Why There's Never Enough Money, and How to Test Your Thought About It

A person gets a promotion, pays off an old loan, finds a second side job, and the inner sense that "there's still not enough money" never goes away. The problem is rarely the income itself. Behind that phrase there's usually one specific thought that has never been tested against a fact, only repeated for years as a diagnosis the person gives themselves.

Below: where that feeling comes from, why advice like "just think positively about money" doesn't work on it, and what method of testing behavioral science offers in place of self-persuasion.

The quotes below come from Russian-language forums (Pikabu, Woman.ru), where people write about money in their own words. The amounts are in rubles.

Why money feels short even when income has grown

One forum user on Pikabu described her experience of income growing from 50,000 to 500,000 rubles over two years like this: "There seemed to be money, but I just didn't feel it at all." The amount grew tenfold, yet the inner state stayed the same, because the thought about money and the real income existed separately from each other.

A similar wording appears in a shorter form: "There's always very little money" (Pikabu). Notice that this phrase has no figure and no condition under which it would stop being true. That's the first sign of a belief. An observation can be refuted by a fact, while a belief lives apart from facts.

The thought that forbids spending even when there's money

Another verbatim entry from Pikabu shows how a belief turns into a rule of behavior: "The thought is always the same: there's no money, and what there is was earned at 2 jobs without sleep, so you have no right to allow yourself anything." Here the thought of scarcity already works as a direct ban on spending. It's tied to the number of hours worked, and the real balance in the account isn't counted.

That's how most money beliefs work: they aren't up for discussion and immediately trigger a specific action or refusal to act. Arguing with such a thought is pointless, because it was never formulated as an argument. It's simply believed by default.

How a "ridiculous" sum turns into interest

The same mechanism works in loan decisions. A Woman.ru forum user recalled: "Against much bigger expenses the sum was ridiculous, and then the interest piled up." The small amount wasn't calculated in advance, so it wasn't taken seriously, and it became a problem only after the interest had accumulated.

Simple arithmetic decides everything here. The full cost of a purchase on installments or credit can be calculated in advance, with all the interest and payments that aren't visible on the price tag. Take your last installment purchase and calculate its full cost in total. One number often changes your attitude to the next such purchase more than any warning. This is general financial literacy. It isn't a recommendation on any specific loan or debt, and it can't replace advice on existing debt.

The mechanism that makes a thought come true

In 1948 the sociologist Robert Merton described a phenomenon he called the self-fulfilling prophecy (Merton, "The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy," The Antioch Review, 8(2), 1948, pp. 193-210). His logic is simple: a false definition of a situation changes a person's behavior, and the changed behavior makes that definition true.

Merton's own example: a student sure he'll fail an exam spends time on anxiety instead of preparing and indeed fails it. A fear that initially had no grounds becomes fully justified in hindsight.

With money the circle works the same way. A person sure they can't name the full price for their work names a lowered one. Gets paid less. Becomes convinced they were right and next time names an even lower one. There's no attraction of money here. The thought changes the action, the action changes the result, and the result confirms the original thought in hindsight.

In the same work Merton described a way out of the circle: it breaks where the original assumption is questioned and replaced with a new one. For that, the thought has to be tested. Willpower alone won't talk you out of it.

Working it out on paper versus testing by action: what's the difference

In 2011 the researchers McManus, Van Doorn and Yiend split participants (N=91) into three groups: one got a thought analysis on paper (comparing arguments for and against), another got a behavioral experiment, in which a person states a testable prediction and checks it against the real result, and the third got nothing, serving as the control group (McManus, Van Doorn & Yiend, Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 43, 2011, pp. 540-547, doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2011.07.003).

Both methods produced a shift in belief relative to the control group. This is an observation on a specific sample. It can't be called a universal law, and presenting it as a guaranteed result for everyone would be dishonest.

Still, the idea itself works: colliding a specific predicted number with a specific actual result is harder to explain away with familiar arguments than an abstract argument on paper.

What this looks like in practice

The formula from the study is simple: name the thought, rate your belief in it as a percentage, formulate a testable prediction, take the action, record the fact, and rate your belief again. The difference between the first and second number is the result a person gets from their own experience.

I put this sequence together as the "Money Thoughts Journal," a free printable form of 23 pages with 14 entries for two weeks. Each entry has six fields: the verbatim thought, what happened a minute before it, trust in the thought from 0 to 100, a testable prediction, what actually happened, and trust again. At the end there are three numbers and a page explaining how to read them. You can download the journal free via a direct link (the PDF is in Russian): Money Thoughts Journal, PDF.

What this journal doesn't have and never will

There are no phrases here about money loving silence or being attracted by the right mindset. There's no magic here, only a check against facts, which breaks the circle described above.

The journal doesn't replace consultation with a psychologist and doesn't replace an individual financial or investment recommendation. It isn't designed for work with existing debt, restructuring or bankruptcy, which is a separate licensed field. The materials of this article and the journal are informational and educational.

You can start testing one of your money thoughts against a fact today, even without the form: say the thought out loud, rate your belief in it with a number, and formulate one prediction you can check against the result this very week. A similar principle of testing against fact instead of feeling works in business too; I covered how it looks there in the article about the three-day test.

If the topic is close to you, the Telegram channel Растём с ИИ publishes breakdowns like this and working materials: calculations, practices and tables you can make in an evening.