Stingy people live a difficult life. Planned frugality is a quality, but helpless parsimony is not. Minimalism is a quality, but inability to spend when you want something and have the resources too, is a curse.
Being able to spend handsomely is a great quality. It’s a trait that the genuinely prosperous people are blessed with. A study reveals that on an average people die with 75 percent of their net worth intact. Generally they leave it for the posterity. As if the posterity is not capable of earning on their own! Jim Stovall’s book THE ULTIMATE GIFT is a great pointer to understand how giving your property on a platter to the next generation can do more damage than good.
This situation of stinginess begs for a basic question: What is money for? How does money derive its value? When does money become money? It’s a simple question with a radical answer. Money becomes money when it ‘goes out’. Money becomes money when it ‘leaves’ you. That’s when it brings it a cart full of goodies. Until then it is just ink on paper. Money derives its value by buying valuable ideas, goods or services. Money is a tool to exchange value. The value you gave to your customer is being exchanged for the value you buy from your vendor. When you don’t spend, you are constantly garnering wealth for the value you provide to the world but not spending the same wealth to buy value from the same world. This is a distorted equation.
Stingy people have some other characteristics. They adulate people who work selflessly without asking for money – the saints and the social workers of the world. Or they adulate those who charge meager amounts classifying them as simple and spiritual. On the other hand, they develop a conscious or subconscious disdain for people who happily charge handsome amounts for their high quality services. As if money or the money-loving are evil and unspiritual. In the process they deprive their own selves of so many high quality ideas and services.
You are not doomed to live this way. The way out is simple though not easy. If you are one of these, you just have to get yourself to honestly see how your life is lesser than the lives of your friends who are easy with money, particularly in the area of savouring life’s bounties. You just need to think this through and if required, over and over again, to a point where you start dissolving your tight-fisted patterns of behaviour. If it yet persists, then probably it’s a deeper childhood conditioning that can be dissolved only through sub-conscious healing.
Either ways, have an easy spending day today. Bid adieu to tight fists!
