How to Remove Emotion From Your Relationship With Money

11 min readDec 16, 2020

Photo by Vinicius “amnx” Amano on Unsplash

You can’t. You won’t. You shouldn’t.

I do my best to not prescribe thoughts, ideas, and solutions to your personal financial situation. Because personal finance is personal.

In fact, emotion — all flavors of it — is awesome. Life would suck without it.

Emotion gives life soul.

Consider Anthony Lawrence’s response to my recent Making of a Millionaire article on eschewing credit cards altogether. Anthony makes a sane, logical, and effective argument — that credit cards can be excellent financial tools if you don’t pay interest and maximize the perks.

I disagree. Largely because of the role emotion and our overarching psychologies play in our relationships with money. This doesn’t make Anthony’s argument any less sane, logical, or effective. It also doesn’t mean that no one on Earth is good with credit cards. Lots of people are.

But…

That’s wishful thinking. And, let’s face it, our lives would be a heck of a lot more boring if we routinely “resist(ed) temptation when the result of it is harmful.”

I’m not going to rattle off a bunch of examples. You can imagine your own. But there’s this tendency to want to cherry-pick life events — from the mundane and minuscule to the big and life-changing. We want to remove that one thing that happened that wasn’t so good, but keep the good stuff that followed whatever it was that didn’t/doesn’t sit well with us.

I got dumped 15 months ago. It sucked. Sometimes I’d like to take everything back that led to the deterioration of the relationship and its less than satisfactory ending. I think about what happened during that phase of my life most days. Still. It left a mark on me. I can’t undo it. I can’t even make it right.

But this doesn’t mean I should wish to wave a magic wand to ameliorate my unease and, even more unrealistically, go back in time, make all the right decisions, and remain in that relationship. Because that relationship — and the consequences of its dissolution — changed me. I’m literally a different person today than I was 15 months ago.

That relationship — the good, the bad, all my poor choices, all of her arguably poor choices, the breakup, the heartache, all of it — had to happen to effect the change I’m better off for having gone through. If it wasn’t that relationship, it likely would have been something else. I hope it would have been something else because I like myself better today than I did 15 months ago.

It’s our human tendency to want to grow, evolve, and experience all of the good things at the same time as undoing the “bad.” This is not realistic. And the “bad” isn’t necessarily “bad,” particularly if it basically had to happen to lead to the good.

A similar dynamic exists when we consider the role emotion plays in our lives. We want to remove it when it can lead to deleterious consequences. (Thanks, by the way, to Dr. Anthony Fauci for reintroducing my vocabulary to the word “deleterious”).

Whether emotion helps bring experiences or events we’re good or not so good with, it’s a critical component of life, especially in our relationships with money. You’d be a fool to remove emotion from the equation. If you try, I’m convinced you’d fail.

Consider day trading. Bad idea for most people. One of the main reasons — people can’t remove emotion from the process. Whether it’s emotion over the stock they’re trading or in relation to whether it’s time to take profits or a loss or something in between.

The best day traders adhere to a system that doesn’t care about company names or if the stock still has room to run. They use objective indicators — generally math-based — to make every decision from what to buy and when to sell. Nothing gets in the way of trust in and loyalty to the system.

This said it’s good when people try to day trade and fail. In my observations (I used to day trade and hang most days in a day trading chatroom), emotion detrimental to day trading success caused — or at least largely contributed to — these failures.

I love Apple. I think it should keep going up. So I’m going to hold it past the $0.20 profit I targeted.

It’s tough to explain to people set on day trading that they have a snowball’s chance in a warming climate at success, even when you show them the academic research indicating that most people fail at day trading. They need to learn their own emotion-fueled lessons.

In the most ideal scenario, the failed day trader recognizes two things:

They failed because of an inability to control their emotions.

While they might be capable of controlling their emotions in other life endeavors, it’s unlikely they’ll do so when day trading. It takes a super rare breed.

It’s this very recognition of your limitations — your inability to control your emotions in certain situations — that helps you grow.

It’s no different with credit cards. Medium user Anthony Lawrence is, I think, a rare breed. But, by all means, try to be like him. I did. I thought I could control my emotions — or other closely related feelings, urges, and desires — and use credit cards responsibly. I tried. Several times. I failed. Several times. It cost me money. Finally, one day I learned my lesson. I’m just not strong enough to resist the allure of the marketing credit card companies are so good at.

Emotion matters. It brings experiences to life. Without it, the great times wouldn’t feel as great. Think about sex without emotion. Or music without emotion. Or, along similar lines, work without passion. Whatever.

Without emotion, the bad times wouldn’t feel quite as bad. We need the extremes — the highs and lows — to make things more real than they might otherwise be.

This is how we change.

When we feel emotion.

We either never want to feel the way we felt again. Or we want to feel that way again, as soon as humanly possible. And we want to get better at feeling good. (This is a major reason why I have never done hard drugs. I’m afraid I’d like the way they make me feel too much).

As you get older, you do less of this. However, I think you ought to give into temptation. Experience everything, including extreme emotions and everything in between. This is life. You need some sort of internal compass that helps you avoid irreparable damage. But there’s no better way to learn, grow, and evolve than by putting yourself in the thick of it.

More often than not, when you get yourself into one of these situations — from total despair to complete and utter euphoria — emotion plays an integral role, if not the role, in getting you there.

Don’t be afraid of emotion. Have a relationship with it. Even a volatile and messy one. You can only get to know your emotions if you feel them — deeply. Only then can you control your emotions or better direct them to improve how you function in all of your dealings, including with money.

This article is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.

How to Remove Emotion From Your Relationship With Money

They failed because of an inability to control their emotions.

While they might be capable of controlling their emotions in other life endeavors, it’s unlikely they’ll do so when day trading. It takes a super rare breed.

Written by Shafin Ahmed