As a Kid, I Thought Money Was the Problem. Turns Out, It Was. Just Not the Way I Thought.

Growing up in a small town in Kentucky with my parents and four siblings, three older, one younger, my relationship with money was really a relationship with fear. My mom told me my dad gambled away what we had shortly before I was born. We moved to the town where I and my younger sibling grew up, and we were struggling financially from the start.

That struggle wasn’t a phase. It was the whole atmosphere I grew up in, because right from my childhood, we were living inside that reality, and my parents lived paycheck to paycheck.

I remember my eldest sibling getting into a fight with some of the locals and getting badly injured. We lost him four days later to his injuries, before my dad could get him to another town’s hospital with better facilities. I was so shaken that it took me months before I could become really social again.

Wealth felt like an abstract concept to me. The mind is like a memory card that stores experiences, assumptions, and beliefs about what’s normal, and I grew up believing I may never be rich or wealthy, because it had never been my reality. I built my whole idea of what was possible around the capacity of my mind.

Despite struggling to get myself into college, I unconsciously carried that scarcity mindset with me the entire way.

I avoided and turned down opportunities that felt too big before I even tried them, and assumed certain lifestyles were unrealistic. Because tell me how it’s supposed to feel realistic for a fellow college student to be making two grand monthly from a business she claimed to run online from her dorm.

I could have at least asked to be taught or shown what it was, but I didn’t, because I felt it might be some kind of scheme. That was just one of many opportunities I could have tried. The capacity of my mind at the time dissuaded me. Gosh, I feel really ashamed thinking back on these things.

There was actually a time I ran a small business before college, selling handmade goods locally. I undercharged constantly, terrified that asking for what I was worth would scare customers away. It fell apart within a year. I was so afraid of spending money that I couldn’t see the spending that would have actually grown it.

I made every decision from scarcity without realizing that’s what I was doing, and no amount of budgeting advice fixed it, because the problem was never really the numbers on the page.

Then I attended a wealth and mindset summit in Nashville, Tennessee, almost on a whim, and something shifted. Not overnight. It was slow and often frustrating. But it paid off in the end, and it changed the direction of my entire life.

Scarcity 2 Sovereignty exists because I had to learn, the hard way, that financial freedom starts in the mind long before it shows up in a bank account.

This isn’t written from a place of “I’ve made it, let me tell you how.” It’s written from how I’ve been actively building both actual wealth and a healthier mind and relationship with money. The habits, the mindset shifts, the mistakes, the lessons. All of it, as it happens.

What You’ll Find Here

• Practical, no-fluff money habits for people starting from behind, not ahead.
• Honest writing on mindset: how scarcity thinking quietly runs your decisions, and how to actually shift it, from someone who’s lived both sides of it.
• No get-rich-quick promises and no inflated income claims. Just real, consistent steps toward wealth, financial literacy, and freedom.

A Quick Honesty Note

I’m not a licensed financial advisor, and nothing here is formal financial advice. Everything on this blog comes from real experience, ongoing research, and continuous learning, shared openly as I go. Always do your own due diligence before making financial decisions.

If any part of this sounds like where you are right now, you’re welcome here.

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