You’re bad at money (but so is nearly everyone)

The one question that can change that

What if you could hand your younger self a slim, well-written book about how to get good with money? How might it have changed some of your life choices or stress levels?

We’ve written that book. The one that you could give to someone just starting their career, or to someone who has worried about money for so long they can’t imagine it any other way. It’s called Never Worry About Money Again, and it’s available for pre-order today. Here’s a sneak peek at the intro, written by our founder Jesse:

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My wake-up call was a fifty-cent doughnut.

When my wife Julie and I were expecting our first baby, we worried about money constantly. I was two years from finishing my accounting degree. Julie worked as an entry-level social worker. We rented a three-hundred-square-foot basement apartment and rode the city bus everywhere.

Despite our tiny income, we had big goals: Get through school debt-free and buy a car before the baby arrived. So we saved aggressively and spent almost nothing. The plan was working (sort of). Whenever money felt especially hard, I told myself we’d stop worrying once we were earning more. But I was so wrong.

It took me a long time to realize that money wasn’t stressful because we didn’t earn enough.

It was stressful because I was bad at money.

Yes, it’s ironic. I was an accounting major. Being good at money was the one thing I was supposed to get right. And I thought we were doing great. Julie and I were checking every box of financial responsibility. Despite all that belt tightening and goal setting, I hadn’t noticed I was actually getting money all wrong.

I finally saw it one morning on my way to class when I stopped at a bakery window and couldn’t bear to buy a fifty-cent doughnut. Of course I could afford a doughnut. But I’d convinced myself I couldn’t because I believed there were too many other things our money should be doing. That tiny moment of deprivation cracked something open in me.

Standing at that window, I wasn’t just disappointed to be skipping the doughnut. I resented being denied such a small thing.

It made me second-guess whether we could afford to have the baby, or the car we were saving for, or the sweater I’d gotten Julie for her birthday. One fifty-cent decision cascaded into an avalanche of doubt. If I couldn’t feel good about spending fifty cents, what income would ever be enough?

That’s when I saw it: Earning more was never going to fix this.

The worry would follow us, no matter what we earned, until we understood what our money was actually for. Money was a burden because we treated it as if it wasn’t ours. We had no say in what it did, so there was a constant gap between what we thought our money should be doing and what we actually wanted.

Closing that gap is the whole game. And it’s simpler than you think.

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Why So Many of Us Worry About Money

You probably fall somewhere between a college student in a basement apartment and a well-paid professional. You earn enough money, whatever that looks like for you. But you picked up this book because you still worry about it.

You’re not alone. Money stress disrupts areas of our lives that seemingly have nothing to do with it. You’re more annoyed with your partner. It’s hard to focus at work. Holidays feel daunting. Even your sleep suffers. This constant worry becomes so normalized that you stop questioning whether it has to be this way.

It doesn’t.

But here’s the thing most people miss. The reason you worry about money isn’t that you don’t earn enough. If that were true, nearly half of six-figure earners wouldn’t still be living paycheck to paycheck, and your worry would have decreased the last time you got a raise.

You worry about money because you’re bad at money. And it’s not your fault. Being good at money is a skill we rarely see done well, so most of us piece together our money habits from whatever we observed growing up: usually some combination of stress, silence, and bad examples. Those patterns keep us stuck in a state of survival, where everything feels like it’s happening to us.

But there’s another state, where money’s purpose in your life is clear. You spend with agency and your money does exactly what you want it to do. This is where you’re good at money and finally stop worrying about it. And getting there requires changing two things: how you see money and how you spend money.

How You See Money

Do you see money as that dollar in your pocket? That card in your phone’s digital wallet? Most people see money as a thing: a tool, a number, a necessary evil to be managed. If you want to get good at money, you must see money as you.

Every dollar you have represents the time, energy, and effort you put into earning it. How we care for our money is how we care for ourselves. It’s as precious and important to our lives as our health and our relationships.

Understanding this unlocks a vital truth: Because your money is you, it is also yours. You get to decide what to do with it. And when you deeply understand that money is you, you understand its true purpose: It is meant to be spent, as an expression of you.

That might sound counterintuitive. We’ve been told our whole lives to stop spending, to save more, to tighten our belts. But spending is money’s only purpose. It’s why you earn money. It’s why you have money. Every money decision you make, from groceries to retirement investing to paying off debt, is a spending decision. Getting good at money means getting good at spending it.

How You Spend Money

All of this comes back to a single question that will bring total clarity to how you see and spend your money: What’s it for?

When you ask that question—really ask it, every time money enters your life—something shifts. You stop operating on autopilot. You stop spending from guilt or anxiety or habit. Instead, you decide, deliberately, what your money will do for you. In ways large and small, you choose how you want to spend, which means you choose how you want to live.

The Question is deceptively simple. Your answers will fall into a handful of categories that capture every single one of your spending priorities. This book will walk you through each one. Part 1 will change how you see money. Part 2 will show you how to spend it: with clarity, confidence, and zero worry.

You don’t need to be a spreadsheet person or a numbers person. You don’t need an accounting degree (I have one, and it didn’t make me good at money). You just have to ask yourself a three-word question and be honest about the answer.

Let’s find out what your money is for.

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If you enjoyed this excerpt from Never Worry About Money Again, you can pre-order your copy here:

If you pre-order the book now, you’ll receive an exclusive bonus chapter and an invitation to our LIVE virtual launch party, where we’ll do a Q+A with Jesse and, of course, give away plenty of merch.

Until next time, booklovers,

Dan