Community Care and Your Money

There's a version of personal finance that goes like this: work hard, spend less than you earn, invest the difference, tell no one, retire quietly. It's the dominant narrative and whilst I am fully behind it, it’s not the whole picture. 

Humans are not supposed to do money alone, for most of history we didn't. Resources were shared, labour was collective and the idea that your financial life was entirely your own business and entirely your own responsibility would have been quite foreign. The hyper-individual model - each household an island, every person responsible only for themselves - is pretty new, culturally specific, and I believe, damaging. Not just financially, but to our mental health, our relationships and our sense of belonging.

This is the last post in my Mental Health Awareness Week series and I wanted to end here, with community, because I think it's where so much of the good stuff lives.

We Were Never Meant To Do This Alone

The concept of social wealth doesn't appear on your net worth spreadsheet but it is absolutely real. The friend who will lend you their car. The neighbour who takes in a parcel. The family member who can put you up in a city you don't live in. The colleague who tips you off about a job. The community group that shows up when something goes wrong.

None of this has a price tag and yet all of it has enormous financial value. In times of crisis - job loss, illness, relationship breakdown - it is often the strength of your community that determines how quickly and how well you recover. This is social wealth, and it is worth investing in just as deliberately as any ISA.

The mutual aid movement has made this beautifully visible in recent years. Growing enormously during the pandemic and continuing well beyond it, mutual aid networks are communities of people pooling resources, skills and time to look after each other, without bureaucracy, means testing or shame. Just people deciding that they are responsible for one another.

Money, Relationships and the Mess When Values Clash

How we handle money in our closest relationships is one of the least talked about and most consequential things in our financial lives (I’ve spoken about relationships and money a few times).

In partnerships, different money styles can create enormous friction: the spender and the saver, the planner and the spontaneous one, the person who grew up with scarcity and hoards against future disaster and the person who grew up comfortable and can't understand what the anxiety is about. Neither is wrong, exactly, but without honest conversation the gap between them can work against a relationship.

The same is true in friendships. We've all been there, the friend who always suggests the expensive restaurant, the one who borrows money and somehow never mentions it again, the one whose lifestyle makes you feel quietly inadequate by comparison, or conversely, the one who makes you feel guilty for earning more. Money is one of the last great social taboos and the silence around it costs us.

Good friendships, though, can be one of your greatest financial assets. People who can talk honestly about money, who will say ‘I can't afford that right now’ without shame, who can celebrate each other's financial wins without envy, who can ask for help and offer it freely, these relationships are genuinely protective. They are a safety net that no financial product can replicate.

Taxes Are Community Care

A reframe I offer because I need to remember it myself sometimes: taxes are not money taken from you but money you contribute to the shared life of your society.

Roads. Libraries. Parks. Schools. The NHS. Street lighting. The fire service. These are not abstract government expenditures, they are the infrastructure of a life, built collectively because no individual could build them alone. When we reframe tax as buying into shared infrastructure rather than losing money to a faceless state, it moves something within us. It becomes an act of participation rather than loss.

I'm not naïve about this, there are legitimate conversations to be had about how tax is spent and by whom, and plenty of room for frustration. And also, I’m not suggesting you should pay more than necessary. But the base reframe, from loss to contribution, is one that I think genuinely improves your relationship with your own money.

Volunteering: The Financial Paradox

Here is something interesting: giving your time away for free has measurable financial benefits.

The mental health evidence for volunteering is robust - reduced depression and anxiety, increased sense of purpose, better social connection, but the practical benefits are real too. Volunteering builds skills, extends your professional network, opens doors, adds to your CV and gives you reference points and experiences that paid work sometimes doesn't. It is also, crucially, one of the most powerful community-building activities available to you at no financial cost.

There is a paradox here that I love - in giving something away, you often end up with more. Which brings me to the bigger picture.

Writing this has reminded me that I needed to sign up to steward the Stockholm Pride Parade again - last year was an absolute highlight of my year!

Abundance vs Scarcity: Community as a Mindset

Scarcity thinking says there isn't enough - not enough money, not enough opportunity, not enough to go around - and so you hold tight, hoarding, competing, isolating. It makes a kind of logical sense if you believe the premise, but the premise is often wrong.

Abundance thinking says that there is enough, that generosity tends to return to you, that other people's success doesn't diminish your own, that sharing resources - time, knowledge, connections, money - creates more value than hoarding them ever could. Community care is an abundance behaviour. It requires trust that you will not be left with nothing if you give something away.

This is not magical thinking, it is pattern recognition. The most financially resilient people I know are not the ones who accumulated the most in isolation. They are the ones with the richest networks, the most reciprocal relationships and the deepest roots in their communities. Their social wealth is real and it counts when times are rough or good.

Bringing It Together

Mental health and money are both, at their core, relational. They exist in the context of other people - shaped by our families of origin, our partnerships, our friendships, our communities and the broader society we live in. The hyper-individual model asks us to solve both in isolation and then wonders why so many of us are struggling.

The antidote is not a budget or a spreadsheet, it's not even a bigger emergency fund, though that helps. It's connection, honesty and a willingness to be known, financially and otherwise, and to know others.

If this week has stirred anything for you - a recognition, a discomfort, a small spark of wanting something to be different - I'd love to be part of that conversation. Financial coaching with me is not about being told what to do with your money. It's about understanding your relationship with it, in the context of your whole life, and working out what you actually want.

That conversation starts with a free call. No pressure or agenda, just a bit of time and space to think.

Book yours here.

Love Eleanor. xxx