When Having Money Still Feels Like Not Having It

I was listening to a podcast, Oprah interviewing Belle Burden about her bestselling book, Strangers.  

Belle comes from a family with wealth. Real, generational wealth. And yet, as she spoke, what came through wasn’t ease or confidence. It was a kind of helpless bewilderment. She had grown up surrounded by money and still had no real say in her own inheritance, no genuine ground to stand on inside her marriage when it came to the finances. She had never quite been invited into the conversation. And so she hadn’t had it.

I sat there thinking: I know this woman. Not her specifically. But her. I know her from my practice. I know her from the call that starts, “I’m not sure why I’m here, everything looks fine on paper.”

The life that crowds out the conversation

Here is what I see in so many high-achieving women in their forties and fifties. There are elderly parents who need arranging. Children with school runs and exam seasons. A career that takes real energy to sustain. A marriage that is mostly good, mostly fine, mostly moving forward. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, the money conversation never quite happened.

Not because anyone forbade it. But because life filled the space where it should have been.

So the finances went to the husband. Or to the financial advisor. Or to both, coordinating with each other, copying her in on emails she didn’t have time to read. And she told herself she trusted them, because she did, and because it was easier than making time for something that felt uncomfortable anyway.

This isn’t a knowledge problem

I want to be careful here, because the instinct is to say: she just needs financial education. She needs to sit down with a spreadsheet and get informed.

That’s not what I see.

What Belle Burden’s story opened up for me

Belle Burden had wealth and still felt its absence in any personal, autonomous sense. That is not a contradiction. That is one of the most honest things you can say about how money actually works.

The number you see is not the number you feel.

A large balance, a well-managed portfolio, a husband who handles everything responsibly, none of that produces the felt sense of financial safety if you have no relationship with the money yourself. If it all exists at one remove. If your name is on the accounts but your understanding, your agency, your voice is not quite in the room.

Money doesn’t work from the outside in. The balance doesn’t create the safety. The safety has to come from somewhere inside you first, and that inside place is built through knowing, through engaging, through having your own ground.

Where to begin

If any of this is sitting somewhere in your chest right now, I want you to start with something simple.

Not a spreadsheet. Not a difficult conversation tonight over dinner. Just a question about yourself: how do you actually relate to money, underneath the arrangements you’ve made?

The Money Quiz is a good place to go quiet with that question. the pattern underneath the behaviour, the belief underneath the silence. It takes about ten minutes and it has a way of naming things that women have been circling for years without quite finding the words.

Take the free Money Quiz here.

Your bank balance is not a measure of your worth. And neither is the arrangement you’ve been living with. You are allowed to want more ground. You’re allowed to start claiming it now.