Some of Your Money Beliefs Started Before You Were Born

How the scarcity mindset of my ancestors shaped my life

I never expected to write about money.

But the more I looked at my relationship with it, the more I realized something strange.

Some of my beliefs about money didn’t start with me.

They started long before I was born.

The Beliefs That Came Before Me

Growing up, I never believed the idea that you would work for one company your entire life. That world was already fading by the time I entered college and started looking for my first job.

What I didn’t realize was that even though the world was changing, I had already absorbed something much deeper.

My parents’ beliefs about money.

I was raised with what people now call a scarcity mindset.

At the time it was just normal life.

There were starving children in China, so you cleaned your plate. My mother made most of my school clothes until I was nine. My mom was called “Auntie Generic” because our pantry was filled with store brand groceries. Coupons were gold in my house.

We never went out to eat. Everything was homemade.

Money was never a joke.

My dad even worked extra hours just to rent the flute I was learning to play and pay for my lessons. I didn’t know that at the time. I only understand it now.

The message was simple.

You worked hard.

You never got ahead.

Wealthy people were not to be trusted. They stepped on everyday workers to get ahead.

My parents were born during the Depression. My grandparents lived through it as adults. The stories of that time were everywhere in my family. There are even stories that my grandparents lived in a boxcar for a while because they couldn’t afford housing.

Hard times weren’t theory in my family.

They were memory.

“We are shaped by every place we have been.”
— Maya Angelou

The Life I Built on Those Beliefs

I was taught to work hard. I was the first and only person in my family to attend college and graduate. That education was supposed to be the ticket out of scarcity.

But it wasn’t.

Somewhere inside me was the belief that life was not supposed to be easier.

If you earned money, you paid for it with suffering.

Without realizing it, I would place myself in situations where work meant enduring the abuse of supervisors. I worked long hours at whatever job I found myself in. Enjoyment was something that belonged in my free time.

Dreams were hobbies.

Things you loved were things you did quietly on the side. They were never supposed to make you money.

All of this was invisible to me at the time.

When Fear Showed Up

Then my life changed.

I found myself off the traditional work grid but still responsible for bills and a mortgage. My savings started disappearing faster than I expected.

Every time I thought about money, fear flooded my body.

It wasn’t mild concern.

It was fear down to my bones. My muscles would freeze with stress.

When I felt that fear, I made desperate choices. I wanted someone to hand me the golden plan that would fix everything. A map I could follow without risk.

But life doesn’t work that way.

So I did what I have always done when I don’t understand something.

I started reading.

I read the wealth building books. The abundance books. I tried the exercises and the mindset shifts.

None of it worked.

Eventually I realized why.

All of those strategies were sitting on top of beliefs I had never questioned.

One word kept echoing in my mind.

Scarcity.

Tracing Scarcity Backward

I realized I had believed in scarcity my entire life. That belief quietly shaped how I saw money, work, and even my dreams.

I believed that following my passions would leave me penniless. I believed real money could only come from a job. I believed there was never quite enough.

When I traced those beliefs back, they didn’t start with me.

They started generations earlier.

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
— Gustav Mahler

I don’t come from money people.

I come from farmers.

Farmers who worked the land year after year and rarely had much beyond the necessities. Money was hard earned and easily lost. Frugality wasn’t a philosophy.

It was survival.

For a long time I interpreted that inheritance as limitation.

What My Ancestors Actually Taught Me

Then I started thinking about what it actually means to be a farmer.

Farmers live with uncertainty almost every day of their lives.

They never know what the weather will do. Crops might flourish one year and fail the next. A storm or drought can wipe out months of work.

And yet they plant again.

They face uncertainty over and over.

When I saw it that way, something inside me shifted.

The people I come from are not small.

They are courageous.

They lived their entire lives facing uncertainty and kept going anyway.

For the first time I felt proud to be descended from them.

For years I had quietly pushed my ancestors into a mental closet, as if their struggles had nothing to do with me.

Now I see something different.

Their resilience lives in me too.

“The greatest inheritance we can give our children is roots and wings.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Learning to Face Uncertainty

I am still working with my beliefs around scarcity and abundance. That work is not finished.

But when fear around money shows up now, I remember something important.

I come from people who faced uncertainty their entire lives.

And if they could face it…

So can I.

Some inherit scarcity.

I inherited courage.