FU Money Isn’t Really About Money

Why financial freedom has less to do with how much you make and more to do with what money makes possible.

If you’re thinking more seriously about how much freedom your career and money actually give you, subscribe. I’m writing the FU Money series for people who want more control over their work, income, and future.

I used to think the hard part of FU Money was making enough money.

I’m less sure of that now.

Because once you start making good money, life has a tendency to grow around the income. The house, the bills, the holidays, the schools, the expectations. Things that once felt expensive eventually just feel normal.

Then the job you might want to leave is paying for a life you’re afraid to change.

In the Federal Reserve’s 2025 survey of U.S. households, 55% of adults said they had enough savings to cover three months of expenses. As you’d expect, the number was much higher among people with family incomes of $100,000 or more.

It was 75%.

Which also means one in four higher-income households did not have three months of expenses set aside.

That’s why I don’t think salary tells us nearly as much about financial freedom as we assume it does.

Someone making $250,000 can be completely dependent on the next paycheck. Someone making half as much may have a year of runway, low fixed expenses, several ways to earn, and no particular panic about what happens if one source of income disappears.

The numbers matter.

But there’s another layer to this that I think we talk about far less.

What emotional job have you hired money to do?

We ask money to do some very strange jobs

Obviously money has practical uses. It keeps a roof over your head, pays for food, healthcare, education and retirement, and apparently allows airports to charge €17 for a sandwich without anyone calling the police.

But money also gets mixed up with how we feel about ourselves.

For some people it means safety. For others, status. It can become proof that your hard work paid off or that you belong at a certain level. Some people spend when they feel miserable because buying something provides a temporary lift. Others interpret an expensive gift as evidence of how much someone values them.

Financial psychologists have used the term money scripts to describe beliefs people develop around money, including avoidance, status, worship and vigilance. I wouldn’t take the labels too literally. A 2025 study of 2,686 people testing a revised version of the Money Script Inventory found problems with how well the four-factor model held up across a more diverse sample.

Human beings are probably a little too complicated to sort into four neat money personalities.

But the underlying idea is useful: our financial decisions are influenced by beliefs and emotions as well as arithmetic.

Research on compulsive buying has also linked it to negative emotional states and stress.That’s obviously the far end of a spectrum, and most people who occasionally cheer themselves up with a new pair of shoes do not have a psychological disorder.

Sometimes you want the thing.

Sometimes you want the feeling you get from buying the thing.

And sometimes the thing is supposed to say something about you.

That last one gets particularly interesting once you’ve spent twenty or thirty years building a successful career.

When your income starts telling you who you are

Imagine someone who worked for years to get to $300,000.

They earned the promotion, became an executive, made partner, built the reputation. Reaching that income probably felt like an achievement because it was one.

Then they decide they want something different.

Maybe they want to consult. Start a company. Go fractional. Write. Teach. Join a smaller business. Work four days a week. Spend more time with their children.

They leave and eventually build something that earns $180,000 a year.

They control their calendar. They choose their clients. They own what they are building. Their income comes from several places instead of one employer. They have more time and substantially fewer meetings involving thirteen people and a PowerPoint deck.

Are they less successful?

Financially, they are earning $120,000 less.

That number can be surprisingly difficult to ignore once compensation has become part of how you measure your own progress.

I’ve seen the reverse problem when people start working for themselves too. Someone can happily accept a $200,000 salary from a company and then feel deeply uncomfortable asking a client to pay $10,000 directly for their expertise.

Suddenly charging well feels greedy.

They don’t want to sell too hard. They don’t want to become “one of those people.” They tell themselves they care more about helping than money, then wonder why the economics of the business don’t work.

Money avoidance is one of the beliefs financial psychologists have studied. You don’t have to believe the whole framework to recognize the contradiction.

We can feel perfectly comfortable being well paid by someone else and strangely guilty about paying ourselves well.

There’s another version of this.

A large income can become the golden ticket I wrote about in the first article in this series.

Not because the income itself is a problem. I am very much in favor of making money.

But life expands.

Maybe you buy the bigger house because you can afford it. The holidays get nicer. You join the club. You upgrade the car. Your children go to a more expensive school. Your social circle has certain norms.

Ten years later, you’re thinking about changing careers and calculate that the new thing would have to generate $300,000 almost immediately.

So you don’t do it.

This is where I think some expenses become identity expenses.

They aren’t necessarily stupid purchases. They might be things you genuinely enjoy.

The question is whether giving them up would reduce your quality of life or whether it would mostly make you feel like the kind of person who used to be more successful.

Those are different costs.

Before obsessing over how to replace an old salary, I’d want to know what that salary is actually buying.

How much does the life you genuinely want cost?

The cost of freedom

Someone who needs $20,000 every month to maintain their life requires much more money to feel financially independent than someone who can happily live on $6,000.

There is no virtue attached to either number.

If you love your house and can afford it, keep it. If travel is one of the great joys of your life, spend money on it. I have no desire to turn FU Money into another lecture about making coffee at home and never ordering dessert.

But every fixed expense does have a consequence.

It increases the amount of income you need before saying no becomes financially comfortable.

That’s one reason the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s research on financial well-being caught my attention.

They spent years studying how consumers themselves described financial well-being. Their definition doesn’t rest on a particular salary, net worth or credit score. They describe it in terms of financial security and freedom of choice, including the ability to absorb a financial shock and make choices that allow you to enjoy life.

They also explicitly point out that people with the same income can have very different levels of financial well-being.

That sounds a lot like FU Money to me.

Morgan Housel makes a similar point in The Psychology of Money, one of my favorite books:

“The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, ‘I can do whatever I want today.’”

I don’t take that literally. Most of us have children, responsibilities, appointments and people who would object if we decided to spend Tuesday in bed watching Netflix.

But I agree completely with the principle.

The value of money is partly what it lets you buy.

A much less visible part is what it lets you refuse.

I think that part gets underestimated because nobody can see it.

You can see the Porsche.

You can’t see the six months of expenses sitting untouched in an account.

You can see the beautiful house.

You can’t see someone turning down a terrible client because they don’t need the money badly enough.

And this is where being financially cautious can become complicated too.

Saving gives you options. But someone can have more than enough money and still remain terrified of spending any of it, leaving a job, taking time off or turning down another opportunity to earn.

At some point, accumulating money because you are frightened of ever having less is not quite the same thing as freedom.

Entrepreneurship can recreate the same trap

There is a very seductive idea that if employment creates dependence, entrepreneurship creates freedom.

Sometimes.

You can also quit one boss and accidentally acquire seven.

You can build a business where one client accounts for 60% of your income. You can become afraid to take a holiday because nobody else can run things. You can say yes to miserable projects because next month’s revenue is uncertain.

The logo changed. The dependence didn’t necessarily disappear.

The OECD published a useful analysis of self-employment across Europe in 2025. Self-employed people continued to have an advantage in work autonomy, but the research also found that gaps in job security and financial well-being between the self-employed and employees had widened over time. Solo self-employed workers were particularly exposed to financial and job-security challenges.

I think this is something the entrepreneurship industry glosses over far too often.

Owning a business can give you extraordinary control over your work. It can also create a very fragile financial structure.

Whether you earn your money from an employer or your own company almost feels secondary if one person can still pull the plug on most of your income.

This was the point of my previous article, FU Money Has Two Sides.

Savings are only one side of FU Money.

The other side is your ability to make more.

I don’t think financial capital is built in isolation. It’s usually the result of other forms of capital compounding over time:

• Expertise capital — from what you know and can do.

• Reputation capital — from what people believe about you and your work.

• Relationship capital — from the people who know you, trust you, and will open doors for you.

• Intellectual property capital — from the ideas, frameworks, content, products, and assets you own.

Your personal brand sits largely inside reputation capital because it helps make that value visible and transferable.

The stronger these forms of capital become, the more ways you have to turn them into income.

Money is often the output, not the starting point.

For me, optionality means having enough alternatives that one employer, client, relationship or bad turn of events doesn’t get to decide everything else for you.

So what is the money for?

I don’t think a healthy relationship with money can be measured by how little you spend.

I also don’t think it can be measured by how much you make.

What interests me now is whether the money is helping you build a life you want or whether maintaining the money has quietly become the life.

Because FU Money is useful when you can actually use the freedom it creates.

Maybe that means leaving, or staying in a job you genuinely like because you know you don’t have to stay. It could mean earning less for a while, taking a risk, turning down a lucrative opportunity because you no longer want the life attached to it, or spending a ridiculous amount on something you love because you’ve consciously decided it’s worth it.

I’m less interested these days in asking, “How much money is enough?”

I think I’d rather know:

What do I want my money to make possible?

The number comes after that.

If this made you rethink what financial freedom means, subscribe for the rest of the FU Money series.

I’m exploring how to build enough financial independence, earning power, and optionality that your next decision doesn’t have to be dictated by a paycheck, client, employer, or anyone else.