Leave This Behind For 2026

As we embark on another new year, it’s useful to become mindful of the baggage we’re still dragging with us from last year. Imagine for a moment your teenage self, before bills, debt, retirement accounts, or taxes entered your routine vernacular.

While our inexperience with money back then was not necessarily an asset, our freshness about how we approached money was an advantage (setting aside any baggage we were unwittingly inheriting from our parents anyway).

Because over enough time adulting, making enough mistakes and taking enough financial hits, problematic thoughts, beliefs, and feelings about money grind their deep grooves in our psyche.

And many aren’t helpful, even if they’re true. This becomes financial emotional baggage.

Maybe you’re carrying some of this around, like:

“I’m poor and will always be poor.”

“I’m not good at handling money.”

“I waste too much.”

“We should be doing better by now.”

The issue here isn’t that such negative statements are true or not, but rather whether they’re helpful for improvement and growth.

I was recently reading about an old hunter-gatherer culture that operated by a completely different set of economic customs than what we’re used to today. The system was called a “demand-sharing economy,” meaning if you needed something someone else had, you simply went and took it for your use (1). Scarce resources moved around the community in this way. (Another anthropologist suggested you could also call it “tolerated theft.”) And other resources, like food, were ubiquitous in nature, never stored or hoarded, just used as needed, when needed, and distributed to everyone.

I love examples like that because it proves that managing a checking account or saving for retirement are not inherent human skills we should be ashamed to lack. They’re simply skills that are necessary for thriving in our specific modern, capitalistic economy.

In other words, the specific skills for modern personal finance success only became relevant very recently in our history.

So, how then can you justify burdening yourself with emotional negativity over something so recent and niche?

It’s time to give yourself a clean slate for 2026. There are no inherent truths you must hold about your money and its management. There are only useful attitudes and less useful ones.

Choose yours carefully.