What is your greatest fear when it comes to money?
Posted by admin on Oct 16, 2009
“What is your greatest fear when it comes to money?” thinking that I will lose everything. That I will not be able to hold on to it, and I will lose it all.
It’s not a money memory exactly, but what comes to mind is that I broke my grandmother’s lobster platter when I was seven, eight, nine—I can’t really remember how old I was. But I do remember what happened. Grandma was telling us—my cousins were there, everyone was there—about how in colonial times poor people would eat lobsters, they were so plentiful. But for us they were a special treat, and we had them only in the summers at her house in Maine. She always served them on this huge platter that was shaped like a lobster, and she loved that platter. Anyway, when the lobsters were done, she piled them onto the platter to be taken into the dining room, and I said, “Can I carry them in?” She said no, I was still too little. But I begged and begged until she said yes. There was a swinging door into the dining room, and—you guessed it. One of my cousins came through the door; bang, the lobsters went everywhere and the platter, Grandma’s special platter, broke to pieces. Lobsters and platter everywhere, scattered all over the kitchen floor.
There the memory ended for Sheila, but it was very telling even so: She was afraid that she would lose it, that she couldn’t hold on to it. This was her fear. And how was it playing out in her life?
Sheila and her new husband had come to see me about switching some of his assets into her name; they were both in
their sixties, and he wanted her to be safe should Something happen to him. Here was a new first for me: Sheila didn’t want to take any of the money at all. She refused to let him give her anything. But what she was really saying was that she was afraid she would break another platter, so he shouldn’t even bother giving her anything to put on it.