- Tension: Growing up working class creates invisible barriers to wealth that persist even after achieving financial stability.
- Noise: The myth that hard work and intelligence alone determine financial success.
- Direct Message: Your relationship with money was programmed before you understood what programming was.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
I still remember the exact moment I understood my relationship with money was broken. I was sitting across from a colleague at a conference dinner — we’d both been in practice for about the same time, similar client loads, similar rates. She mentioned, casually, that she’d just bought her second rental property. I nodded and smiled while something in my chest went tight. I had maybe three months of expenses saved. We made the same money. We had the same education. But she built things with hers, and I just… maintained.
That dinner haunted me for months. Not because of envy — though there was some of that — but because it forced me to see a pattern I’d been living for decades. I wasn’t broke. I paid my bills, took vacations, bought decent coffee. But I never accumulated anything real. Money came in, money went out, and I stayed exactly where I was, financially speaking, year after year.
The thing is, I worked hard. I was smart enough to get through Reed, through two years at Berkeley, through building a practice from nothing. But there were these invisible scripts running in the background — patterns I’d absorbed growing up in a household where money was always just enough, never abundant. And these patterns had nothing to do with how many hours I worked or how many degrees I had on my wall.
1. You treat financial stability as the ceiling, not the floor
When you grow up working class, stability feels like winning. Your parents worried about keeping the lights on, so when you can pay your bills without checking your bank balance first, you’ve made it. You’ve already exceeded what you grew up with, so why push further?
I see this in myself constantly. Once I hit a certain income level — enough to not worry — my ambition just… evaporated. Not my work ethic, that stayed intact. But the drive to build something beyond basic security? That felt greedy, unnecessary, even dangerous. Like I was tempting fate by wanting more than enough.
The psychology here is fascinating and heartbreaking. We internalize our parents’ financial ceiling as our own, even when our circumstances are completely different. Their relief at making rent becomes our relief at having savings. Their definition of success becomes ours, even when we’re living in a different economic reality entirely.
2. You have a scarcity relationship with abundance
Here’s something I noticed in my practice: clients from working-class backgrounds would get deeply uncomfortable when things were going too well financially. They’d sabotage raises, avoid promotions, find ways to give away or spend sudden windfalls. Not consciously — but the pattern was unmistakable.
When you grow up with scarcity, abundance feels temporary and untrustworthy. You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the universe to correct this obvious mistake. So you might as well spend it now, or give it away, or find some way to return to the familiar state of having just enough but not too much.
I did this with my first real paycheck from private practice. Instead of saving or investing, I immediately paid off every small debt, bought expensive gifts for family members, upgraded everything in my apartment. Within two months, I was back to my baseline — comfortable but not building anything. It felt safer there.
3. You conflate financial complexity with risk
Amos Nadler, a behavioral finance expert, calls it “complexity aversion” — “It’s a bias that we call ‘complexity aversion.’ And it’s the biggest barrier to building wealth for people who are not in markets or who have never invested before.”
This hit me hard. My mother kept all her money in checking and savings accounts. The stock market was for rich people, gambling, or both. Investment properties were how people lost everything. The message was clear: complexity equals danger.
So even with graduate education, even understanding behavioral psychology, I kept my money in the simplest possible arrangements. Checking, savings, maybe a CD if I was feeling adventurous. The idea of investment accounts, index funds, real estate — it all felt like playing with fire. Better to keep things simple and safe, even if simple meant never growing.
4. You mistake movement for progress
Working-class families value hard work above all else. Being busy means you’re doing something right. But there’s a difference between movement and progress, between working hard and building wealth.
I spent years in constant motion — seeing more clients, taking on more responsibilities, always doing more. But I never stopped to build systems that would generate income without my constant effort. Every dollar I made was tied directly to an hour I worked. That’s employment, not wealth building, but it took me decades to see the difference.
5. You have an employee mindset in an ownership economy
When you grow up working class, you learn to be a good employee. Show up on time, work hard, be reliable, and you’ll be okay. Nobody talks about ownership, equity, or building assets. The goal is a steady paycheck, not wealth accumulation.
Even running my own practice, I essentially treated myself as an employee. I paid myself a salary and that was it. I never thought about the practice as an asset to build and potentially sell. I never considered how to make money work for me instead of always working for money. The employee mindset was so deeply embedded that even being self-employed couldn’t shake it.
6. You feel guilty about wanting more
There’s a particular kind of guilt that comes with outearning your parents, especially when you can see them still struggling. How can you think about investment properties when your mother is still working past typical retirement age? How can you want more when you already have more than they ever did?
This guilt becomes a ceiling on your ambition. You make enough to help family, enough to be comfortable, but not so much that you have to confront the growing gap between your life and theirs. You stay in this middle space where you’re doing well but not so well that it becomes uncomfortable at family gatherings.
7. You don’t have wealth-building models, only survival models
My mother taught me how to stretch a dollar, how to make do, how to survive lean times. These were valuable lessons, but they weren’t wealth-building lessons. She couldn’t teach what she didn’t know.
Without models of how money can grow, compound, and work independently of your labor, you just repeat what you know: work, earn, spend, repeat. You might earn more than your parents, but you use the same fundamental approach to money. The numbers are bigger, but the pattern is identical.
What this means for us
These patterns run deep — deeper than our conscious minds, deeper than our education, deeper than our good intentions. They were programmed into us before we had words for them, absorbed through a thousand small moments of watching our parents navigate money.
Recognizing these patterns doesn’t immediately dissolve them. I still feel my chest tighten when I look at investment accounts. I still have to consciously override my impulse to keep everything simple and safe. But recognition is the first step toward rewriting these scripts.
The truth is, we’re not broken. We’re running software that was perfectly designed for a different environment. Our parents’ financial strategies kept us fed and housed. But those same strategies, applied to different circumstances, keep us stuck in this strange middle space — not struggling, but not building either.
The work isn’t about becoming someone else or rejecting where we came from. It’s about updating our programming to match our current reality. It’s about keeping what serves us from our working-class roots — the work ethic, the resilience, the ability to find joy in simple things — while learning new patterns that allow us to build the wealth our intelligence and effort have already earned us.
