Same Money, Different Story

Retirement takes up a lot of space in our collective consciousness. It’s what we’re all supposedly saving for, and it’s especially loaded right now, when so many people struggle to get by while working full-time.

How are we supposed to save for retirement when we can barely manage the present? Maybe we should all give up. Who needs savings anyway?

That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy if I’ve ever heard one.

Interestingly, plenty of people keep saving anyway. What story are they telling themselves? Maybe they’ve noticed how many impoverished, vulnerable seniors are already out there, and that’s motivation enough. Maybe they still have hope for how things will go. Maybe they’re just hedging their bets.

Whatever story you’re telling yourself about saving right now is quietly shaping how you actually live and spend.

I first noticed how much these stories matter through my volunteer work with the Community Volunteer Income Tax Program. In one year alone, I helped file forty-four returns for low-income seniors, and the highest earner among them made $28,000. During tax season, the line at the Seniors’ Centre wraps around the block. The cutoff to qualify for free filing is earning under thirty thousand dollars a year, and even that’s generous relative to what most people in that line actually bring in. Between Old Age Security and a maxed-out CPP contribution history, someone with no other savings tops out around twenty-five thousand dollars a year. That’s a lot of seniors living on very little, each carrying a different story about how they got there.

One woman I helped had lost her husband years earlier, and with him, the financial security she’d expected to carry her through old age. She’d never worked outside the home. What little she had left, she’d since lent to family, and that money hadn’t come back to her. Every time I saw her, that loss came up again, clearly still the loop playing in her head. And yet she was sharp, put-together, moved quickly for her age, lived somewhere lovely, and had grandchildren who visited. None of that seemed to register next to the story she was telling herself. I could see the worry sitting right on her face.

Another man I helped, in the same building, offered me tea while I worked through his return. We talked about music, hobbies, his dog, who he still tried to walk daily even though walking had gotten harder. He seemed genuinely upbeat.

Financially, there was no real difference between them. Same fixed, minimal means, same basic constraints. But they were living in two completely different stories.

We all find our own way of coping with whatever we’re handed. How we manage it, and the story we tell ourselves about it, shapes how the present actually feels, and how the future unfolds from there.

Most of us will eventually retire, and eventually stop being able to earn. It’s worth planning for. If you want to know where I personally land on it, I’m solidly in the hedging-my-bets camp. It’s a lot easier to stay hopeful when you feel like you have some actual control over your own situation.

The Story I Told Myself About Money

The stories that play in our heads usually get planted there by whatever’s happening in the world around us as we grow up. We absorb them from parents, friends, and the wider culture, and depending on how loud and constant they are, we tend to adopt them as fact.

Growing up, the story in our house was: be careful with money, save for the rainy day that’s definitely coming. Good luck doesn’t last, and you’d better be ready when it runs out. That story wasn’t unique to my family. Most of our parents had grown up under parents shaped by war and depression, and they’d had the same story drilled into them. They passed it down.

Everyone interprets an inherited story differently. Some people hear “good luck can’t last” and decide to spend freely, so there’s nothing left to lose when the bad day comes. I went the other way. Every purchase became an internal debate: do I need this, or should I save it for the day I can’t earn anything and end up destitute? The rainy day always won. So I mostly just stopped spending.

The only exception was spending money with someone else who was operating from a different story than mine. As a lifelong people-pleaser, I weighted other people’s arguments more heavily than my own; if someone told me it was fine to buy the thing, I’d buy it, then spend the rest of the day quietly justifying it to myself, wrapped in guilt.

Sometime in my thirties, I noticed how extreme this had gotten and dialled it back a bit. But the core belief that ruin was coming eventually never left. Then I got married, had kids, and my ability to save took a real hit. I worried about money constantly. It was exhausting.

Then I got divorced.

And there it was: proof. My story had finally been confirmed.

Starting over after divorce is hard enough. Starting over while genuinely believing the world has ended and you’ll never see financial stability again is a different level of hard. The day I’d spent my whole life bracing for had finally arrived. I was going to be financially unstable forever. That’s a difficult belief to build a life on. I tried to limit the damage by taking no risks at all, hoarding whatever savings I had left and making them last until I died.

Then I started noticing other people telling themselves different stories. One that fascinated me: if you run out of money, you go find a way to make more. Really? That was allowed?

Another was the gratitude story: friends who felt genuinely lucky to live where they lived and have the work they had, who seemed to move through life with more actual joy because of it.

Slowly, I noticed something else too. Doomsday hadn’t come. I hadn’t become destitute. I had only believed I would. That belief was never true; it had just been busy manufacturing my reality anyway.

So what did the story actually do for me? It helped me save, and I’m genuinely grateful I came out of my divorce with some financial stability because of it. But did I need the guilt and buyer’s remorse that came bundled in with the saving? Honestly, no. I could have saved just as well without any of that extra weight. Pay yourself first; that’s really all it takes. I did that automatically every month. The guilt over everything I spent afterward wasn’t doing anything useful. It was just the cost of believing a story I’d never actually tested.

Do you have a story about money running in the background of your own head? What is it actually doing to how you live?