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Money Mindset: Time to Ditch Your Grandmother’s Language About Money
Don’t build yourself a prison with your own words
“Why are we having blackeyed peas for dinner?” I asked my mom and grandmother. I had always thought of them as a side dish, a vegetable. And now a big bowl of them had shown up right in front of me at the dinner table, as my main course. I didn’t hate blackeyed peas, but I sure would have rather sat down to a slice of pizza.
“Paul, that’s the kind of thing you have to do when you’re poor,” my grandmother told me. “You have to have peas or beans for supper once in a while.”
A favorite phrase of my grandmother was “make do.”
I remember the energy crisis of the late 1970s. President Carter asked everyone to set their thermostats to 78 F / 26 C during the hot days of summer. My grandmother went along with his request. I thought I was going to melt.
“Paul, AP&L (our utility company) is charging prices that are sky high right now,” my grandmother told me. “We can’t afford to turn this place into a refrigerator. We’ll just have to make do.”
One thing to understand before we get to the main point
I did not grow up poor.
