My relationship with money has always been a bad one. Not to say that I'm a hoarder or a gambler or a thief or a con artist or anything like that; me and money, we just don't get along so well. It's never been a reality for me. Even as a kid, it was just too theoretical a construct for me to grasp.
I was a strange kid (and still am, I suppose, in many ways). I can remember being no more than 5 or 6 years old (judging by the house we were living in) and trying to wrap my head around the relativity of money because the older of my two sisters had tried to explain to me that, though $100 seemed like a lot of money to us kids, it wasn't a lot of money for our parents, who had to pay on a mortgage and pay bills and buy food for a family of 8. This notion of relativity really got to me and the realness of money started to fade. Consequently, I can remember being 8 or 9 or 10 and getting in an argument with my nearest-aged sibling because I maintained that money was nothing more than paper, that it had no value, that it wasn't real. I can also remember being about the same age and pressing my parents for answers about what money was for, why we had it, who made it up, how it worked, and isn't there a better way? I remember in my early and middle teens getting in arguments with my mom because (get this:) she wanted to give me an allowance! She had set up a merit system in which we kids would do our daily and weekly chores and mark a calendar to say which days we had done them, and then she would pay us at the end of every month according to how much we had done. The first few months, I refused the money, telling her that she needed it more than I did and that I was confident that she could put it to more productive use than I could, but she insisted that I take it. Finally, I got wise and did my chores but simply neglected to mark the calendar. I can distinctly remember her being irritated and telling me that she knew I did my chores and then giving me an allowance anyway. (Meanwhile, the other two kids at home were constantly saying things like, "I really did do my chores; I just forgot to mark the calendar!" to which my mom would respond, "Do you think I'd get paid if I forgot to fill out my time card?")
What a strange kid I was--what a strange man I've been! I just glanced over the posts on this blog under my "money" label, and my my my how quickly I've forgotten how passionately I bashed money less than three years ago. As a kid, I just didn't understand it; as a young adult, I actually hated it. Now, as I near my quarter-century mark, I feel something entirely different, which strangely enough hearkens back to something that predates the money-bashing posts of this blog.
The final few months of my mission sent me home thinking about money a lot. In my penultimate interview with my mission president, he told me to be a millionaire. That really caught me off guard. He was telling me how much potential he saw in me, how great he thought I could become, and then he said, "You could do anything--be anything. Be a millionaire, Elder Jepson. There's nothing wrong with financial success. Be a millionaire and give it all to the Church."
A few weeks before that, my companion and I had been teaching a lesson to a man named Mickey Traylor. He was telling us about the circumstances that caused him to move from Texas to a suburb of Boise, and it mostly had to do with the fact that he had been getting so caught up in his financial success that his relationship with his wife had started to suffer, so he called it quits and took her far away to a place where they could just relax and enjoy each other.
"Money'll change you," he said.
"Money wouldn't change me," my companion assured him.
"Only people who've never had money say that," Mickey said. "I used to say that, but then I got money, and it changed me."
At the time, I thought that conversation was the final nail in the coffin of my estimation of money, but then I had that interview with my mission president, and I got confused.
Then came the very last day of my mission. My zone leader arranged for a member to give me and a few other home-bound missionaries a ride to the mission office. This member was a very wealthy man, and his advice to me as a returning missionary was to go home and make as much money as possible. "The Lord can't use you if you're poor," he said.
That naturally offended me, but the rest of his conversation was even worse. He spent the drive telling us the way he had amassed his wealth, and it was unethical and perhaps illegal. I really didn't understand, but I'll try to explain: he said that right after he got married, he bought a little house. Before buying it, he got it appraised at well more than it was worth, and then got a loan for the amount of the appraisal. He then talked the seller into selling it for much less than the advertised price, used his enormous loan to buy the house, and used what was left from the loan to invest enough money that the interest paid for (or at least helped to pay for) his monthly mortgage payment. Once that house had paid itself off, he sold it and bought a bigger house in the same way, which he sold and bought an even bigger house. He finished by saying, "I now live in a two-million-dollar house that pays me to live in it."
This man, for whatever reason, could not go all the way to the mission office, so he dropped me and the other missionaries off at another man's house. Some other home-bound missionaries met us there, and then that man gave us a ride to the office. When I asked this second man what he did for a living, he said, "As little as possible," which did not impress me. When I asked him for more details (because he had a nice living situation for someone who was at home in his PJs halfway through a Wednesday morning), he said something like, "Basically, I convince people who have a lot of money that they should have meetings with other people who make a lot of money so that they can learn from each other how to make even more money, and then I convince them to pay me a lot of money to set the meeting up."
And thus my conflict began. My mission president had exhorted me to become a millionaire, yet the wealthy people I met didn't make me want to join them. Very early on in my mission, I had had dinner with an anesthesiologist and his family. They lived in an enormous brick house with lots of land, but the kids of the family didn't think they had anything. From their conversation, I gathered that each child (I think there were four of them) had their own private room and bathroom and that for Christmas they had each gotten their own ATV, yet they were completely dissatisfied and asked their parents over and over, "When are we going to move into that big house we looked at?" I had at the time an awful sort of lurking pride regarding my middle-class (arguably lower middle-class) upbringing, and I was disgusted by those children.
When I first moved to Provo, I quickly became overly fond of this quote by Brigham Young:
The worst fear that I have about this people is that they will get rich in this country, forget God and his people, wax fat, and kick themselves out of the Church and go to hell. This people will stand mobbing, robbing, poverty and all manner of persecution, and be true. My greater fear for them is that they cannot stand wealth; and yet they have to be tried with riches, for they will become the richest people on this earth.
I guess I mostly lacked faith in myself. I assumed that if I ever became wealthy I would subsequently become petty, greedy, snobbish, and unaffectionate.
I've changed now. I've recently come out of a phase in which I was seriously considering pursuing a career in law. I think my highest desire right now--and this is certainly resultant from my recent wedding--is to become an excellent breadwinner. I still don't aspire to wealth, but I do hope for some material comforts. I never hope to have an expensive car or a mansion on a hill or a private jet, and I hope that if I'm ever in a financial situation to see such things as viable options that I'll find a better use for my money.
After that interview with my mission president, I decided that perhaps the most admirable thing to be is a middle-class millionaire, and in the past couple years I've discovered that our nation has quite a few of those--in fact, all the best financial advice these days is to live poor so you can retire well. I struggle with that idea because my immediate response to such advice is always, "What's the point of having all that money if you don't do anything with it?" I don't hope to have a Ferrari, but I do hope to have good, reliable transportation. I don't hope for a mansion, but I want a house that holds out the rain. I'm quite fixed on the idea that my kids will share bedrooms and bathrooms, but I don't want to shove them into bed-sized closets when I tell them good-night.
I guess what I'm saying is that I do want money, but I want happiness more. If I ever have money, I hope to use it well.
Be a millionaire, Elder Jepson--just don't be stupid about it.
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ReplyDeleteWell said. And in a nice well reasoned essay to boot. I stand ashamed.
Do you remember that post you did years ago about the evils of money?
ReplyDeleteI remember being surprised then that you wrote that. You seem to have a much more balanced view now.
As I see it, people often project way too much onto money. They give it character and personality, and speak of it in terms of morality. I honestly don't think I'll ever understand why.
Money is simply a tool, and like any tool it is morally neutral. You can only assign morality to a tool through how it is employed.
I'm pretty sure most of the problems associated with money relate to its power. Because money is a powerful tool, and because power often corrupts, people say money corrupts.
I think this argument is the heart of why people say money is bad, and I think this argument hinges on a fundamental misunderstanding of power and the possible evils of pursuing it.
It's true that some people compromise their values and lose focus in the pursuit of power. But this doesn't make pursuing power evil.
Pursuing power can be a good thing: it just depends on what you plan to do with it. Doctrine and Covenants section 121 gives a pretty good description of how to righteously pursue power, and the reasons that hallow such a pursuit. And coming from the other angle, the fall of Satan shows us that blindly and selfishly pursuing power can destroy you.
Now coming back to money, it's the same way: when pursued not as an end in itself, but as some means to accomplish good (as your mission president said) then it is a good thing. Looking at it this way pursuing money could even be considered a religious pursuit; it's a chance to put the power to enact positive change in righteous hands. Conversely, pursuing money for power and as an end in itself, to selfishly pursue it for personal advancement, is spiritually damning and in many ways a microscopic re-enactment of Satan's fall.
I think good people have a responsibility to pursue power and use it to build God's kingdom. An extension of this is I think good people have a responsibility to pursue money.
I take the church's wealth (and the church's savvy in increasing and utilizing its wealth) as evidence of my position.
Anyway, that's just my three cents on the matter.
As far as I'm concerned, if someone says money corrupted them they're assigning a false cause. The corruption was already there: money just brought it to the surface.
For what it's worth, I think you'd be a great millionaire.
Thanks, Dan--I hope to be.
ReplyDeleteGoing along with what you said, I've always found it interesting that King Benjamin said that if we seek money after we have sought the kingdom of God then we will get money because we'll use it to do good. I think most Mormons read that and think it says seeking money is bad and that it's better just to seek the Kingdom, but I think it says that, if you want to get money, you can, and that's great, but you better seek the Kingdom first. I think it goes along with what you were saying (though I never thought of it this way before): money brings out the corruption already inside of people, but people who are seeking the kingdom of God are not corrupt, so money will only further empower them to do good.
Thanks both of you for reading such a long post.
three of us. You're welcome :)
ReplyDeleteI think you'd be a great millionaire too. I'm happy that we're on the same page about money. I love you.