Moving Beyond the Scarcity Mentality
My grandmother took the lessons of the Great Depression deeply to heart and raised my mother with a minimalist approach to life. I also grew up in a large family living on my father’s sole income; my parents’ careful budgeting and Mom’s couponing made sure our needs were always met.
And that’s the key word: Needs. We grew up learning to define our requests as “needs,” or “wants.” We needed clothes; new clothes were a want. (I grew up wearing hand-me-downs from either my older sisters or the kids of family friends.) We needed food; fruit roll-ups and sodas were a want.
You would think that being raised in this environment would lead me to be a financially responsible adult, bipolar disorder notwithstanding.
Nope.
For me, financial responsibility transformed into a scarcity mentality. I don’t have enough. I won’t have enough.
I felt insecure, incapable, and afraid. Instant gratification was my way of plugging those emotional gaps.
That worry meant that I had to grab on to every opportunity in front of me, for fear that something better would never come along. It meant that I settled for poor work environments, and I accepted being perpetually broke as my lot in life.
Financial responsibility transformed into a scarcity mentality.
The disorder was no help here, either. Hypomanic episodes sent me on spending sprees. I felt shame over the spending and didn’t return anything for fear of judgment and angering the sales clerks.
Frustratingly, stress is a known trigger for mania — and financial challenges are a significant source of stress, creating a vicious circle of money challenges. The Scarcity Mentality was reinforced on all corners.
Desperate to keep current on my bills, I paid everything as it came in and the cash was available. Any money left over after paying bills from that paycheck was frittered away on personal spending.
If the money ran out before the bill came in, the bill was paid late. There was no budgeting for rent, the car payment, or utilities. If the credit card bill came in before the car payment, the credit card company got paid, and the car company waited another two weeks for its money.
The scarcity mentality is not about our circumstances. It’s about our mindset.
I think you can see the inherent problems with such an unsustainable approach to finances. Two weeks stretched to four as late payments and penalties piled upon each. Being broke is amazingly expensive, and the Scarcity Mentality became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I got my first taste of a different approach to money when I lived in Phoenix. My girlfriend started dating an accountant, Luke, and brought me along as a chaperone. He was a good guy and very pulled together. He always had cash to flash around, bribing the door guys at exclusive clubs to get us in the door.
Conversations inevitably turned to plans for the future, which I generally didn’t have. My scarcity mentality meant that, although some details may differ, my future life would look like my current life.
Every so often, I would tell Luke something I wanted, like a newer car. “Why don’t you get one?” he would ask.
“I don’t have the money.”
“Ahhh, you don’t have the cash flow,” he gently corrected me.
Every time I told Luke I didn’t have the money, he would respond in a neutral tone with that statement: “Ahhh, you don’t have the cash flow.”
Being broke is amazingly expensive, and the Scarcity Mentality became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
He gave no judgment, no lecture, no commentary on my lifestyle. Just a different perspective on my experience.
Such a subtle difference, yet it was a profoundly different approach to money.
It was about a year later when I first heard my original way of thinking labeled as a “Scarcity Mentality” at a conference. The speaker challenged us to think about our lives as abundant, no matter how they seemed to us at the time.
Sleeping on the floor of a small apartment in downtown Detroit at the time, driving a car with no AC and no heat (a summer in Phoenix with no AC is brutal; Detroit in the winter in a car with no heat is equally challenging), I struggled with this challenge.
I was broke. At the time, I was unemployed and chasing an entrepreneurial dream financed and driven by a partner who would abandon me about two months later.
When you’re broke and you’ve always been broke, how do you imagine abundance into your life?
I decided to play a game with myself. Accepting that abundance was not my reality today, I imagined what an abundant future would look like. My persistent poverty lowered the bar for abundance: I would drive a good, reliable car. I would have a robust and steady income. I would have stable housing, and maybe even own an inexpensive home.
Taking it one step further, it meant that I could eat out at restaurants. Shop at Costco. Buy a few fun things for me without feeling guilty. Move past homemade presents for my friends and family. Turn the tables and buy my friends drinks for once.
When you’re broke, and you’ve always been broke, how do you imagine abundance into your life?
These simple, humble definitions of abundance caused a shift in my thinking. Each felt small and achievable, even for someone in my situation. Maybe I wouldn’t buy a house or get a new car, but shopping at Costco or taking friends out every so often felt achievable.
The sense of the possible changed my behavior when I went out. I considered my purchases from a different light: I needed my car, and my car would need new tires soon, but I didn’t have to spend that money today. I could set aside a little from the money my partner and his investors gave me so that it was available when the time came.
The pressure to buy things eased, as I recognized that my abundant future would provide those things. I made some hard choices, knowing they would have long-term impacts. Even so, I had peace that they were the best decision for me. Making those choices meant that I was investing in my abundant future; I was making an active choice — out of hope, not fear.
The sense of the possible changed my behavior when I went out.
Over time, making these small choices helped me achieve goals I’d given up on. Passing up those non-essential purchases left me with a little extra cash. Not a lot, but enough that I started making payments on time again, and even put a little extra down each month.
When I finally decided I needed to be employed again, I approached interviews with a new heart. Letting go of the scarcity mentality meant releasing desperation and fear; I interviewed with more confidence. I even turned down a job offer, because I was confident that a better one would come along and I wanted to be in a position to accept it.
That better job did, indeed, come along, along with a significantly healthier paycheck. I was able to catch up on all my bills and work aggressively toward being debt-free. Abundance bred abundance, and more opportunities and better people came into my life. I moved into a better neighborhood, and yes — I repaired my car and finally had AC and heat again.
Letting go of the scarcity mentality meant releasing desperation and fear.
The scarcity mentality was calmed, but I still have it. When I stepped back from my career, and my family transitioned to a single income, I struggled with it. Changes were necessary, and old habits re-emerged as I worked my way through them.
Now, it’s my husband who reminds me: We live with abundance. We are OK. We own our home, and, in a few years, will even be mortgage-free. We have savings in the bank; if he were to lose his job, we have plenty of time to make decisions and take action without seeing a hit in our lifestyle.
What I’ve learned is that the scarcity mentality is not about our circumstances. It’s about our mindset. And even small shifts in our mindset can yield outsized results.
How have you moved to an abundant life? What holds you back?
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