Personal money management is usually not the first thing that crosses your mind when considering how to make your life more sustainable or “green.” However, the green business sector calls it the “triple bottom line” for a reason: you’ve got to be economically as well as environmentally and socially sustainable, or you are not sustainable.
Our money is working for or against us, even while we sleep. It’s a huge bummer to wake up and realize you forgot to pay a credit card bill and have suffered a late fee, or worse, overdrawn your account. And just what is your bank doing with your money while it sits in your checking account? Is it a local bank or credit union, or a huge vampire bank?
Bari Tessler Linden is a great person to go to when you want to deepen and enrich your relationship to money and finances. In my little info graphic below, books like Lynn Twist’s The Soul of Money would fit the “philosophy” category, and YNAB fits the “tools” category. Bari’s year-long course, “The Art of Money,” fits squarely in what I’m calling “strategy”: the bridge between worldview and on-the-ground tools.
In 2005 I was very fortunate to take a course with Bari, back when her organization was called “Conscious Bookkeeping.” For several weeks in a row our small group met and dug up money corpses, let money skeletons out of the closet, and basically aired out a lifetime of accumulated hangups and hiccups around cash, credit and future hopes and dreams. This was the first time in my life I had really taken the time to consider how my upbringing had influenced my relationship to money. The process Bari led us through was a thorough discovery adventure, and I had the benefit of safe group for support and encouragement. This was also my first window into the reality that in actual fact, most people have money challenges, so I have no reason to feel bad about my own!
Bari Tessler Linden
