For a long time, I thought my problem was income. I figured if I could just make a little more, everything would sort itself out. I’d pay off the debt, build some savings, and stop feeling like every unexpected bill was a crisis waiting to happen.
I was wrong. I mean, yes, income obviously matters. But I eventually realized that most of my financial problems weren’t income problems at all. They were mindset problems. And the frustrating thing about mindset problems is that earning more money doesn’t fix them. It just gives them a bigger stage to operate on.
You’ve probably seen this play out. A friend gets a raise and somehow still ends up broke at the end of the month. A lottery winner blows through millions in a few years. Pro athletes who earn more in a single season than most people see in a lifetime end up filing for bankruptcy not long after their playing careers are over. The money wasn’t the problem in any of those cases. The thinking around the money was.
This is the post I wish someone had put in front of me years ago. Not because it contains some heavily guarded secret. None of this is actually a secret. But because knowing something and genuinely internalizing it are two completely different things. The gap between them is where most people stay stuck for years.
The Scarcity Trap Most of Us Grew Up In
Consider this: the way you think about money right now was likely formed before you turned twelve.
The conversations your parents had about bills, the way they talked about people who had more or less than you, whether money was something that came and went or something that was always almost gone—you absorbed all of that before you had any framework to question it. Behavioral economists have proven time and again that our earliest money experiences create invisible patterns that follow us straight into adulthood. I was actually pretty fortunate growing up. I always had whatever I needed and my parents were able to afford to give my siblings and I every opportunity to succeed and have experiences that others may not been able to. We weren’t necessarily rich, but we were far from poor and never had to struggle much. But that can also be a trap.
For a lot of millennials, those early experiences were shaped by scarcity. Maybe not extreme poverty, but enough scarcity to build an unconscious belief that money is hard to get, easy to lose, and never quite enough no matter how hard you work.
That’s the scarcity mindset. And it’s sneaky because it doesn’t feel like a mindset. It just feels like reality.
A few signs you might be running this pattern without realizing it: You feel vaguely guilty spending money, even on things you genuinely need. You avoid checking your bank account because the number stresses you out. You make financial decisions based on what relieves pressure today rather than what builds your position for tomorrow. You believe, somewhere deep down, that wealth is something that happens to other people, people who were luckier than you, people who had a different start. For me, I had a bit of a different start and I still wound up in the same boat.
Sometimes I feel guilty about having had more growing up than what others do and still ending up in the same spot. I spent years wondering if there was something wrong with me and then finally began to realize what was actually going on.
What Abundance Mindset Actually Means
Before we go further, I want to clear something up. “Abundance mindset” has become a self-help buzzword, and with that comes a lot of misunderstanding about what it actually involves.
It’s not about pretending you have money you don’t have. It’s not about manifesting wealth through positive thinking while ignoring your actual bank balance, or spending freely and telling yourself the universe will provide. Anyone selling that version of an abundance mindset is selling a fantasy.
What it actually means, stripped of the self-help jargon, is believing that your financial situation is something you can influence rather than something that just happens to you. That’s genuinely the whole shift. It’s moving from feeling like a passenger in your own financial life to feeling like you have your hands on the steering wheel.
Behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan found that a scarcity mindset literally shrinks your cognitive bandwidth—the mental space you have available for clear decision-making. When you’re constantly stressed about money, you make worse financial decisions. Not because you’re bad with money, but because the stress itself impairs your judgment. This isn’t just philosophy; there’s hard cognitive science behind why your mindset matters.
The Beliefs That Keep People Stuck
Through personal experience and a lot of reading, I’ve come to realize there are a few core beliefs that keep most people financially stuck. It’s rarely about circumstances or income. It’s the beliefs underneath those things.
The most common one I see? “Money is complicated, and it’s not for people like me.” This belief is pervasive, and the financial industry thrives on it. Sure, some aspects of finance are genuinely complex. But the fundamentals: spend less than you earn, invest the difference, avoid high-interest debt, build income streams that don’t depend on one employer—are not complicated. They require discipline and consistency, not a finance degree. As I mentioned, I have one of those, but that’s not what it’s for.
Closely related is the procrastination trap: “I’ll start getting serious about money when I earn more.” The habits you build at a lower income are the exact same habits you’ll need at a higher one. Waiting until you earn more to practice financial discipline is like waiting until you’re fit to start exercising. The discipline comes first, and the results follow. Not the other way around.
Then there’s the luck narrative. That’s the belief that wealthy people got there through circumstances rather than choices. Does luck play a role? Absolutely. But decades of research into actual millionaires – most notably The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley – consistently shows that most of them built wealth through disciplined behavior over time. The luck narrative is comfortable because it removes personal responsibility from the equation. But it also removes your personal agency, which is a much more expensive loss.
I’ve believed versions of all of these at different points in my life. Some of them I’m still working through. That’s just the honest truth.
How the Shift Actually Happens
Here’s where most mindset content loses me: it tells you to think differently without telling you how. So let’s get practical.
You can’t motivate your way into a new mindset. You have to act your way there. The thinking gradually shifts to match what you’re doing.
Start by tracking your money, even if the numbers make you uncomfortable. Financial anxiety thrives on avoidance. The moment you start looking at where your money actually goes, you take back a degree of control. You can’t make good decisions with information you refuse to look at.
Next, make one small financial decision based on “future you” rather than present comfort. Automate twenty dollars a month into savings. Pay an extra ten dollars toward a credit card balance. The amount genuinely doesn’t matter at first. What matters is making future-oriented decisions at all, because each one makes the next one slightly easier.
Also, pay attention to what you’re reading and watching. Your information diet shapes your assumptions more than you realize. Spending time with content about building wealth, thinking about money strategically, and learning from people who have actually done it gradually shifts your baseline sense of what’s possible and what’s normal.
The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel is the best starting point I’ve found for that kind of reading.
Finally, find your specific reason. Not a vague one like “wanting to be wealthy.” A concrete one. Mine is wanting a life where having a job is optional rather than mandatory—where I make choices about how I spend my time based on what I actually want to do, not what I have to do to keep things from falling apart. That level of specificity is what makes the harder decisions feel worth making.
Where I Am With This Right Now
I want to be completely transparent about where I am in this process. The mindset shift isn’t something that happened to me all at once. It’s an ongoing practice.
Getting laid off twice does something to how you see your financial situation. For me, it could have reinforced every scarcity belief I’d ever had—proof that no matter what you do, the rug can be pulled out from under you. Instead, I’m trying to use it as the catalyst that finally pushed me to build something that can’t be taken away by someone else’s decision. I won’t pretend that’s always easy to hold onto. But it’s the direction I’m choosing.
The Richer Road is part of that shift in a practical sense. Building income that doesn’t depend entirely on an employer is an act of abundance thinking. It’s a bet that there are enough opportunities out there for someone willing to do the work consistently. Some days that belief comes easily. Some days it doesn’t. I’ll be honest about both as we go.
The One Thing Worth Taking From This
If you only remember one thing from this post, make it this: your relationship with money is not fixed. It was shaped by experiences and beliefs that were handed to you before you were old enough to choose them. That means it can be reshaped by the experiences and beliefs you choose going forward.
That’s not a small thing.
Next week, we’re getting practical. We’ll talk about the first concrete financial move that matters regardless of where you’re starting from—building your first $1,000 emergency fund, and why that single step changes your relationship with financial stress more than almost anything else you can do.
See you on The Richer Road.
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