Helping Clients Connect to Their Money

Money is an integral part of everyone’s life on a daily basis, isn’t it?  If it is, how could anyone not be connected to their money? Actually, money may not be a part of everyone’s daily life depending upon whether talking about money refers to talking about the green kind or the plastic kind. Most of all, it depends on what it means to be connected to your money.

These days money comes in many shapes and sizes, and can be spent anywhere – not just at the cash register or online, but in the middle of the street with the swipe of a card (on someone’s cell phone no less).

Are you too removed from your money? If you have your paycheck deposited directly into your checking account, pay for purchases with a credit or debit card, pay your bills with checks or online, and use your phone at the checkout line, you are most likely out of “touch” with your money.

Without direct contact with your money, it can too easily become an abstract concept with little connection to the rest of your life. Its value is minimized because it doesn’t seem real. This facilitates spending money (whether you have it or not). Being “out of touch” with your money makes it difficult to maintain a healthy relationship with it or to know how much you do or don’t have.

Though not carrying cash has certain benefits, it also has certain drawbacks. The primary one being the “Money Disconnect,” and another being that a cashless society drives a culture of debt.

The Money Disconnect is an outcome of having less direct contact with money i.e. seeing it less, touching it less, and interacting with it less (avoiding it more). Reconnecting with your money will look different for each person, but it is always about attaining greater understanding of personal financial habits and developing new and better financial tools and skills for managing money.

Helping clients reconnect to their money begins with knowing what money means to them. This insight makes it possible to begin to address key underlying factors. How we relate to our money depends on whether it represents success, failure, deprivation, power, dependence, independence, greed, scarcity, abundance or hundreds of other things. Each of these associations, feelings, and attitudes requires exploration and understanding.

One additional way to reconnect clients to their money is by engaging them in a discussion about what money is and isn’t; what money can and cannot do. This activity provides the opportunity to identify myths and misconceptions in thinking and attitudes and to explain that money:

• Is a form of exchange.
• Isn’t good or bad–it isn’t the root of all evil and it doesn’t grow on trees.
• Is used to get the things people need and want.
• Means different things to different people.
• Can’t buy happiness, health, love, etc.
• Can provide emotional and financial stability.

This insight and information can begin to make money more relevant in clients’ lives; to reconnect clients to their money.

By Reeta Wolfsohn, CMSW
SJS Contributor

*First published at: http://www.financialsocialwork.com/helping-clients-connect-money?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=helping-clients-connect-money with permission from the author. For more from FSW, go to Visit http://www.financialsocialwork.com