How to Create Safety and Security Without Accumulating Wealth

A guide for inheritors of wealth with social justice values to humbly shift out of a wealth accumulation mindset and into true long-term security.

Many of us with radical politics and access to inherited wealth want to increase our giving, but we get stuck. We get paralyzed by a fear that we will one day not have enough, so we reach out to financial planners to tell us that magical number to ensure we will always be safe and comfortable. We tell ourselves once we find that magical number, we will be able to finally relax and not worry about the future. For people of color, queer people, and women, this feeling might be layered with real experiences of oppression and a desire for protection from violence in society. But we know in our hearts that it doesn’t feel right for us to hold onto more money than we need when the majority of the world does not have enough resources to survive. We struggle with the tension of wanting to align our money with social justice values but fearing for individual security.

The problem is, until we address the underlying ways that our lives rely heavily on transactional relationships and individualism, we will remain trapped in the cycle of unconscious wealth accumulation.

Here’s the Vicious Cycle of Wealth Accumulation that we get trapped in:

In order to break the vicious cycle, we need to debunk some of the core lies that keep us trapped and get reconnected with reality.

Part I: Truths

1. There is no amount of wealth that will guarantee you will live a long, comfortable life.

We are living in late-stage, racialized capitalism– where the wealth divide is becoming increasingly volatile and unviable (the top one percent of households globally own 43 percent of all personal wealth!¹). We live in a competitive world where most people do not have their basic needs guaranteed. The stock market can (and will) crash at any moment, and our assets could easily vanish overnight. In addition to that, we’re in the midst of a massive climate crisis where the viability of our species’ survival is questionable. Yikes! So we are grasping for comfort and the “known” for good reason.

As the world becomes increasingly volatile, and as we get older and confront (or avoid) our own mortality, many of us are compelled to keep more resources to feel safe. This– often unknowingly– causes us to fall deeper into the vicious cycle of wealth accumulation; it also gives us the illusion of being in control.

For most of us, the family members who created our trust funds did so for the purpose of ensuring we would have long, safe, and fulfilling lives.

The truth is, no amount of money will make us immortal. We will all one day die.

We need to learn how to discern anxiety about mortality from true financial scarcity. We need to develop means of coping with a volatile world beyond wealth accumulation.

I personally got politicized around capitalism when my beloved brother died at age 26 from a rare form of cancer. Despite our access to supreme health care and specialists, my family’s wealth was unable to save his life. Despite the fact that he got a 4.0 at Columbia University and received a Fulbright Fellowship– and was by all measurements on a confident path to financial and academic success– his life was brutally and quickly cut short. This was a profound wake-up call for me about the unpredictable and painfully temporary nature of life, and it shattered the illusion that wealth would make me invincible.

2. Financial advisors are not god.

It can be incredibly useful to hire a financial planner or financial advisor². I recommend financial advisors to the majority of my clients to help them gain financial literacy, flesh out a long-term plan that will support their vision for divestment, and reinvest their money into values-aligned investments. But here are some things to keep in mind before you hire a financial advisor.

Financial advisors are trained into a fiscally conservative mindset to protect clients from financial losses and maximize wealth accumulation. Their strategy of managing the unknowns of life– such as the age you’ll be when you die, the state of the stock market in 30 years, and the risk of your unborn children having expensive needs– is to hold on to as much money as possible to avoid all possible risk.

They narrowly focus on your nuclear family’s safety, consider philanthropy through the lens of tax evasion, invest in extractive corporations to secure profit, and offer you a myriad of possible fear-based scenarios that will require you to keep and/or accumulate more wealth. Their structure is inherently rooted in fear and preparing for the unknown. There is nothing wrong with this– it’s what we pay them to do. We just need to keep this context in mind when we listen to their advice. This is also why it’s especially important to only work with an advisor whom you are confident is values-aligned.

And no financial advisor can tell you what your values are and what you should be willing to “risk” for the sake of aligning your money with your values. Only you can grapple with the tension between profit and values-alignment. In fact, financial advisors often are legally unable to support more radical decisions, as they are vulnerable to lawsuits if you ever end up running out of money in the future. If you want to give away 90% of your inherited wealth or divest fully from Wall Street, they might not legally be able to support you if they are not entirely confident your plan is foolproof.

I once sat in on a meeting between a 25-year-old client and a financial advisor. The client entered the meeting hoping to make a plan to give away at least $1M out of her $2M in net wealth and was informed that she could only “safely” give away $100,000. She was understandably confused and conflicted about what to do; the expert she had hired had told her having less than $1.9M could lead her down a path of poverty. I’ve witnessed financial advisors tell multimillionaire clients that if they fully divest from Wall Street, they will never have enough money to retire. Financial planning can lack imagination, perspective, and creative solutions.

Financial advisors often reinforce the idea that we need more money to be okay, trapping us into the vicious cycle of wealth accumulation. We must stop looking to them for all of the answers and view their opinions as one of many opinions to weigh and consider.

We have a choice. We can succumb to narratives of fear and scarcity, or we can set our own path.

When we hold our financial plans more lightly and with more nuance, and maintain our own critical thinking, we can stay firm in our commitment to move money to places that are fighting for a more secure, safer world for all and break the vicious cycle of wealth accumulation.

3. Definitions of enoughness vary dramatically across class– revealing how they are subjective and irrational.

“If you move up from coach to business to first class, you won’t want to go back to coach. And once you’ve flown private, wild horses will never drag you through a public airport terminal again. Comforts, once gained, become necessities. And if enough of those comforts become necessities, you eventually peel yourself away from any kind of common feeling with the rest of humanity.”
― Abigail Disney³

Take a moment and ask yourself — how much money would you need to have to feel truly and permanently safe and secure? Then ask yourself — where did you get that number from? If everyone in the world felt they needed that same number, would that even be economically viable?

As people become wealthier, their magical number increases dramatically. A Harvard study of over 4,000 millionaires found that in order to be 100 percent happy, “they would need to grow their fortune by 1,000 percent, regardless of how many millions they had.”⁴ Even with hundreds of millions of dollars, people still feel the need to increase their wealth to be happier. This demonstrates wealth can create an endless hunger for more money. Money is addictive, people!

A study by Morning Consult shows that some people who earn as little as $50,000/year feel rich, while others who earn $100,000/year feel poor.⁵ We humans are incredibly adaptable– we can grow accustomed to living off of very little material resources or an overabundance of resources. Through class segregation, wealthy networks reinforce a distorted sense of enoughness and normalize hoarding more wealth.

I don’t mean to deny the importance of having enough money and resources to survive or to idolize poverty. Everyone needs and deserves shelter, food, health care, clothing, access to mental health services, etc. But when wealthy people maintain and accumulate endless wealth because we are distorted about enoughness, we have a huge impact on the world because we continue to deprive others of meeting their basic needs.

And as we get accustomed to certain levels of luxury and material comfort, we lose touch with our inherent resourcefulness and resilience. This can be especially true for white inheritors from the United States, as we don’t need to develop resilience to navigate racism, state-sanctioned violence, and xenophobia.

We must decide how much is enough and what comforts we are willing to part with in order to lead a values-aligned life.

4. Focusing on individual safety and survival creates less safety for everyone.

“If you’re the only well-fed person in a room full of starving people, how safe do you feel?”

― Ed Whitfield⁶, co-managing director of the Fund for Democratic Communities

Because of the individualist nature of white supremacy culture and capitalism, most wealthy people were raised to believe that anyone beyond our biological family is our competition, and that short-term profit matters more than the longevity of the planet and the prosperity of the rest of the world. The underlying idea is that our needs are fundamentally at odds with the needs of others, rather than interwoven with others.

Through the lens of scarcity, individuality, and domination, workers organizing for a livable wage is a threat to the well-being of a company; indigenous organizers resisting the construction of an oil pipeline is a threat to our economy; and having Black and Brown people in prisons will keep white people (and our property) safe.

This way of relating to the world creates more danger and isolation for everyone– most acutely for communities targeted by white supremacy and classism, but also for those of us who are financially and socially profiting from this system. On a spiritual and interpersonal level, relating to the majority of people as our enemy and as people to control is deeply isolating. This dynamic creates suspicion and paranoia and forces us to continue to rely on wealth rather than on relationships. If we only have money to rely on for your sense of security, especially when the majority of the world barely has enough resources to survive, we’re in a pretty volatile situation.

It is a fallacy to believe that your well-being exists independently of the well-being of every living being around you. We are only as well as the people and living beings around us. Our lives depend on the health of the forests and oceans and on the people who make our clothing and harvest our food.

If you retire at age 65 with $5M in the bank, but the planet has risen 5 degrees in temperature, and half of your generation is houseless, how safe and secure will you really be?

If you are the only person in your group of friends to have enough money to retire, while everyone else must work themselves to death into old age, how fulfilling and satisfying will your own retirement feel?

On a global economic level, when we invest in corporations that steal from our future to secure personal profit– such as palm oil companies that cut down forests, tech conglomerates that consolidate power in the hands of the few, and private prisons and migrant detention centers that destroy lives and traumatize future generations– we are stealing from the future safety of ourselves, our families, our communities, and the world. We are actively undermining the very social justice movements that are trying to make the world safer for everyone. We are making ourselves fundamentally less safe.

5. Wealth accumulation obstructs solidarity and inner resilience.

“If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become.”

― Robin Wall Kimmerer⁷

The decision to keep more resources than we need and to have a very narrow circle of those we care about sets us up for a more disconnected and unfulfilling path. It also makes us less resilient.

Wealthy people are socialized to use money to cope with life and avoid inconveniences: rather than rely on friends, we pay people to drive us to the airport or deliver us food when we are sick. We hire fancy lawyers to avoid dealing with the consequences of our actions. We fly in private planes to avoid dealing with crowds or having to wait.

I had several clients who needed to travel a long distance during the pandemic but weren’t able to do the drive on their own, and were concerned about being exposed to Covid-19 if they flew on a commercial plane. They struggled with the choice between flying on a private plane versus asking a friend to help them with the long drive. There’s a vulnerability in asking someone for help when you are unpracticed at it, and on the surface, it can seem like you’re burdening someone since you could pay for help instead.

But when we rely on money instead of people, we lose out on the incredible experience of relying on a friend to help us simply because they love us. We miss out on a friend relying on us because they trust us to show up for them. And of course, the financial implications of each decision are significant. This reinforces the vicious cycle because it prevents us from experiencing real intimacy or a solid community. We then continue to see people as commodities and objects to meet our needs rather than as complex human beings with whom we can have relationships.

Can your stocks comfort you when you’re sick or sad? How cuddly are your dollar bills?

If you can’t rely on others, are fundamentally suspicious of others, and/or feel isolated, you are vulnerable to being endlessly addicted to money. And without people or community, what do you have left? ONLY MONEY. That’s like balancing your house on just one stilt. Oh boy — that’s trouble.

Now that we’ve broken some key illusions, let’s explore some solutions on how to rebuild your sense of security and safety outside of wealth accumulation.

Part II: Solutions — The Five Pillars of True Safety and Security

1. Self trust: Be a person of integrity.

Have you ever spoken up about injustice, or done something uncomfortable because you knew it was the right thing to do, and felt that zing of empowerment and dignity? That is self-trust. Self-trust means you know who you are at your core. You understand your values and you align your actions accordingly, even in the face of fear. You know you are a person of your word.

To be able to trust yourself, regardless of changes in your external circumstances, is one of the deepest forms of security that exists.

We weaken self-trust when we violate our own boundaries, remain silent when we witness injustice, or fail to uphold promises. When self-trust is weakened, we experience internal volatility in the forms of self-doubt, indecisiveness, and insecurity. All of this interferes with our ability to redistribute wealth. Some ways that I see this show up with my clients are: backing down on a multiyear giving commitment, lying about access to wealth, and avoiding difficult conversations about money because they fear conflict.

Self-trust is a defining aspect of our ability to build and sustain meaningful relationships with others. If you do not trust yourself, it’s harder to trust others. If you are not trustworthy, others will not trust you.

We must examine the moments we have betrayed ourselves and weakened self-trust, make commitments for how we will not reproduce that behavior in the future, forgive ourselves, and move forward with a renewed commitment to integrity. We must also explore what integrity means to us and align our decisions about money accordingly.

Questions for reflection:

• In what types of situations do you trust yourself, and in which situations do you not trust yourself?
• What are your core values that you want to build your life upon? (Ex: interdependence, generosity, justice, healing)
• Where do you change or omit your opinions because you’re afraid of what others will think of you?
• Have you ever stolen something? Do you ever take credit for things you did not do? (Please note: All inherited wealth is stolen. So include the ways you struggle to redistribute as a part of this).
• When have you broken trust with yourself, and how can you make amends with yourself?

2. Nourish the collective: Be a reliable, generous, trustworthy community member.

“Each person, human or not, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream’s gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human’s education is to know those duties and how to perform them.”

― Robin Wall Kimmerer⁸

Investing in the well-being of others is a way to actively build security, safety, and fulfillment in our lives. When those around us (human and non-human) are taken care of and thrive, we do too. When we show up for others, we broaden our definition of well-being to include those around us.

Become someone in your community people know they can rely on for support. This means showing up for others even when it’s inconvenient, difficult, or requires sacrifice. This does not mean you need to lose boundaries, become a martyr, or stop taking care of yourself. Instead, it is a reorientation from separation and othering toward interconnection– to treat the needs of others as being inextricably tied in with your own and to give as much love and nourishment to the collective as you can offer. Giving to others can be inherently nourishing and is also a way to give to yourself.

In a bigger picture, social justice movements that fight for livable wages, housing for all, abolition of prisons, and a planet that can sustain life are what keep us safe. Funding and investing in these movements should be a key component of, rather than at odds with, your long-term financial plan.

Invest your money, time, and gifts into social justice movements like your life depends on them — because it does.

Note: the interpersonal component of this pillar might be especially relevant to those who are white, and/or cisgender men, and/or from the United States or other countries rooted in individualism.

Questions for reflection:

• In what ways do you nourish your community? In what ways could you stretch yourself to support others more?
• Are you someone people go to when they need help? If they lose housing, need help recovering from surgery, need a ride, or need help moving — do they come to you?
• Are you a part of a local community? Who is your community? Do you have a political home?
• In what moments are you compelled to back out of commitments, flake, or wait for others to step up to take on labor?

3. Receive from the collective: ask for help, be vulnerable, and rely on others.

We are a part of the collective, and we also need and deserve support from others. When we increase our giving and step out of a wealth accumulation mindset, we will be required to confront our capacity to ask for help and to rely on others, as we will no longer be able to rely on money for help in all situations. When we ask for help we make ourselves vulnerable, and offer the possibility for further intimacy with others.

This might mean learning how to make more friends or form deeper bonds with friends. This might also mean exploring ways of doing trades rather than only paying for things. For some of us, it might feel like torture to ask for help, whereas it comes naturally to support others. For others of us, we might overask for help and not support our community enough– it’s all about balance.

How much would your sense of enoughness change if you knew you had a strong community that would support you through any possible crisis? Ultimately, we need to set up our lives so that we can trust that other people will show up for us when we need help — that is one of the deepest forms of security that can exist. After all, it’s more likely that your friendships will outlast a recession.

Note: I am not suggesting you avoid paying people who make a living from what they do. Please pay bodyworkers, therapists, healers, artists, etc. for their services– and ideally at the upper ends of their sliding scales!

Questions for reflection:

• What is it like for you to ask for and receive help?
• Where in your life are you more comfortable paying for help than asking for it?
• Do you have people in your life that you know in your bones would help you in any type of crisis?
• Who in your life would you like to be closer to and move toward more interdependence? What gets in your way of doing that?

4. Useful, practical skills that you can always offer to the community. Also: Zombie apocalypse skills.

As inheritors, we need to create a career path where we can earn enough to cover our living expenses and save. If we fail to do this, we are setting our lives up to forever rely on inherited wealth, which limits our ability to redistribute and also sets us up to need to stay invested in the stock market.

The cost of living off of inherited wealth over the course of a lifetime is incredibly expensive!

Earning enough to live off of and being able to save will free you up to redistribute more money. It might also create space for you to have more liberated relationships with the sources of your inherited wealth, such as your parents. Shifting out of relying on inherited wealth to survive builds confidence, self-trust, and an internal sense of security. You will have the embodied sense that you can take care of yourself and support others, without the help of money you did nothing to earn⁹. This might be especially empowering for folks who are assigned female and/or identify as queer.

Building safety outside of wealth accumulation starts with the practical skills needed to earn at least a minimum wage job, and extends to skills that will always be relevant, even in the face of a rapidly changing world struggling with climate chaos and economic collapse. It would be even more wonderful to include your vocation- the gifts you most long to offer the world to create the impact you want to have.

What will you do if the stock market permanently crashes and you no longer can make money off of money? (I’ll give you a hint: it does not mean moving all of your investments into gold!) If your inheritance disappeared tomorrow, would you be able to earn enough money to live off of? It is also important to consider finding ways of earning money that nourish your community rather than cause harm or extract resources.

Questions for reflection:

• What skills do you bring to the community? Do you have any useful skills for survival such as fixing things, growing food, community organizing, cooking, healing, midwifery, etc.?
• What jobs could you imagine doing that would cover your living expenses? What would it take for you to pursue those?
• What skills would you be excited to develop? Who might be able to teach you those skills?
• Learning new skills can bring up perfectionism and fear of failure. How are you with failure and making mistakes?

5. Adaptability, Resilience & Resourcefulness

We’re in a climate crisis and in the midst of economic collapse. Our world is incredibly volatile and ever-changing. Each one of us needs to figure out how to become more adaptable and resilient. Additionally, we need to learn how to adapt without just paying our way out of challenges.

We need to work on our tendencies to want to associate control with security and comfort with happiness. The more we are able to trust ourselves to find a myriad of creative solutions for any given challenge, the more secure we will be. If we befriend the unknown, we’ll be more relaxed in the midst of life’s unpredictable changes.

Californians now know to adjust to having not just an occasional wildfire but a fire season that lasts 2–4 months per year. In navigating fire season, imagine the difference in financial and social implications between buying a second home in the Midwest that just your family can flee to for part of the year versus setting up a trade with someone in the Midwest where you can host them during the coldest part of winter. You might even coordinate with your community to make a shared fire season plan. Engaging adaptability, resilience, and resourcefulness will support you to redistribute more wealth– and you might even get more friends out of it!

Lastly, if you haven’t had to practice surviving materially difficult circumstances, you might experience more fear because you don’t know what you’re truly capable of handling. Being sheltered and constantly comfortable breeds fragility. Consider that beneath your sense of fragility, you are actually an incredibly resilient human being, but you need to start tapping into your own resilience to discover that it’s there.

Questions for reflection:

• How easily are you able to adapt to unpredictable circumstances and last-minute changes?
• Where do you use money to avoid dealing with hardships?
• What might be other strategies you could take on beyond money to navigate hardships?
• In what ways are you addicted to comfort? What practices could you take on to get more comfortable with discomfort?

Conclusion

To close out this piece, I want to remind you: there is so much to be gained by shifting out of a framework of wealth accumulation and into community, fulfillment, and integrity. Of course, your feelings of scarcity will arise as you give away money. But don’t let those fears run your life, and don’t hand over your own thinking to your financial planner, partner, parents, or anyone in your life.

Listen to that part of your gut that is calling for you to change your ways and to step into the unknown so that, at the end of your life, you can look back and be proud of who you were, how you showed up, and what you stood for. No amount of money can buy you that satisfaction.

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Iris Brilliant is a social justice money coach based in Berkeley, CA. Her life mission is to support people with wealth to move money to social justice and to transform how we relate to money, belonging, and community along the way. You can read more about her private and group coaching offerings at www.irisbrilliant.com

This essay is a reflection of the wisdom and insights from a huge range of people. Thank you to those who gave me detailed feedback and insights on the writing: Nitika Raj, Damon Azali-Rojas, Rebekah Markillie, Isaac Lev Szmonko, and Desiree Darling. Thank you May Nguyen for designing.

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¹ “Top 1 Percent of Households Own 43 Percent of Global Wealth,” TRTWorld, December 7, 2020, https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/top-1-percent-of-households-own-43-percent-of-global-wealth-42134

² A financial planner is a professional who helps individuals make a long-term financial plan. A financial advisor is a broader term that can include both financial planning and investment managers. Christina Majaski, “Financial Planner vs. Financial Advisor: What’s the Difference?”, Investopedia.com, January 21, 2021, https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/040215/financial-advisor-vs-financial-planner.asp

³ Abigail Disney, “I Was Taught From a Young Age to Protect My Dynastic Wealth,” TheAtlantic.com, June 17, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/abigail-disney-rich-protect-dynastic-wealth-propublica-tax/619212/.

⁴ Grant E. Donnelly, Tianyi Zheng, Emily Haisley, and Michael I. Norton, “The Amount and Source of Millionaires’ Wealth (Moderately) Predict Their Happiness,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 44 (5) (2018): 684–699. https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/37221623

⁵ Hillary Hoffower, “Nearly half of Americans earning $100,000 or more think they’re middle class — and it shows that class in America isn’t just about money,” BusinessInsider.com, May 6 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/class-wealth-money-rich-poor-2019-5.

⁶ Ed Whitfield, “How Much Is Enough?”, Resource Generation Praxis Meeting, 2017

⁷ Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. (Minnesota, Milkweeds Edition, 2013).

⁸ Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass.

⁹ I recognize this might require nuance depending on your cultural background- it might make cultural sense and feel values-aligned for you to continue to be financially interwoven with your family (such as if you are an immigrant or a person of color).