The key ideas

The Art of Money: A Life-Changing Guide to Financial Happiness

Bari Tessler, 2016

Why do intelligent adults leave bank statements unopened for years? Financial therapist Bari Tessler answers: shame, rather than poor arithmetic, damages our relationship with money. She guides readers through three stages: releasing shame and exploring their money story, building a habit of five-minute money dates, and creating a three-tier spending map. You will learn to look calmly at your numbers and spend on what truly matters to you.

Who it is for

For anyone who puts off reading bank statements and feels anxious at the thought of money. And for couples whose conversations about spending always end in an argument.

“Enough” is not somewhere out there. It is a relationship with what you already have.

The envelope you do not want to open

Does this sound familiar? A bank notification appears on your phone, and you swipe it away unread. A payment email sits in your inbox, and leaving it until tomorrow feels easier. It is not laziness: the mere thought of the numbers makes your chest tighten.

Bari Tessler knows that feeling firsthand. While studying for a master’s degree in somatic psychology at Naropa University in Boulder, she threw away bank statements. She spent years learning to help people with their emotions, yet could not look at her own money.

Later, the same woman started a business and spent several years keeping other people’s books before creating the year-long Art of Money program. In the book, published in 2016, she introduces herself as a financial therapist: someone who helps people understand both their feelings about money and the numbers themselves.

The book’s central idea sounds unfamiliar. Tessler says money is neither a mathematics exam nor a test of adulthood, but a lifelong relationship. It contains fear, shame, family memories, and dreams. What most often damages it is shame rather than poor arithmetic: shame makes us unwilling to look at the numbers.

Tessler offers a three-stage path: healing, daily money practices, and a money map for the future. You will follow them in order and learn to look calmly at your numbers and spend on what truly matters to you.

Not bad with money, but ashamed to look at it

Tessler was twenty-eight when the time came to repay her student loan. During her studies, she had learned a great deal about people, bodies, and emotions, but, as she later said, her program never discussed money. There was nowhere left to run, so she decided to make a serious effort to understand money.

She began with what seems the dullest activity: learning bookkeeping software. Something unexpected happened. Tessler felt she understood her money and could manage it; in her words, she fell in love with bookkeeping. Soon she had a business keeping records for coaches, artists, and people in helping professions, the very people who wanted nothing to do with their own numbers.

What does this story show? Someone who threw away statements for years was not incapable of understanding money. She was ashamed to look at it. Tessler calls this money shame: feeling you do not deserve your money or manage it less well than you should.

Shame works in a simple, insidious way. Tessler observes that we confuse money with who we are: our self-worth, success, adulthood. Every number on a statement then sounds like a judgment of you. A mistake can be corrected, but a verdict is something you simply do not want to hear. You look away, the problem grows like a splinter you are afraid to touch, and shame grows stronger.

Hence the book’s central approach: release shame first, then tackle the numbers. Tessler calls her skill the art of un-shaming and describes four steps:

• Witness. Look directly at your money history without excuses or self-attack.

• Accept unconditionally. Speak to yourself as gently as you would to someone close who is struggling with bills.

• Forgive. Let go of past debts, late payments, and missed opportunities.

• Move on. Take the next small step without waiting until you are no longer afraid.

A common mistake, following Tessler’s logic, is starting a strict budget while shame is still loud inside you. The budget soon becomes another reason to criticize yourself, and the statements are pushed aside again.

Read in Livria

About the author

Bari Tessler is an American financial therapist with a master’s degree in somatic psychology and the founder of the year-long Art of Money program. She began with her own bookkeeping practice.

All books by this author: Bari Tessler

Terms from the book

  • Boulder
  • somatic psychology: A field of psychology that works with emotional experiences through bodily sensations. Tessler earned her master’s degree in it in 1998.
  • Naropa: A private university in Boulder, Colorado, where Tessler studied.
  • financial therapist: Tessler’s name for her profession: helping people with their relationship with money by combining emotional work with practical bookkeeping. It is not a medical specialty.
  • money shame: A concept from the book: feeling that you do not deserve your money or handle it poorly. Tessler considers it the main reason people avoid looking at their finances.
  • body check-in: The book’s main tool: a brief pause to notice your body, sensations, breathing, and feelings without changing anything. The author’s practice rather than a medical technique.
  • money story: The book’s term for the money-related beliefs and habits a person takes from family, culture, and personal experience.
  • money rituals: A practice from the book: small, deliberate actions marking a change in your relationship with money.
  • money date: Tessler’s practice of regularly spending time with your finances in a pleasant setting, starting with five minutes a day.
  • values-based bookkeeping: Tessler’s method: keeping records that let you compare actual spending with what matters to you, and naming spending categories after your values.
  • Miss Saigon: A musical by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, first staged in London in 1989.
  • money map: The third stage of Tessler’s system: a three-tier spending plan covering basic needs, comfort, and a dream life, revised as life changes.

All terms

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