Mitch: In the agrarian society, you watched your crops grow, you watched your pigs get fatter, you put your product in the truck, you took it to the elevator, and you sold it.
Dick: Right, and you had some notion that it would renew and replenish.
Mitch: Right. Today, we’re missing all that experience then.
Dick: We’re missing that experience, but it’s also not in the nature of money to renew and replenish in the same sense that our crops or our fish in the sea did, or our resources, our coal, our oil—or what have you. That we’re asking this thing that nobody understands—this force—to take care of literally billions of people. It’s just humankind’s way of interlocking itself to provide what people need. Does it work all the time? No. Sometimes we go through pretty tough periods where money’s reliability is definitely in doubt.
Mitch: Maybe under this underlying terror that you are describing about money is the fact that we don’t understand how it works and can’t apply those same rules to money like we do the land, the law of sowing and reaping, the harvest, etc.
Dick: We can use them metaphorically, but I don’t know that we can believe that they’ll work for us in the same way. I think the best metaphors around money are all biologically based. The mechanical metaphors around money—what we’re most used to—are actually not as useful to us as the agricultural-type metaphors.
Mitch: I guess it’s awfully hard to use a metaphor like sowing and reaping, when, say, someone who has been an airline pilot or an airline flight attendant for 30 years and thought they were going to get a pension of X and [it] ends up being X divided by 60%. We began to realize that it doesn’t work the same. Money doesn’t work the same in our world as it does out in the farm field.
Dick: Well, the farm field tends not to betray you on purpose. Sometimes the floods come and sometimes a tornado will come through, but that’s part of the deal. It’s not the same thing as somebody having lied to you for 30 years.
Mitch: It’s interesting. I recently had a conversation with a gentleman whose wife had left him for another guy. The marriage, the family and everything was in absolute turmoil. I said, “Well, how are you doing?” I was just trying to delve into his mental state. He said, “Well, I’m doing fine. I got the money.” I almost fell over.
Dick: It doesn’t keep you warm at night. [laughs]
Mitch: Yes. We live in a world where this is how a lot of people think. Maybe it’s because there’s all this insecurity and fear around money. That here he is in this incredible crisis of life, personally, and the first thing on his checklist was to get the money.
Dick: Interesting.
Mitch: Does that tell us something about our culture?
Dick: Well, I think it certainly tells us something about this guy. I think this guy lives in a culture that says that if you have the money, you’ll be all right. I’m guessing he was pretty shook up and just didn’t really want to talk about the other stuff either.
Mitch: Yes, right. Our dialogue today is called, “It’s Not About the Money,” and it opens up a lot of areas, doesn’t it? Everyone wants money. Most people, I’m safe in saying, think they want more money. Yet, in fact, the money always seems to represent something else to us. One of the statements you’ve made is that if it’s not about the money, it’s about how you live your life. Can you explain that to us?
Dick: Money is just a tool enabling us to access the goods and services we need to live our lives, but it’s not a substitute for a life. If money becomes a substitute for your life, then it really is your life—and money doesn’t tend to do that “life” stuff very well. It doesn’t tend to provide, and you can do some awfully silly and stupid things with money—and people do.
On your death day, you will not go to St. Peter and say, “I had enough money.” It won’t make any difference to you at that point. If you deal with the money appropriately, it will be in balance. You will spend enough time on it to not do anything stupid, and you will not have wasted your precious time on Earth with what money demands of you—except to do what you must.
Mitch Anthony is the creator of Life-Centered Planning, the author of 12 books for advisors, and the co-founder of ROLadvisor.com and LifeCentered Planners.com.