Rewriting Your Financial DNA with Elizabeth Husserl

Is your relationship with money inherited? What if, when it came to your finances, you mothered yourself? In this episode of About Your Mother, personal finance expert Elizabeth Husserl shares the radical redefinition of wealth that we all need to hear.

Elizabeth is the author of The Power of Enough, which she dedicated to her ancestors and the wisdom they instilled in her.

How Much of What We Learn About Money is Inherited? Redefining Wealth

If you want to change your relationship with money, start with your financial DNA. Understanding your financial story is crucial, including the beliefs that shaped you and the patterns and behaviors you witnessed.

From there, you get to decide what financial beliefs and habits still work for you and which ones are for a different generation.

Elizabeth went through this experience after college when she spent two years working for a nonprofit in Oaxaca, Mexico. After studying economics, she wondered why the people in Oaxaca seemed wealthy even though their resources were considered “scarce.” On the other hand, the United States has so much material wealth, yet people feel poor.

In her book, The Power of Enough, Elizabeth writes about redefining wealth as moments of satisfaction and meaning. This reframe connects the word wealth back to its root meaning, which is well-being. It recognizes that other factors that are non-monetary are responsible for our sense of satisfaction.

With this new definition of wealth, you can free yourself from dependence on money to make you happy.

The Wealth Mandala Exercise

In Sanskrit, the mandala circle is the path to joy. Elizabeth’s wealth mandala exercise builds on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but it recognizes that how you satisfy your needs is unique and personal.

It helps you create your own path to joy. The Wealth Mandala exercise takes the 12 universal needs and asks you to assess how fulfilled (or not fulfilled) you feel by each one.

The 12 universal needs are:

Financial stability
Safety
Physical health
Touch
Leisure
Curiosity
Connection
Belong
Participation
Understanding
Purpose
Freedom

If your needs aren’t represented by this list, you can add them. To create your wealth mandala, you go through each need and assign it a spot on the mandala based on your current level of fulfillment. You’ll discover where you feel abundance and where you feel a lack.

From there, you can evaluate what strategies are working for you and what you need to change. You can create new monetary and non-monetary strategies, but the key is that you don’t need to rely only on monetary strategies to meet your needs.

The wealth mandala is a great framework that gives you a snapshot of how wealthy you feel and what areas of your life need attention.

Redefining Your Relationship With Money

While Elizabeth’s new definition of wealth includes monetary and non-monetary factors, you still need to foster a healthy relationship with money. There’s a severe lack of financial literacy in the United States, and many people have a hard time grasping that money is simply a technology that we use as a medium of exchange.

Elizabeth facilitates difficult but much-needed conversations about money with her clients. She’s noticed that many people talk about money as if it were a person. They argue with it like a teenager argues with their parents. They feel angry at money.

What her clients discover is that their emotional reaction to money is usually linked to unresolved issues from their childhood. It’s helpful to go to therapy with money. Let all of your thoughts and feelings out. You can rant if you need to, or you can sit in a quiet meditation. Either way, it’s important to share your heart.

After you dig into and air out your feelings around money, you can take responsibility for your relationship with money. You’ll uncover how your dynamic with money is hurting your relationship with it.

The next step is to break up with the money patterns that aren’t serving you and write new ones. You and money can have a clean slate.

The Abundance Scarcity Cycle and Embracing Satiation

Another way to redefine your relationship with money is to explore the abundance scarcity cycle. The idea of the abundance mindset was popularized by Stephen Covey in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

With an abundance mindset, you see the glass half full. However, it also forces you to push scarcity away and hold tightly to the idea of abundance, which is not something you can do from a relaxed state of mind.

Instead of clenching your fists around abundance, you should open your hands and trust that you have the necessary resources to feel fulfilled. From there, you can begin to embody wealth. The abundance scarcity cycle is about feeling satiated instead of always trying to call in more.

Elizabeth recommends doing a 30-day journaling exercise to explore the concept of satiation. At the end of every day, simply write down three things that made you feel satisfied, and then close your journal.

At the end of the 30 days, take a week off, and then come back to the journal and read through all of your entries in one sitting. It should only take you 20 minutes to get through all of them, and you’ll start to notice patterns from day to day. You can then create new strategies to practice more of what makes you feel satisfied so you can experience the power of enough.

The Power of Enough is a Human Birthright

Everyone should have the power and agency to experience the power of enough. The more we understand how to create wealth in monetary and non-monetary ways, the more we can take back our power.

When we embrace the power of enough, we break our unhealthy dependency on money. We also break the habit of wasteful spending because we focus on satiation over accumulating more possessions.

You don’t have to wait until retirement to become financially free. You can achieve financial freedom now by telling your money story, having a hard conversation with money, and working through your wealth mandala.