Have I Always Loved Money?

Looking back I think I’ve always been fascinated by money. I tried to negotiate prices with the tooth fairy (proof below), was a bank for my siblings (a bad one) and loved collecting foreign currency. My aunt and uncle would often bring me coins from wherever they were living at the time. I also bought fake foreign currency with the little chore money I received. I was such a normal kid 🙂 .

(A letter I wrote the tooth fairy when I was 5. I love that I already knew what “ASAP” meant)

When I discovered FIRE and started this journey I thought it was the first time I was really focused on money and it wasn’t the money really: it was the freedom the money would grant me, but looking back it seems like I’ve always been fascinated with money – and not just the power money holds, but the actual money itself and its different versions in different countries.

I’ve always liked money, but surprisingly not in a greedy or obsessive way. It’s interesting. It’s fascinating to me that we have imbued these pieces of paper and metal with meaning and the entire world has agreed to their meaning and weight. It’s a strange, but efficient concept – this agreement between people. It’s even more interesting and strange that money is even more abstract now: just numbers on a computer screen…though I imagine it used to be numbers in an accounting book :).

I’ve found another aspect of my life that I thought was created with the discovery of FIRE, but has always lurked beneath the surface. Fascinating. Given the abstractness of money in our current society I try to give it real-world weight – when I put $2,000 in the market I imagine stacking two MacBook Airs into the closet 🙂 . It makes it seem more real than that $2,000 on the screen.