Abundance mentality vs financial responsibility?

[Keith]

I understand that a scarcity mentality leads to fear which leads to reticence to take action = bad.

But how do you reconcile that with application of limited financial resources?

You can't just spend money like it's going out of style and leave yourself unable to pay the bills. Or is that assumption itself scarcity thinking?

Can someone please clarify how responsible financial management gels with abundance thinking?

Thanks

[dorothy hanna]

Having lots of STUFF isn't neccesarily a mentality of abundance. Having the impule to go out and shop, and spend all the money, and not pay your bills etc...leaves you lacking, so that would be a mentality of lack.

When you are in a mentality of lack, you manifest a continuation of that lack. And the universe will help you manifest it, by giving you the inspired thought, or impulse to fulfill that mentality, because that is your focus, lack.

Being responsable, and paying your bills first is a frugal, (not stingy) mentality, and it ebbs towards saving. If this is your mentality, the universe will help you to fulfill that, by growing your savings.

[Michael Chui]

It has to do with decision-making. Abundance mentality isn't imprudence; but neither is scarcity thinking prudent. I learned about abundance mentality from Stephen Covey's 7 habits, in the context of Think Win/Win. I think that's an important context. If the result of a decision is Lose/Win (He got a meal, but now I can't pay my bills), then it's really no better than Win/Lose (I have money, but he's in the cold).

Scarcity suggests that you need to hold onto what you have and get more in case you lose it.
Abundance suggests that there's no reason to hoard your belongings and you can always get more so it's not a big deal to give some of it away.

You're not sacrificing; you're sharing.

[Erik Mazzone]

Yeah, I agree with Michael's assessment about the Covey win/win approach.

I think one of the basic points of cultivating an abundance mindset is that when you give money away, you start to feel like someone who can afford to give money away. That feeling creates an optimism and generosity of spirit that, in turn, benefits you by attracting more wealth into your life. However, if you give money away and literally can not afford to pay your bills afterward, that feeling of optimism is going to be short-lived. Too short to do you any good, in all likelihood.

The key is in the concept of "enough". Keep enough for yourself, no more and no less. Keep too much and you get greedy and slide into scarcity. Keep too little and you can't make ends meet and slide into scarcity. It's a tricky balance. For lots of people, though, living on "enough" creates an overage that can be shared.

[Nicketas]

Originally Posted by Keith

I understand that a scarcity mentality leads to fear which leads to reticence to take action = bad.

But how do you reconcile that with application of limited financial resources?

You can't just spend money like it's going out of style and leave yourself unable to pay the bills. Or is that assumption itself scarcity thinking?

Can someone please clarify how responsible financial management gels with abundance thinking?

Thanks

The problem is in your assumption. You are assuming that the abundance mentality and financial responsibility are mutually exclusive.

They are not.

Manifesting abundant amounts of resources (including money) takes an indeterminable amount of time.
HAVING and abundance MENTALITY simply means that you *KNOW* and you FEEL that there is PLENTY of money out there waiting to be harvested by you.

Think of it as fishing. You can have an idea of how to fish but you may not start off with much gear to begin with. So you may not rush out and get a bunch of gear, However, you still know you can fish and you still know there are lots of fish to catch.

As you catch more and get better and better at it, then you can buy more gear.

The same is true with money or ANYTHING you do. Its the whole think and grow rich mentality. You build over time.

An artist may start out with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ set of paints, but it doesn't matter because he's working on developing the SKILL of making his art more abundant and more beautiful. As he gets better and better then he can afford more supplies.

The actions you take in spending your money have very little to do with how much money you actually ATTRACT into your life.

Its how much you MAKE and KEEP that matters more than how much you spend. Still, if your CURRENT REALITY is such that you have little to work with, focus on spending INTELLIGENTLY while you attract & build more and more money.

Gratitude is key here.

[Jaben]

Originally Posted by Michael Chui

If the result of a decision is Lose/Win (He got a meal, but now I can't pay my bills), then it's really no better than Win/Lose (I have money, but he's in the cold).

Scarcity suggests that you need to hold onto what you have and get more in case you lose it.
Abundance suggests that there's no reason to hoard your belongings and you can always get more so it's not a big deal to give some of it away.

That's beautiful. Abundance makes so much more sense when you include the other players in the economy. When the fear of not having enough leads to competition and hoarding, scarcity results.

Saving money that you earn halts the flow of exchange. The money that you receive comes from someone else who produced value and passed the reward on to you. Keep the money for too long and you stop the flow, use it wisely such that more value production results and abundance is increased.

Worse than saving however is spending frivolouslyto feed greed and imbalances of emotion, health, etc.

Of course if you don't have any money to use or invest, you can focus on the value that you have to offer. Every experience, awareness, thought and action are a contribution to abundance or scarcity. Fiscal irresponsibility doesn't support abundance. Caring for your own well being, the well being of others and our sustainability as a whole does.

[Parthon]

Wow, this is a great thread. Lots of good posts.

I want to go directly for how financial management works with abundancy.

I think they go together perfectly, in fact they head in the same direction while scarcity and financial management fight each other.

With scarcity thinking you believe you don't have enough, that you have to carefully use what you get, and you are always hanging out for more, wishing you had a lot. Sometimes this makes people scrooges, never spending anything, and sometimes this makes people go out and spend everything all the time, mainly because they think they never have enough.

This thinking fights financial management, you get money, but you have to be careful with it. You want to spend it BUT you have to spend/save it wisely. Working out how to spend it vs spending it badly and not having enough.

You use financial management to counter how scarcity thinking works.

With abundance thinking you believe there's money everywhere, and that there's enough to go around and that you get enough to do what you want, however much that is. It's a very hard place to stand when you are surrounded by people who are thinking scarcity and you used to yourself.

Now imagining that you believe you get all the money you want, then the next step in that thinking is saying "okay, what do I do with it?" and this is where financial management comes in. You find out how best to use your abundant resources. You get all the money you want, and you work out how best to use it. Financial management really helps here, and it goes so well with abundance thinking.

And in that area you can save, you can buy stuff, pay bills and even donate to charity without feeling like you are missing out on anything.

And the best thing. You can believe it even without earning any more than you already do and still feel like you have enough. Of course, sometimes you don't know what you are going to do with all that money or even where it came from, but that's half the fun.

[John Hill]

What you have to do to get out of your poverty consciousness and into a new abundance style of thinking is to make a change. You need to start the ball rolling by beginning to think that money is about to come your way and really expect that it is.

If you believe in the universal laws and know that what you give in life is what you get back, you should start by giving a small amount of money away each day, only what you can afford, even if it's only a dollar a day and let the universal law of tenfold return do the rest. I have written instructions on this process on my website, the link is below.

John