You Start Making Money: Then This Happens (5 Traps)

Making more money doesn’t solve every problem — sometimes it creates new ones.

I’m writing about this article: your issues won’t end when you start earning more money or accumulating wealth. They alter. The absurd thing is that, as soon as your financial situation improves, people tend to assume that you are problem-free. That is true.

People don’t think about the fact that there’s a whole new set of traps, issues, and problems that pop up when you start making more money. So, here are five traps to watch out for as you do better with your money.

#1: I Deserve It Syndrome

So the first one is this, the I deserve it syndrome, right? This is a genuine trap. And that’s where you make more money as your net worth grows, and you start to get it in your brain that just because you make more money and your net worth is growing, and you’re seeing progress in your finances, you start believing that you just deserve better, right? You start to think money has to equal nicer stuff or more stuff.

This is a financial trap that will leave you making more money and building wealth, but still living paycheck to paycheck if you’re not careful, cuz you lose control.

Because you think, “Hey, I got it, or we got it, right? We don’t have to worry about tracking our money anymore. We don’t have to worry about a budget. We work hard, so we deserve to live a life without a budget, without tracking what we spend.”

But here’s the deal: you stop being organized with your money. You stop focusing, and you stop tracking what you spend, and you become undisciplined with money. That’s a real trap.

This is really, really common amongst people who started from nothing, and all of a sudden, they’re making a whole bunch of money. It happens all the time, so read this.

#2: Ego Trap With Money

Now, the second trap, as your money starts to grow, is what I like to call the ego trap.

Now, the ego trap is the trap where you start believing that you are somehow fundamentally smarter than everybody else because your bank balance is higher than most people.

Or you have more money, so you much you must know more stuff or be more intelligent than most people, right? Or because you have a business that leaped over seven figures in revenue last year.

You’re not smarter than all the rest. Your business probably ain’t that big yet. I’m not dissing. I’m just saying you have work to do yet. Get off your high horse, some. Be humble. Just shut the hell up and keep doing what you’ve been doing to get where you are.

Yes, you may be doing well with money right now, but remember, anything could change in the blink of an eye. Or you can wake up tomorrow morning and not be doing so well financially.

So, get your nose out of the air, stop flaunting, stop walking around with your chest out, and keep working. Because when you start winning with money, you’ve got to realize something, and you’ve got to learn this. You must learn to tell your ego to be quiet.

This ego gets in the way and often leads to poor spending habits, ultimately, or it leads to emotional behaviors with money. Bad investment decisions, eh? The I can’t lose mindset, which is completely false, can cause a lot of friction between you and 99% of the people that you come in contact with.

Now, hear me out. I’m not saying that you need to calm your ego down for the sake of other people. I’m saying you need to come off your high horse for the sake of humility.

When you’re truly grateful, it doesn’t involve any ego. So read out for the ego trap.

Now, the third trap that you’ve got to read out for when you’re doing well with money and growing your net worth is resisting the urge to live flashy.

This one kind of sneaks up on a lot of people, right? Because now you can actually afford some things, and that’s where the danger in this trap is. You start upgrading everything.

Your car improves. Your house is expanding. Do your clothes get more expensive and brand-name? Vacations get an upgrade, too, don’t they? You’re going on more vacations, and you’re going to more exotic, nicer beaches? And before you know it, you’re not living; you’re actually performing. You’re trying to look like you have money instead of actually just still building with money.

Now, let me be clear. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your money. Am I not telling you not to enjoy your money? But when your lifestyle starts to grow at the same pace as your income, you’ve just trapped yourself.

Because now you need that high income just to maintain the lifestyle that you’ve become used to, or to maintain a certain image, right? That’s not freedom.

When you start making more money, that’s like bondage. It’s pressure, more pressure.

The worst part is that most of the people you’re trying to impress — or perhaps you’re just trying to impress yourself — don’t give a damn about the kind of vacation you take or the kind of car you drive, or they’re just struggling to make ends meet.

They ain’t worried about you or thinking about you.

The deal is this: real wealth moves in silence. It doesn’t need validation. It doesn’t need to have an expensive suit on to feel validated.

So, here’s the deal. As your net worth grows and your money grows, you have to learn to live well without needing to look rich. There’s a difference.

#4: Money Changes Relationships

You’re building wealth, and you have more money, and you’re hanging out with the people who have a whole lot less than you; read out. That’s all I got to say, right?

Now, this one is real, okay? Because as you grow, your environment doesn’t always grow with you. And that can create tension, jealousy, maybe envy, right? People start looking at you differently.

The deal. Some of the people that you’ve been around for a long, long time- you start winning with money- they’re going to celebrate with you. Yay! Got your back. Pushing you forward.

However, some people will give you a sidelong glance. Some people will begin to anticipate things from you. Suddenly, you’re the one who pays the bill each time you go out to eat, or you’re the one they call when they’re short on anything, or you’re the one they subtly compare themselves to without you even realizing it.

And if you’re not careful, this can turn into resentment from both sides, right? You start feeling used, or you start feeling like they don’t like you anymore. They don’t want you to come around anymore. They didn’t call you for this event and that event, right? They start feeling judged.

And now what happens is that the relationship is not the same anymore.

What do you do in this situation? You don’t cut everybody off. That’s not what I’m asking you to do.

You do have to get comfortable with boundaries.
You’ve got to learn how to say no to some people.
You’ve got to learn how to move differently.
You might have to build a new circle of people around you that matches where you’re going.

Not just the same circle that matches where you came from, like a lot of us are in, right?

Because here’s the deal: when you start winning with money, not everybody on this level with you can go to that next level with you. It’s not a bad thing, but it just is what it is. And that’s not arrogance; that’s just being. You want to be in alignment with the group of people that you’re around most of the time.

#5: Over-Delegation Trap

What happens when you start making more money is simply this: the over-delegation lifestyle. This one right here is a quiet killer because it feels like success.

Now that you have some money at last, you begin outsourcing everything. preparing food. You have a personal chef, someone who can come in at any time to cater, or you order Uber Eats every day since you don’t have time to prepare meals. Or perhaps it’s cleaning? You may hire a babysitter, have a cleaning agency or person come in once a week.

You’ve got money, so you hire everything out. You pay somebody to clean up your home, to run errands for you. Somebody else can do it, right?

And before you know it, you’ve built a lifestyle where money tends to sort of leak out the bottom? Every single day. You’re spending without even thinking about money. Because why? Because you have the money.

Once more, convenience is perfectly acceptable. I understand. However, you lose discipline when everything in your life gets outsourced due to a lack of time. You become unconscious. In the end, you lose control over your expenditures.

And you start to… Here’s what happens. People start to justify it. Oh, I’m just busy, or I don’t have the time, or I can make more money working than actually cleaning up behind myself or cooking myself a meal. I make enough money, why not? I value my time, so I just pay people.

This is what I hear. I value my time.

And so you end up paying people to do the stuff that you grew up doing just fine until you start having more money.

Yeah, and it’s possible that you could actually be wasting a ton of money and disconnecting from the very habits that built the money in the first place that you have.

Simple things like cooking yourself a meal, managing your schedule, handling your own responsibilities, cleaning your own toilets, right? Those things, they tend to sort of keep you grounded.

I don’t care how much on the grind you are. Sometimes you need to take the time to do some of the things yourself for the sake of sanity and the sake of staying grounded, and not paying to outsource your entire life.

I’m not saying don’t delegate anything, but I’m saying delegate where it makes sense. But don’t outsource your entire life, right?

Those are the five financial traps that you’re going to face as your net worth grows and you start making more money.