7 Reasons You're Trapped in Scarcity (And How to Fix It)

P A R T O F T H E S A G E T R A N S F O R M A T I O N S E R I E S
7 Reasons You're Trapped in Scarcity
(And How to Turn It Around)
future
So youcanfinallytakecontrolofyourfinancial
By Peter Sage
Founder, Sage Academy | Sage Wealth Academy

Introduction
Why Money Still Feels Stressful (No MatterHowMuchYouMake)
I want to start with something that might surprise you.
The most financially stressed people I have ever worked with are not the ones with the least money. Some of the
most anxious, most avoidant, most fundamentally insecure relationships with money I have encountered belong
to people earning six and seven figures. People who by every external measure have succeeded financially and
who find, once they arrive at the number they were aiming for, that the anxiety did not go with it.
I know something about this from direct personal experience. I was born on a government housing estate. My
parents had no financial advantages and passed very little financial education on to me, because they had none
to pass. I dropped out of school at sixteen with no qualifications. And over the decades that followed I built and
lost and rebuilt again more times than I can easily count. I lost everything as recently as 2018. I went from what
looked like success on the outside to being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt with no business, no income,
and a wrecked credit rating.
And here is the thing I want you to hear. When it happened, I did not panic. I did not spiral. I did not lie awake
rehearsing disaster scenarios. I got quietly excited, because I understood the rules of the money game. And
understanding the rules meant I knew that rebuilding was not a question of if. It was a question of when.
The variable was time. Not possibility.
That level of certainty, in the face of genuine financial collapse, is not available to most people. Not because
they lack intelligence or work ethic or desire. Because they were never taught the rules. They were taught how
to earn money, perhaps. How to spend it, definitely. But not how the game actually works. Not where the
leverage is. Not what is running underneath the surface of their relationship with money that is quietly
determining the results they keep getting regardless of how hard they work.
The money game is eighty percent psychology and twenty percent mechanics. Most people do
the opposite. They obsess over the mechanics and ignore the psychology that is running
everything.

This guide is about the eighty percent. The inner game. The patterns, beliefs, and identity-level programming
that most people inherited before they were old enough to evaluate it. That have been running their financial
decisions from below the level of conscious awareness ever since. And that no amount of budgeting advice,
investment strategy, or motivational instruction can address, because they are not operating at the level of
strategy. They are operating at the level of who you believe yourself to be in relation to money.
Understand that level, and everything else becomes considerably more tractable.
Let us begin.