If you’ve lost it all, how can you think you have the power to keep money safe, let alone make it grow?
When I was about eight, my mother gave me ten dollars to go to the bakery to buy bread. My grandparents and cousins were all coming to lunch, and this was a big deal. It was the first time that I got to go all the way by myself—down the block, to the right, then across the street all by myself, and down one more block to the corner. I’d been that way a million times, but never all by myself. And ten dollars! It was an enormous amount of money. Mom told me how much the bread would probably cost and told me to keep the change in my pocket. There was all this trust in me, all this responsibility.
And what did I do? Lost it, the ten-dollar bill. When I got to the bakery: no money in my pocket. I had no idea what could have happened to it, no idea. I was late getting home; I looked everywhere. My grandparents and cousins were already there when I got back; everyone was in the kitchen; there was the
noise of everybody talking. “Where’s the bread, Anjy?” my mom said, and I had to say I lost the money. The room grew so quiet. Nobody said anything; they were all just looking at me. I didn’t get punished or anything. I think everyone knew how
bad I felt, and there wasn’t anything anyone could do. We had our lunch with the bread basket on the table but without the bread.
When he and his wife, Leslie, came to see me, Anjy said, “I was so overwhelmed by that loss, I think I never wanted to be in control of my money after that.” Leslie had never heard his story before, and even Anjy had forgotten about it until we did this exercise together. But after Andy told the story, everything started to make more sense for both of them. They had come to me to talk about investing for the future, but the two of them could never agree on the kinds of investments they should make. Most of these disagreements ended up with one or the other of them storming out of the room, to the point where they decided they needed professional help. Leslie wanted to invest aggressively; in their early forties they were young enough, she felt, to take some risks. Anjy, on the other hand, was adamant about putting the money into a bank account, where, he said, “it’ll be safe.” He never understood why investing scared him to death until he made this connection to his past.