How to Stop Chasing Money
What Les Miserables reveals about personal finance in America
One of the challenges of being a parent is trying to operate with split attention: you want to be present for your kids but also, dinner’s running late… and is the homework done? You’ve literally got multiple burners going at the same time.
Last night as I was putting my eight-year-old daughter to bed, I was stressing about the kitchen cleanup I still had left. But she wanted to pull me into her current obsession: the original cast recording of Les Miserables.
Sitting up with a flashlight, reading the liner notes for the double-CD (as one does), she grilled me hard: what happened to Cosette’s mother? Why did Inspector Javert chase Jean Valjean for 20 years over a loaf of bread? These are difficult but important musical theater questions. 🙏 But mentally, I was already out of the room.
It turns out that being an American worker often means wrestling with much heavier distractions.
In 2022, 57% of U.S. employees reported feeling financial stress at work. What’s more, over half of those employees spent 3+ hours each week dealing with personal money issues during office hours.
One patently obvious solution is for people to be paid a living wage. But, there is a very large swath of workers for whom the problem isn’t just income. Consider that 40% of Americans earning more than $100,000 are currently living paycheck-to-paycheck. This kind of stress makes it so hard to be mentally in the room—at work or at home.
Sure, being financially responsible is important, but that’s just the minimum. Let’s set the bar higher.
The real goal isn’t just to stop stressing about money, it’s to stop chasing it.
There’s a big difference between earning more and actually knowing where your money is going. One is an endless sprint and the other is an intentional practice.
Think about what it would feel like to open your bank app and actually feel calm.
To make a purchase without any guilt following you around afterward.
To know, without obsessively calculating, that your essentials are covered, your priorities are funded, and the money left over is genuinely yours to enjoy.
Many people fantasize that feeling calm about your financial situation is only possible when you’re earning 10x what you have now. However, it’s possible to feel better about money today by getting off the treadmill of “just make more money,” and paying attention to where your money is actually going. Only then can you decide, on purpose, where you want it to go instead.
You don’t want to just be chasing that bread for 20 years without a raison d’être.
YNAB has been helping people get off that treadmill for over 20 years, because we believe your money should work for you, not the other way around.
I’d love to hear from you:
Was there a moment when you stopped feeling like you had to chase money and started feeling more at peace with it? What changed?
Until next time,
Dan
Unfortunately, my thought goes WAY back -- to the late 1980s? I was a couple years out of college in a steady job with steady, mostly predictable income, and I was spending freely. I came across a show on the radio, How to Manage Your Money with Larry Burkett that literally changed my life. I soon understood that I would be better off if I knew where I was spending my money so I could be intentional about future spending. I went back to my checkbook and laboriously wrote down all of my spending for the prior six months. As a single guy, I discovered I was spending $300 each month (in 1980s dollars, mind you) that I could not account for. I began tracking spending on columnar paper, then was later thrilled to be able to use spreadsheet software in the 90's. When Quicken came along, I thought it could not get any better, but they and their product lost their way after 15 years, so I found my way to YNAB.
Having money available for a need is freeing from anxiety. Getting to that place can be a marathon, but ever 26.2 miles is attainable over time, one step at a time.
Honestly, my money stress pretty much evaporated about 5 years ago after a year of using YNAB. It’s not completely absent but the stress that remains is more about the hard choices around what I value and want to fund and not about how am I going to pay the bills. Over that 6 years I went slowly from paycheck to paycheck life with some serious credit card debt to being debt free (except my mortgage) and a month ahead. I never have to think about my bank account balance. When I recently split with my partner YNAB helped me figure out my new reality with confidence. Just try it. You can absolutely change your life.