money matters - cultivating a healthy money mindset
as a creative small biz owner with anti-capitalist and intersectional feminist values, cultivating a healthy money mindset whilst living in late-stage (maybe?) capitalism has been absolutely imperative. it’s also been a tricky li’l mine/d field, and i will be the first to state up front that i still regularly have days where scarcity mindset takes the driver’s seat. i have seen growth in myself over the past few years though, and also get to see it reflected back at me as my friends and colleagues come to me for advice around this and related matters. over the next few months here on the blog, we’ll be discussing one of western society’s most taboo (and therefore of course, most powerful) topics - money. i’ll be speaking from my personal experience, obviously, and sharing the tools i’ve found that have helped me work on my personal relationship with money, which has in turn helped me to grow my business in a sustainable fashion.
here are some of the basics that helped to build my money story up until i went full-time with my biz in 2017:
both of my parents came from very working class backgrounds and are part of the boomer generation. by the time they had me and my brother in their late 30s, my parents had worked their way to lower middle class status. now retired, they are comfortably middle class.
i grew up understanding that budgets existed but not necessarily feeling them harshly in my day-to-day - we always had food, mum was extremely good at cooking nutritious meals from pantry staples and garden vegetables, we went on camping vacations as a family every year rather than international vacations (with two exceptions when my parents had access to accommodations from friends/family), and i had a good relationship with the “teddy bear jar” where we stored all the coins we picked up from the ground, regularly tipping it out to neatly organize the coins into their various piles and roll them to take to the bank for deposits.
i worked casually in high school at the local children’s theatre, but my parents’ primary concern was that i get good grades and then apply for as many scholarships as i could find. i ended up funding my first degree entirely through scholarships thanks to both high grades and a lot of volunteer/student leadership hours. my parents had made use of government RESP and investment matching from employers from the time i was born, so that money funded my master’s degree. i worked during both of my degrees to offset living costs. i ended up in the very unique position of being a millennial with two university degrees and no student debt, which has been extremely beneficial and also has created an-at-times-unhelpful fear of any debt other than my current mortgage (which has played out in my biz by me never taking on any loans/investors and only accruing credit card debt that i can pay off within the month it’s on my statement).
during university, i ran in anti-capitalist/queer/anarchist circles where the overall mentality was very much “eat the rich”, and the loudest voices were frequently (like me) white citizens coming from middle class families and who usually had the option of parents/family members helping out in any real emergency. the ramen noodle diet and thrift store clothing was more aesthetic/ethos than actual necessity. and while we meant well, the nuance of what true access to money could mean - for ourselves, for our movements, for our communities - was never as clear as the message that if you had that access, you were a sell-out and/or somehow to blame for all the world’s ills. “money = bad person” was the message we were given, usually implicitly and frequently explicitly.
fast forward to early full-time #bosswitch days, when i was constantly trying to make my work as accessible as possible and as a result ended up just being in constant scarcity mode myself. my birthday gift would include my parents paying for willow’s annual vet visit, sunday suppers at their place would involve lots of leftovers so i could eat good nutrition for part of the following week, and i freaked out over every unexpected bill because i didn’t have any buffer to deal with them. and also, my fledgling biz still managed to make my day-to-day feel luxurious because i’d come from below-living-wage paychecks every year since leaving university and joining non-profits for the workforce anyway, and at least running my own biz meant i had more control over my days. having no savings or emergency buffer was normal, because i was living tight paycheck to paycheck while working 9-to-5 jobs for years. occasionally i’d live with roommates, and by the time i was running my biz full-time, i’d been paying all the bills without splitting costs with another person for about three years. very much my dad’s kid, i preferred being in the position to hustle as i needed when money needs would appear rather than be reliant on a static paycheque that never gave me the chance to move the needle forward.
eventually i finally came to terms with the lesson i’d been told for the better part of a decade - you can’t fill others’ cups if your own is empty. it’s similar to the ethos of “put your own oxygen mask on first” - you’ll be exponentially more useful and of service to others around you if you have your basic needs met. one of the most insidious tools of capitalism (and all the -isms, really) is that it keeps us focused on barely surviving off scraps and constantly exhausted from just trying to find the next thing we need. it’s much harder to overthrow a system or fuck with it as a collective when you’re busy worrying about the next bill or the next meal. imagine if you had enough consistent access to what you need and so you instead had energy and mental/emotional space for getting involved with your community. if you were able to look at everything from a place of abundance rather than scarcity, and so you could come up with innovative solutions to problems because you can see a fuller, brighter picture. if each new situation felt like an opportunity for growth rather than a chore or punishment.
let’s not forget the nuance here. there is privilege in getting to this stage, including mental health status at any given moment. i’m reminded of the meme “maybe you manifested it, maybe it’s white privilege”, and that is definitely a general factor to keep in mind. mind over matter isn’t exactly the solution when we’re talking about systemic oppressions.
and also.
there is deep terrifyingly rich power in refusing to play their game. in choosing to adjust your mindset, in refusing to give up. money is not inherently evil. access to it will give you more or less ability to take advantage of your inherent values, yes, but more money does not automatically guarantee someone will do shitty things. imagine if the people we admired most were given $100 million. chances are they would make some aspects of their personal lives/dear ones’ lives a little easier, yes. and chances also are that they’d invest the vast majority of that money into the causes they already fight for. money is a tool, and tools work the way we choose to wield them.
this is ongoing work with a lot of nuance and a lot more complexity/evolving personal opinions than a blog post will ever do justice. so i’ll leave you with some of my personal favourite tools that have helped me, in various ways, to adjust my money mindset over the years:
we should all be millionaires by rachel rodgers
overcoming underearning by barbara stanny
you can check out the ongoing initiatives that my business invests in (through money, time, and resources) here. if you’re ready to step into your own #bosswitch boots and create your dream life with confidence, join me in the creative coven online design course! this self-paced program will take you from casting on and writing your first pattern to running a long-term sustainable and supportive creative biz with knitwear design. with pre-recorded videos that you can return to whenever you need, to 24/7 access to my favourite tools and resources for running your online biz, you’ll be able to take the pattern ideas in your head and put them out into the world AND make money while you do it. check it out here. if you’re not sure if you’ve got the creative confidence yet, try out the creative coven challenge in the creative coven community to see just how many ideas are waiting to pour out of you. not sure if this whole fibre witch thing is even your cup of whiskey? take the free fibre witch quiz to double check.