Is your money HAPPY? (And how can you tell?)

I had the exquisite opportunity to interview Ken Honda, ‘Zen Millionaire’ and the author of Happy Money, The Japanese Art of Making Peace with Your Money on I’m a Millionaire! So Now What? You can listen to our full discussion here.

Ken writes about wealth, attitude and appreciation, and what it takes to be happy and wealthy at the same time:

“…it doesn’t really matter how much you have or how much you make; it’s just about your attitude toward money. If your attitude is not friendly or not happy, your money is crying. And if you’re happy with your money, that is Happy Money.”

According to Ken, Happy Money “makes people smile and feel loved and cared for deeply. It is in many ways an active form of love – a way in which people can see, feel, and touch.” (Happy Money, Ken Honda, 2019)

This reminds me of Gary Chapman’s Five Love Languages. One of the love languages is gift-giving. We often show love and seek to connect to another human being with the exchange of a gift.

But Happy Money isn’t just about what we’re spending on, it’s how we feel every time we spend.

Ken asks us to note all the times money passes through our hands – every time we ‘open our wallets’ -- and consider how we FEEL about that payment.

Unhappy Money is spent “begrudgingly.” Unhappy Money is “money circulated in frustration, anger, sadness, and despair”. Even when it comes to paying taxes or paying down debt – something that doesn’t typically bring a lot of joy to people -- we can choose to pay with Happy Money or Unhappy Money.

“When you take a look at the number of your debt, just imagine that you have huge trust by a stranger. Feel blessed and thankful about the trust that somebody placed in you. So even just when you pay debt, instead of feeling like, ooh, I don’t want to pay for this, just do that with appreciation. I mean, you have to do it anyway, so you have a choice.”

What emotions have you infused into the money that you accept and give?

Throughout the summer of 2018, I wrote a series of posts about our most basic relationships with money: our Sacred Money Archetypes. How we feel about money affects how we make financial decisions. While exploring all eight archetypes, I also asserted that what you focus on expands. Where your focus goes, your energy flows. That’s also the principle behind ‘scarcity’ and ‘abundance’ mindsets. If you feel money is scarce, you’ll struggle to find it; whereas if you feel, fundamentally, that money flows easily, you’ll find it easy to attract.

Happy Money – I think Ken is on to something here.

And it raises an interesting question about how money flows.

Practically speaking, money was developed to make trading and exchange simpler. The units of trade became a full system called currency. And what is a current? Scientifically speaking, it’s how things flow: water flows with a current; electricity flows by way of a current; energy flows by way of a current; what is money but a flowing current of value?

I’ll leave a discussion about quantum physics up to someone else, but throughout both Ken’s and my careers, we’ve seen people who are happy with wealth and unhappy with wealth; we’ve seen people struggle to get ‘enough’ and people towards whom money just seems to flow. We know people who are able to stand, at peace, in the flow of money around them. Money in, money out, money in again.

Is that what being a Zen Millionaire means?

“You have to be responsible for happy money in your life, because in the world, unfortunately, as of now, there is a lot more unhappy money circulating. Violent, cold, mean money is circulating. So we need more happy people, more generous people, warm people to start circulating happy money.”

I wonder, what’s in your wallet?

If you’re ready to attract more Happy Money, and work with a wealth management team focused on building and strategizing financial plans that optimize how you spend, save & share your wealth, contact us at O’Connell-Campbell Wealth Management.