“You never waste money.”

That was my father’s mantra, and that’s how we lived. It kind of made sense, even if we had to drive around for 20 minutes trying to find a parking meter that still had money left in it.

  • Lights were not allowed to be left on.
  • You were told to shut the fridge door after more than 10 seconds of looking.
  • If we ever went out to eat, large sections of the menu were off limits.

As a child, I absorbed this frugality doctrine without question. The message was clear – money was too important to waste. It was more important than whatever we wanted.

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When I discovered money coaching, I realised I had inherited this doctrine.

And, painful as it was to have grown up around, I had repeated it for most of my own parenting.

As I started to understand the roots of my behaviour, I could see that it extended beyond simple money anxiety to a whole scarcity mentality.

Scarcity isn’t just about counting the pennies and not wasting money. It’s a deep-seated sense that there isn’t enough, that resources could disappear at any moment, that safety requires constant vigilance and control.

Disaster is always just around the corner.

That’s not a fun place to live.

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And this sense of “not enough” isn’t just about frugality and thrift; it consumes your mental bandwidth. It narrows your focus, reduces your cognitive capacity, and pushes you towards short-term thinking. Scarcity affects how you think and how you live, not just how you spend.

The biggest problem with a scarcity mentality is the feeling of limitation – about who you can be, what you can do, and what you can have in life.

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Many of my clients suffer from scarcity, and because money is so central to our lives, self-worth very often becomes tied up with net worth.

So, if you’re suffering from scarcity, it’s important to break it into two separate components:

  • I am not enough 
  • There is not enough

Both are beliefs learned in childhood, based on the messaging you got from the people around you as you grew up.

The first is best addressed through self-compassion – realising that the messaging you received is a reflection of the adults and their issues, not your intrinsic worth. You were always enough.

To address “there is not enough,” it’s useful to start by exploring what enough would actually feel like. Enough is not a number. It’s a feeling.

I’m not making light of genuine hardship. There is plenty of that around.

But when scarcity is present in your life, changing it requires examining your beliefs about what you’re allowed to have on the menu of life – and what it would feel like to have anything or everything you wanted.

Because scarcity isn’t really about how much you have. It’s about how you experience what you have.

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This is what money coaching is about. Changing money from a source of anxiety and limitation into a source of freedom and empowerment.