The Little Book of Zen Money

A Simple Path to Financial Peace of Mind

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• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781119859697
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Finance

At last, a mindful book about money that anyone can appreciate and understand

The Little Book of Zen Money: A Simple Path to Financial Peace of Mind delivers easy-to-follow steps for combining sensible saving strategies with mindfulness practices to achieving financial peace of mind. Finally, you can know how to fix your finances without feeling stressed out!

In this book, you'll find out that sound financial strategy is far more straightforward than the financial industry wants you to think. It reveals the path to mindful money simplicity, showing readers how to adopt behaviors that encourage responsible saving and spending.

You'll learn about:

• How to journal your spending and saving so you keep track of the money you have coming in and going out
• Easy mindfulness exercises, mantras, and meditations that keep you centered, rational, and calm when it comes to your money
• Simple explanations of the financial industry and how to invest responsibly that anyone can understand

Perfect for anyone who doesn't usually like books about money (or the complicated jargon they're often filled with), The Little Book of Zen Money proves that you don't need to be an expert, professional, or mathematician to get great financial advice.

Chapter One
Zen and the Art of Money Management

No Judgement

Your money problems are not your fault. I know they can feel like your fault (“Who else spent the money?” you may want to ask), but you can't blame yourself if you don't understand something you have never been taught. Your uncertainty is understandable.

Engage honestly with how you feel about money, but don't talk yourself down unnecessarily.

Equally, while we learn more about how money can be wasted on expensive items, there is nothing wrong with buying things we enjoy. There is nothing wrong with taking delight in something truly beautiful, whether it is cheap or expensive.

No one here is judging you.

First, I literally can't see you. And second, judging doesn't help or inform anything. I have been where you are. I didn't enjoy being judged then, and it didn't help me. And it was mainly me doing the judging.

So don't judge yourself either. Any regrets you have about the past are at best pointless, and at worst turn into shame and denial that could block your path to peace of mind.

If we have never learnt to use a complex or powerful tool correctly, we know we shouldn't touch it. If we do try to use it, we don't generally blame ourselves for getting it wrong. Someone else who should have known better, or kept us away from it, generally gets the blame.

If we want to manage the money in our lives better, we need to understand this and believe it fully: money is just a tool.

By seeing money as it really is, we can downplay how much we think it makes us happy, or how much we think it makes us stressed, and have more of it to use for the things it really can do.

Being mindful about money, and our reactions to it, and not judging either, can enable us to be more mindful in our use of it, and manage it more effectively.

Judging ourselves, or imagining others judging us, has no place here. It won't help, and it will only add to our stress.

Zen Exercise 3

Do you know how you feel about money?

We may need to change some deep feelings we have about money, like shame or a fear of being judged, which if we don't address them, will hinder our progress along the path.

So, it is worth taking at least a few minutes to play a little exercise with our thoughts and emotions around money.

If you haven't done a free‐writing sprint before, here are the rules: there aren't any. There are no rules, no right or wrong answers. You can give yourself a time limit (five minutes is good: long enough to write something, short enough to create some time pressure), but you can stop early or you can over‐run. You can scribble fast, you can draw diagrams, you can loop arrows from one piece of text to another. As free as you like.

Easy, right? It should be fun too.

Write down on the left‐hand side of a piece of paper “Rich” and “Poor” on the right, and then free associate around them. You can do this by writing quickly, if you like, without thinking too hard, and scribble, doodle, think on paper all around them. Then think about what you've written.

Or you can think about how the words make you feel, the physical sensations you have when looking at those words. How do your emotions react to them? They may be different if you imagine those words being about you rather than other people. “Rich me” and “Poor me” may evoke very different feelings from “Rich them” and “Poor them”. Once you've felt that, write those down.

There are no points or answers here. Your answers are neither right nor wrong, better or worse than anyone else's. They just are. Look at them and acknowledge them, without arguing with them or reinforcing them. Now that you know they're there, just let them be.

The hardest enemies to fight are invisible ones. Just making them visible may remove the need for fighting. They may not need to be fought at all. They may not even exist.

Money Stress

The Playground

When you walk onto a trading floor, your brain may not recognise it as being the playground of your youth, but the emotions swirling in your gut will. There are no swings or chalk‐marks on the floor, but the other threatening elements are there. People. Competitive people. Competitive people with minimal rules or supervision.

Cliques and gangs, bullies and the bullied, but all now occupying desks crammed with flashing screens, using language you don't understand, using it as code to keep themselves in and you out. Your stomach tightens an inch or two just imagining it on your way into work, wishing you were back on the two‐week holiday that you paid for with the other 50 weeks of work.

But even if you never work on a trading floor – and wisely don't want to – the world of finance and investing brings that anxiety‐inducing atmosphere to you, wherever you are.

The guy talking, no shouting, about investments on TV knows no doubt. He is always right, he says, if not in words, then in his posture. Another man who is also always right in his own head disagrees with him. As if this weren't enough noise, letters failing to form words are followed by numbers to two decimal places, and they march right‐to‐left across the bottom of your screen. It is supposed to make the boring seem exciting, so you watch more, but it only makes the unknown more nerve‐wracking. There's no escaping the tension.

You seek answers and perhaps a little solace online – as though that has ever worked – but because the playground posturing can't be physically seen, it happens in words instead. In ALL CAPS. Perhaps every tweet or post by a “fin‐bro” could be summarised: “Everyone not doing what I'm doing is stupid!”

And of course, you're not doing what he's doing. So you feel stupid. And stressed.

There are so many things to do. So many things to know. It feels as though it would be impossible to know them all, and that the noise would distract you from even some of them. Who can tell you where to start?

“It's ok,” says the reassuringly upper class and well‐dressed man, who represents a renowned global financial institution. “I can take care of all of that for you,” before presenting you with a stack of documents you need to read and sign, confirming that you have fully read and understood them, for which you would need the law degree you don't have.

“Of course he can take care of all of it for you,” says your friend who knows about everything. “He's going to earn massive fees off you, directing you into products he makes more from than you do. You should do it all yourself.”

You have come right back to the beginning, and the strands of stress have tangled into a knot in your stomach so fully formed it has a voice, and it says to you: “maybe I could just forget about this.”

The Fairytale Trove

You step into the spangly warmth of the department store and are immediately welcomed by the lady who looks like your trendy unmarried aunt, who always had the latest clothes and best life.

Everything here sparkles, like a fairytale treasure trove. The cosmetics counters glow, the skincare displays gleam. You aren't supposed to know this, but it is because the lights have been set just so, bright mini‐spots hidden out of view that make everything look as though it is on stage, on TV, on screen. Not real life. Better than real life.

Of course, we may already have seen these images in advertising sandwiched between, above, below or around the other content we want, featuring our favourite celebrity who wears the thing sold right there that makes her appear so perfect and so certain. Unlike our lives, the only ones we experience from inside, feeling all the doubts and problems.

Everything here is designed to make you want it. Everything you see, hear, smell, touch, and even taste, including the free samples in the food department, is designed to pull at the senses that connect directly to your emotions to make you feel it will make your life better. And yes, feel, not think, because this is all about emotions not cognitive thought.

“Designed” is the word too. None of this is left to chance. Psychologists have worked on every aspect of how we spend money to get more of it from us at every opportunity. If making a profit this year means making your emotions false promises, then so be it.

We all know from repeated experience that none of the things for sale in this shop will make our lives better for any extended period of time. If they did, and our lives are already better as a result, we wouldn't be back here, at this crack‐den of consumption.

The buzz we get from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Zen and the Art of Money Management
• Chapter Two: The Path Is a MISSION
• Chapter Three: The Path Is Practice
• End User License Agreement