Coming face-to-face with money, wealth and finances - with Spencer Sherman

Spencer Sherman’s journey started in the late 80s when he had a panic attack and ran into his burning office building to retrieve his client files, sparking a realisation that he had valued money higher than his own life. This inspired him to begin a journey into meditation which brought him face-to-face with his issues around money. In the years that followed, he learned how to befriend his pains and tightly held beliefs and to transform his understanding of identity and wealth. Now based in California, Spencer devotes much of his time to sharing his mindfulness-based approach to money through his Fearless Finance program. He is the author of “The Cure for Money Madness” and founder of a Abacus Wealth, a successful, values-driven financial consulting firm. 

In this episode, Spencer begins by talking openly about his experiences of certain difficult people at work, his habitual way of recoil and avoiding them, and how he has come to understand how important it is to take the risk of stepping out of our comfortable, habitual response patterns in order to find freedom to say what needs to be said. With honesty and humour, he also discusses his long journey of coming to understand his own relationship with money, and laments how the discussion of this central topic is so taboo in our society and leads to so much suffering. He goes on to discuss his work with those facing the pain of bankruptcy or major financial loss, and how he’s found so many of those people are deeply identified with their financial situation, believing that “net worth = self worth”. In exploring these topics, we talk about how encountering difficult people and facing our finances equally bring us face-to-face with impermanence and the realisation that there’s nothing to hold onto, and hence towards freedom.