Welcome, Living Money members. Its Jeremy here to introduce this month’s topic which is about money and me and money and you. In other words, our relationship with money.

Its also December and Christmas time, so let me take the opportunity to wish everyone a very happy Christmas and a happy and wealthy (see Sep17!) new year.

So, what do you make of Christmas? Is it a time for family, renewal, rejoicing? Or is it a time of strain, anxiety even loneliness?

And what about money? Personally, I never cease to be amazed at the irony of celebrating the birth of a baby to a family in such poverty that they had to make do with a stable and a manger by going on the biggest spending spree of the year, a spending spree that starts months before Christmas and is fuelled by tremendous consumer and commercial pressures.

How do you deal with this pressure? Do you rejoice in it, and give yourself permission to see Christmas as a time to get away from the long autumn grind that started after the August Bank Holiday and the dreary winter weather.

Or do you do your best to ignore the pressures and risk being called a Scrooge?

How do you deal with the endless calls on your charity, often from organisations you know little about and from causes that are not part of your agenda?

And how do you deal with January’s bank and credit card statements? Are you feeling guilty because you realise that maybe you could (or should) have spent a bit more on your family and friends, or do you get on a terrible post Christmas downer as you realise how much you have overspent?

Or maybe, just maybe, you got it just right. You are at peace with yourself, feeling that the money you spent was driven solely by the love you felt for your family and friends and by a sound understanding of your financial position.

The answer lies in our relationship with money and Christmas, because of the pressures, is a time when that relationship is tested, often to the limit.

I mentioned Lynn Twist’s book The Soul of Money in September’s post. In the first paragraph of her introduction Twist describes the book – which is about our relationship with money – as a route to finding a new freedom, truth and joy in our relationship with money. She goes on to call it the pathway to personal and financial freedom.

As I said before, I found that so powerful that I adapted the phrase as my tag line, in spite of the debasement of the word ‘freedom’ by the financial services industry.

And this begs the question, what do we mean by our relationship with money?

Cut to 13 July 2004 and my first meeting with George Kinder. With a handful of other far sighted financial planners we attended his first workshop held in the UK. It was at this workshop that I first started to appreciate there is a far greater depth to money than the shallow numbers game that, personally and professionally, I had previously ascribed to money.

Imagine that money is a member of your household, a fellow human being with whom you have contact every day. As with other human relationships, our relationship with money is founded in our emotions, in our love or dislike of money, in how much or how little we see of money, whether we want more of it, or are content with what we have.

And as with our relationship with our fellow human beings, the more mature our relationship with them, the better the relationship.

Which brings me back to George Kinder. The title of his workshop was the Seven Stages of Money Maturity, based on his book of the same name which is subtitled ‘Understanding the spirit and value of money in your life’. Kinder believes that, rather like children growing into adults then moving into old age, there is a scale of money maturity with a childhood innocence at one end and an adult wisdom at the other end.

Our money maturity increases as we learn to deal with the pain around money. Indeed in between the two extremes is ‘Understanding’, where we begin to see that pushing away the pain we often feel around money does little good. However, walking into the fire and being at ease with the pain provides the route to dealing with it.

Now we are going to spend much of our time in this community dealing with our relationship with money, and this is  just a brief introduction. There are not that many authorities in this field. However, we will explore writers such as Kinder, Twist and Needleman who all provide deep insights into our relationship with money.

However, I believe that the best route to wisdom is through our your stories and my stories. We have much to learn from each other and the sharing of our experiences to develop wisdom is one of the prime purposes of this community.

I’ve provided just one short and easy exercise for you to do this month, which is all about assessing your current levels of money maturity. It will only take you a couple of minutes to complete it and should provide you with some useful insights, which you can explore through the usual self-reflection

There is one short video to watch, a five minute TED talk by Tania Luna called ‘How a penny made me feel like a millionaire’. It doesn’t need any explanation from me. Just watch it.

I’ve also given some more details of Kinder’s book below, and a link to a review of the most important money books around at the moment.

Next month I am going to reflect on the concept of the journey, the journey we have taken so far, and the journey we will take as part of the Living Money community.

Thats it for this month.

Take care and go well.