Financial Patterns in the New Year

The subject of money has been hidden, not talked about, or flat out excluded from family discussions since the Stone Ages.  Traditionally, fathers brought in money and mothers made sure there was food on the table.  It’s been something of a mystery for each one of us to figure out for ourselves.

Times have changed.  Money patterns, perhaps not so much.  Your financial patterns may have originated generations ago as a result of a need to survive or the ability to thrive.  The way that your predecessors reacted to money may affected you without you even knowing it.  

A quick way to notice the financial patterns in your own life is to write down what you think about money, what you tell yourself about money, what it is allowed or not allowed to mean in your world, and where that comes from.  

In Jennifer’s family, there is a pattern of feast and famine.  Sometimes money comes and sometimes it goes.  In her family circle, that is just the way money is.  Jack, on the other hand, believes that education is far more important than money, while Jim grew up with savings books and envelopes.  Let’s look at each one.

Jennifer comes from a line in which money was made and then lost in the Great Depression.  That began a pattern of win and lose that they have never quite escaped.  Jack comes from a family with multiple highly educated members who frown upon wealth and celebrate education.  Jim’s father and mother taught him from very young to separate his money out into different places.  Some to save, some to spend, and some to invest.

In each case, you can see quite clearly that either an event or a family pattern has impacted the way that each current member of the family system acts and interacts with money.  The outcome of each seems somewhat predictable until these latest members begin to examine the financial patterns they have inherited and decides to do something quite different.  

By identifying the pattern in play and exploring it for both its gifts and limitations, they are free to choose what they will take with them and what they will set down with gratitude – acknowledging that both have a place and source of wisdom upon which to base their own new financial patterns.

We are at the beginning of a new year.  This is a great time to examine your system’s Money DNA and to choose whether you will repeat the patterns in play or change them for something different.  Go back to those things you wrote down earlier and see if you can see if you can spot a new pattern that is trying to emerge through you.  Perhaps you are the new wealth in the family, perhaps for the first time finances will be discussed in your immediate family circle, and money, too, will be allowed to take a happier place in your family system.