Josip Sesar

A financial planner for the same reason that brings many people—she didn’t want to deal with her money. Her earliest memories about money helped explain why. She had learned that what money buys is nothing compared to what it takes away.
It would have been the very end of first grade. My father said, “How would you like to go live on the Great Lakes?” I didn’t even know what great lakes meant, but I said no, I wanted to stay in Virginia, where we were. He said too bad, we’re moving anyway, but that it would be great because we’d have more money. The moving truck came and that was that. All my friends were waving from the driveway, and I remember just sobbing and sobbing as we drove away. My father kept getting promoted, so we had to move every year, sometimes twice a yearand the reason was always more money. It was so hard in the new schools. My clothes were never right, and kids would laugh at my accent, whatever it was that year. The teachers would teach the subjects in all different ways—old math in one school, new math in another. Plus I had to make new friends each time; by the time I’d made them, it was time to go. It was hard on my mom, too. By about the tenth move, she stopped unpacking half the dishes—what was the point?
They’d just have to be packed up again.
Most of us leave a cluttered paper trail marking where our money went behind us, but she was unlike any other client I’d ever had. She had no debt. She rented a furnished house: no mortgage. She leased her car. She had no savings, no investments. Divorced, with one son, she had come to see me about putting aside money for his education. I saw a woman alone with no money for emergencies, or tomorrow. I could have said to her, “Now, she, see here, you are forty-three years old and you really must start investing for the future.” But clearly she knew that, and clearly knowing it made no difference at all to her, at least on the level that inspires us to take action. She was still living as if she might have to move the next day—no commitments, no ties, no furniture, no complications to undo if she suddenly had to pull up stakes. She had turned her childhood message around and had come to believe instead that to keep away from pain, you keep away from money.