoTRY · 10 MIN
What Is Money For?
TAIU
Money is usually buying something other than what appears on the receipt.
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Tool 08 · Develop yourself
What am I asking money to do, and what is enough?
A guided 25 to 35 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. Not budgeting. The other conversation, about what you are asking money to do for you. It also asks what enough would actually mean: the point where more money stops changing how your day feels.
GUIDES
You have named it. Now spend some time on it.
Each Guide gives you a clear way to look at one subject in your own time. Choose where to begin. You do not need to work through everything.
Where the rules came from
The story underneath
Work out where your money rules came from and which ones you still hold.
Where this often ends up: Your money rules written out, with where each one came from.
It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.
Around twenty minutes
What it pays for
What money is for, in practice
Look at what money means to you alongside what it is actually being spent on.
Where this often ends up: A plain statement of what your money is for, tested against the last year.
It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.
Around thirty minutes
Enough
What enough might mean
Look at what enough looks like for you, in practical terms as well as feelings.
Where this often ends up: Your own account of enough, with figures only where they are useful to you.
It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.
Around twenty minutes
This Guide is free, like everything else in The Clearing.
You can see what it covers before you begin.
Start this Guide
If you got the number tomorrow, what would you stop doing?
If the answer is nothing, the number was never the point.
Most people can name what they would buy. Far fewer can name what they would put down.
What you'll look at
- 01What money did in the house you grew up in
- 02A decision money made for you
- 03The number, and where it came from
- 04What you would stop doing
A note from Mark
Money is not interesting because people want more of it. Almost everybody does, and saying so gets you nowhere. It is interesting because of what people quietly believe it will fix, and how rarely that belief gets examined once it has been set.
I have watched people build businesses to reach a number they could not justify when I asked them where it came from. Sometimes it came from a parent. Sometimes from the person they sat next to five years ago. Sometimes from a period when there genuinely was not enough, and the fear outlived the circumstances by two decades.
Read my full view ↓
None of that makes the ambition wrong. Some people should earn more, and telling them to be grateful is lazy advice. But an ambition you have never revised is not really a decision. It is a habit with a price attached, and the price is usually paid in time you cannot buy back.
The question worth carrying is simple and slightly uncomfortable. If you got the number, what would you actually stop doing? People who can answer that are usually fine. People who cannot are often working towards something that has no finishing line in it.
What you'll get
This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.
01
What you are actually buying
02
Where the story came from
03
What enough looks like
04
What it would cost you
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.
See everything included ↓
- 01What I came here with
- 02What money appears to represent for me
- 03The evidence
- 04Where the target came from
- 05Where the story came from
- 06What I say I want and what my behaviour suggests
- 07What I am actually buying
- 08Enough
- 09The credible alternative
- 10What is already working
- 11What is still unresolved
- 12What to do
- 13Where this goes next
When you finish
Bring it back to your tree.
Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.
At the end, the conversation asks how Money feels for you right now, in your own words. It also asks what, if anything, would feel different. Nothing changes on your tree unless you say it changes.
The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.
- Session
- Date
- The part of life this belongs to
- How you described it
- What would feel different
- What we found
- The alternative we tested
- What deserves protecting
- What should change, if anything
- Next actions
- What to notice or find out
- What remains unresolved
What now?
01 · Save it
A plain reading of what money represents for you, with the evidence behind it.
02 · Test it
Look back through three months of spending and mark only the things you would buy again. The pattern in what survives is more useful than the total.
See more ↓
Before you file it away
The handover is only worth having if you read it a fortnight later. Money conclusions reached in one sitting tend to sound obvious on the day and different by the end of the month.
If the exercise concluded that nothing material needs changing, that is a result. Protect it rather than going looking for another exercise.
What I would do
- 01
Start with what happened rather than what you believe. Money beliefs are easier to see in decisions than in statements.
- 02
Separate money from what you are asking money to buy. Security, freedom, standing and proof behave very differently, and only one of them is usually the real one.
- 03
Test the ambition. Ask when you last revised the number and what would have to happen for you to revise it again.
- 04
Describe enough in conditions rather than figures. What would be true, what would stop, what you would give up.
- 05
Take real constraint seriously. If the pressure is genuine, it is a money problem and not a mindset problem.
Test it
- 01
For one week, note the moment you feel financially uneasy and what triggered it. Uneasiness rarely tracks the balance.
- 02
Deliberately do not buy one thing you would normally buy without thinking, and write down what you notice.
- 03
Say your definition of enough out loud to the person most affected by it and see whether it survives the conversation.
The alternative
The obvious conclusion is usually more money. Sometimes that is right, and the exercise will say so. But the evidence often points somewhere else: less financial pressure rather than more income, more autonomy rather than more wealth, greater security rather than greater consumption or a set of expectations that were never really yours. Occasionally the alternative is that the ambition is sound and the impatience is the problem. The exercise raises an alternative only where your own answers support it.
Think about this
- What money was in the house you grew up in. Whether it was discussed openly, quietly resented, treated as the only score or never mentioned.
- The last significant thing you bought that you can still justify, and the last one you cannot.
- A job or a move you took mainly for the money, and whether it delivered what you took it for.
- If you have a figure in your head, who put it there. Very few people arrive at one alone.
- What you would stop doing if you had enough. That answer usually tells you what you are actually buying.
Take this to Ask Mark
You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.
This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.
Take this to Ask Mark →Put this into practice
LEARN · GUIDE
Beginner's guide to managing your money
MoneyHelper
Impartial and free, which most money advice is not.
Find out more ↗
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LISTEN · EPISODE
Morgan Housel on getting rich versus staying rich
Shane Parrish with Morgan Housel
A long conversation rather than an interview, and it spends most of its time on the part people skip: the difference between the behaviour that builds money and the behaviour that keeps it, and how much of both is inherited from the household you grew up in. Listen to it if the exercise turns up a childhood money story you had not thought about since.
Listen ↗
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Recommended by the TAIU community
What helped you?
If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.
We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.
Finished the exercise?
What did this uncover?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Before you start
Reading, if you would rather understand the question first.
Further thinking
The Psychology of Money
Morgan Housel
Your Money or Your Life
Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez
Income and emotional well-being: a conflict resolved
Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Mellers
See the thinking ↓
Book
The Psychology of Money
Morgan Housel
Housel's argument is that financial behaviour is mostly not a maths problem. People handle money according to what they lived through, what they saw at home and what they are frightened of. Read it for the chapters on enough and on wealth being the money you do not spend, which are the two ideas this exercise keeps running into.
Book
Your Money or Your Life
Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez
The book's central move is to convert money back into the hours of your life it took to earn, then ask whether the thing you bought returned that time in any recognisable form. It is where the idea of enough is treated as a real number rather than a mood.
Article
Income and emotional well-being: a conflict resolved
Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Mellers
Two researchers who had published opposite findings sat down together to work out who was right. The answer was both, in different populations: for most people happiness continues to rise with income, while for an unhappy minority it flattens once real hardship is behind them. It is the most honest available answer to the question of whether more money would help, and it refuses to give you a slogan in either direction.
Book
I Will Teach You To Be Rich
Ramit Sethi
Included here as a counterweight rather than a recommendation. Most of the good writing about money, including two of the other resources listed with this exercise, moves towards restraint, frugality and enough. Sethi goes the other way. His argument is that plenty of people already underspend on the few things they genuinely care about, that cutting small pleasures is a poor substitute for earning and negotiating properly, and that a rich life has to be described in specifics before any of the arithmetic is worth doing.
Podcast
Morgan Housel on getting rich versus staying rich
Shane Parrish with Morgan Housel
A long conversation rather than an interview, and it spends most of its time on the part people skip: the difference between the behaviour that builds money and the behaviour that keeps it, and how much of both is inherited from the household you grew up in. Listen to it if the exercise turns up a childhood money story you had not thought about since.