I Have a Lot of Money, but I Don’t Feel Wealthy!

“Um, we’ve got a question from JLo up next. JLo, not to be confused with JLo I, about to say this is just a different person. The block, keep going. No, but this is Golo. Golo JLo. Know y’all said JLo. No, no, you were there. Okay, the question says, ‘Is it normal to not feel like you have reached abundance when your numbers say a different story?’ Oh, yeah, Bo, why don’t you start this? Because you talk about this all the time. You say, ‘Man, life was good, but it didn’t feel good, and then it felt good after it probably already been good for a while, realistically.'”

“Well, now, did I mishear the question? Because I thought, Rebie, you’re kind of the moderator here. Is it normal to feel like you’re not in abundance when you are in abundance? Is that the question? I’m going to read it again just how it’s phrased: ‘Is it normal to not feel like you have reached abundance when your numbers say a different story?’ So, how I’m taking it is their numbers say they’re very successful, but they do not feel like that. Let me tell you, see, there was this—I don’t have the specific data point in front of me, but there was a large percentage, it was over half of wealthy people who said that they were not wealthy. We have that survey somewhere; we’ve done content around it. And so, I read this, I was on the phone with some CPA friends because we were doing, working on some clients’ taxes or something. And, I knew this CPA because he’s also a client of the firm, and I was like, ‘Hey, you know, I saw a stat, and you’re successful; you have, you know, multiple seven figures.’ I was like, ‘Do you feel like you’re loaded, you got money, you’re living in abundance?’ He’s like, ‘No way.’ And I was like, ‘You realize statistically, you’re like, you’re in the top.’ And I think that’s pretty normal, Golo, because look, especially if you come from humble beginnings, you know, it’s you can take the person out, but you can’t get the humble beginnings out of them. I mean, that’s just, they have that funny saying. I totally butchered it, Daniel, but well, I didn’t want, because the real saying, and I didn’t know how in this crazy time, you can take the boy out of McDon—talking about myself—but you can’t get the McDon out of the boy. I mean, that’s the say, but I didn’t know use certain words.

Now, everybody gets all worked up, so I did. I didn’t know. So, but it is one of those things where I think that it’s completely normal to feel like you haven’t reached. That’s why you’ve got to make sure you have analytical factors working in your life that Know Your Number course, this is exactly why we designed it—learn.moneyguy.com—so you can actually put some analytics because emotionally, we know emotions lie to us, you know, because they, they, they, they, what we come—we’re packaged with all kinds of limitations and other things because we have a bunch of baggage from what we grew up with. You’ve got to get outside of the emotional stuff and kind of retrain your mindset and then have the analytics to kind of make sure you’re getting the best version of yourself. So, I think, Golo, that’s completely normal. I do too. You know, there’s the same comparison is the thief of joy, right? Like we say that all the time. I think that comparison is also the thief of reality because where we sit, we never really look at the people next to us or below us. Well, I look at the people above us, uh, that when it comes to money, I think we do that a ton. We aren’t thinking about how great my situation is; we’re thinking about, ‘Oh, well, somebody else has.’ I mean, just in the chat right now, somebody said, ‘Oh, well, I got a buddy’s got 400,000 shares of Apple. That’s wealthy.’ Well, yeah, I’m not going to disagree with you there, but also, you know, having a million bucks in the bank, that’s, that’s wealthy too, right? Like, that’s still wealthy. And so, we are so accustomed to looking and comparing ourselves to others that, I think a lot of people, just human nature, fall into that category.

And so, I do think what you have to do is you have to have a measured and grounded approach to say, ‘Okay, well, I don’t feel like I’m killing it. I know that, hey, I’ve got money in the bank, and I’m saving well, and I’ve got a healthy income, and my debt’s under control, and my net worth is growing, and I know my number, and I know where I am today, and I know that the steps I’m taking today are going to move me towards my number.’ If you can say all of those things in the affirmative, you’re doing good, right? You’re doing pretty good, even though it might not feel that way. And so, I think what is frustrating is when people who are objectively doing well try to suggest or pretend otherwise. It’s like the guy who said, ‘Oh, you know, let me tell you why a million dollars is nothing, how so easy to spend a million dollars.’ Well, that’s a very subjective view. Objectively, a million-dollar income is a lot of money, right? There’s just no two ways about that.

So, I think we have to be careful not to compare ourselves to other people, not to compare ourselves to the people around us, and have a realistic view of all right, where am I? And ultimately, why does it matter? Because at the end of the day, money is nothing more than a tool. Wealth is nothing more than a tool that allows us to better achieve the things in life we want to achieve, whether that be time, time with family, relationships, whatever that thing may be. Money is just the mechanism that gets us there. So, am I wealthy or am I not wealthy shouldn’t really be the question. Have I made or have I not made? Is am I at the point in life where I can do the things I want to do the way I want to do them, on my terms? And that’s what we—we should compare ourselves to, not to all the folks around us.” Have you downloaded our free Wealth Multiplier resource yet? This tool shows you exactly how much you need to be investing each month in order to reach $1 million by your target retirement age (and what every single dollar could turn into by retirement).