Have you been in a position where you're being treated badly and you know deep down that the only reason you have no choice than to endure that is because you're poor or you just don't have enough money to stop what's going on? That's the most important thing about money to me.
Having a full tank of gas used to mean something altogether different to me, not that I could drive a certain distance, but instead that I could run as many errands before the next payday. In fact everything got measured like that. Whether I could say something in a meeting, whether I could leave early and whether I could stand up to someone who had been clear they had the upper hand in the negotiation.
Most financial advice skips over this part of managing money. Instead, they go right to talking about compounding interest, retirement accounts and diversification, all of which are great but they leave out a huge gap that exists between the number of dollars that are enough and the number of dollars you have as options. These two types of dollars don’t just arrive at different times but they also arrive at different places in your life.
There is a very specific kind of clarity that comes from paying off a small expense and having the realization that the person you once feared just doesn’t intimidate you anymore. Nothing about that person fundamentally changed, it was your exposure change which in a way altered the dynamic.
You no longer needed anything from that person and needing something from a person has historically done a ton of very heavy lifting for you.
Desperation has a very strong power of changing how we can see someone else and not overnight but rather, slowly over time through a series of substantial life decisions that at the time seemed totally reasonable to make but at the end build up and add up on each other and significantly reduce your ability to leave a toxic relationship.
The trap that is just going to keep hurting you till you notice it and do something to get out.
Having enough money to walk away from something is a different number for every person. But almost everyone knows exactly what they would consider to be enough money without doing any math calculations. They're not looking to have millions of dollars, they just want a certain amount that'll give them total freedom from abusers.