How to Have a Healthy Relationship With Money
(Written From Inside the Struggle)

Let me be honest before I write a word of advice. I have not reached any kind of financial freedom yet. Money still decides things for me. Whether we do something, whether we buy something. The freedom switch is not on.

I am a guy who has made good money and lost it, building this thing close to zero. I am writing about a healthy relationship with money from inside the work, not from a beach house after the fact. The beach is a two minute walk. The beach house is still a long way off. I think writing from here makes it more useful, not less.

The Letters I
Stopped Opening

A broken relationship with money usually builds slowly, the same way getting out of shape does. You do not notice the day it happens. You notice it later, all at once. Sometimes it is not slow at all, of course. Sometimes you just get unlucky, or a business goes under and takes your footing with it. That happened to me too.

I was in Tampere working a sales job, and a business I had been running had quietly collapsed. For about six months I had almost nothing coming in. I remember the first letters from the debt collectors arriving and it landing on me that I could not pay. My credit was going. And the move I am least proud of is not the debt. It is what I did next, which was nothing.

I did not try to negotiate. I did not ask for help, even though I could have. I stopped opening the envelopes. The logic, if you can call it that, was brutally simple: if a letter says I owe thousands and I do not have thousands, the maths does not work, so why open it. The letters kept coming, the dread kept growing, and I kept not looking.

And somewhere in that pile of unopened envelopes my self-image started to shift. Am I really this much of a loser, that a grown adult cannot manage his own money? That question does damage. It changes how you approach work, because money is supposed to feel like something that opens doors, and instead it had become a source of shame I was actively avoiding.

The Story I Inherited
About Money

Here is the strange part. I did not grow up without money. We never went hungry. I always had good gear. My dad is sport-obsessed and supported every hobby I ever had. Nothing was ever missing because of money.

But the message at home was constant: spend less. Save, use the coupon, stay safe. A careful, scarcity-shaped mindset, even though there was no actual scarcity. My dad is genuinely tight with money. He cannot understand my mum paying seven euros for a coffee and a bun. To him that is waste.

That is the belief I am breaking. I have wanted to be wealthy since I was a kid. The story I inherited was about protecting a small amount carefully. The one I am building is different: I am good at creating money, and my identity is becoming someone who has it and keeps multiplying it, not someone guarding a shrinking pile.

Your relationship with money is mostly inherited before you ever earn a cent. The first real work is noticing the story you were handed and deciding whether you actually want to keep it.

Good at Making It,
Better at Spending It

I have always been good at making money. I have been even better at spending it. There has never been a saving instinct in me, not naturally. For most of my life it has been hand to mouth, even in the years the income was good, because whatever came in went straight back out.

That is its own kind of broken relationship, and it is worth saying plainly because a lot of people who earn well quietly live this way. The problem was never the earning. It was that money moved through me without ever stopping. No part of it was ever kept. And money that never stops with you cannot become anything. It cannot compound. It cannot turn into security or freedom or options. It just passes through on its way to somewhere else.

Where I Actually Am
Right Now

Here is the honest present, and it holds two things at once. I am genuinely grateful. We have the things that matter to us: an apartment with an absurd view, six surfboards in the garage, food in the fridge. We have never gone hungry. Those are not small things and I do not pretend they are.

And at the same time, there is no freedom yet. We could not decide on a whim to take off on a surf trip whenever the swell looks good, bring a few friends along, and not think about what it costs. Money still sets the edges of what is possible, and that is the line I am working to move.

What has changed is not the balance. It is the model. For most of my life it was simple and fragile: I need a salary and an employer to survive. That is gone. The new question is which streams my wealth could be built from, and I have decided there will be several. Some sales work where I am setting up meetings again. And I keep noticing gaps I am positioned to fill, like pairing my own skills with a friend's expertise in an industry he knows well, or the obvious opening in building clean websites fast for people stuck with terrible ones. The point is the shift underneath: money is no longer something handed to me. It is something I build, on purpose, from several sources.

The 10% Decision
I Have Avoided for a Decade

If I am honest about the single biggest move I could make, it is not complicated and it is not new. It is the so-called ten percent account. Every bit of money that comes in, ten percent goes straight to a savings account I do not touch. Locked. Sacred.

This is the first thing almost every piece of money literature tells you to do, and it has been on my to-do list for probably ten years. Olga has actually done it and it works. The reason it matters has very little to do with the amount. Whether it is one euro out of ten or a thousand out of ten thousand, the point is that you pay yourself first, and slowly that act rewrites the story. You stop being the guy whose money passes through and start becoming the guy who has money, who has proven he can keep some.

The obvious objection is the one I have used on myself for a decade: how can I put ten percent away when a hundred percent does not even cover the bills. And that is exactly where the secret hides. You do it anyway, with whatever the number is, because the habit and the identity are the real prize, not the balance. This time it is not a someday item on a list. It is the decision.

Money Is a Relationship,
Not a Number

The reason a healthy relationship with money is hard is the same reason any relationship is hard. It runs on stories, habits, and the things you avoid looking at. The unopened letter, the inherited fear, the money that never stops with you. None of those are math problems. They are identity problems wearing a math costume.

So the work is not really budgeting, though you will budget. It is deciding who you are with money and then doing the small, unglamorous things that prove it, starting with the ten percent you keep before anything else gets paid. I am doing this in real time, which is the only reason I trust myself to write about it. The Money pillar on Thrive Map goes deeper into building that relationship from wherever you are standing now.