The First Rule: Give Money a Container
How defining “enough” creates a life that’s more than enough
Every person I’ve worked with around money — every family I’ve coached, every adult I’ve sat across from, every eighth grader I’ve taught financial literacy to — has eventually arrived at the same place.
No matter where we started.
Sometimes we started with budgets.
Sometimes with debt.
Sometimes with investing questions.
Sometimes with anxiety.
But no matter which door we entered, the conversation always circled back to one question:
What is enough?
With kids, it’s surprisingly straightforward.
They’ll ask, “How much money do we need?”
But we can’t answer that until we answer something more basic: “What do you need?”
Food.
Shelter.
Heat.
Electricity.
Enough, at first, looks a lot like survival.
Adults aren’t much different — but the question gets harder.
Most adults I work with don’t actually struggle to understand what they make or what they spend. They know their numbers. They know their income. They can even tell you where the money goes.
What they struggle with is creating surplus.
Not because they don’t earn enough — but because they don’t have a container.
Without a defined “enough,” it doesn’t matter how much money you pour into a life. There will be spillage. Stress. A constant sense that nothing ever quite fills the space.
You can’t experience more than enough if you’ve never decided what enough is.
There used to be a simple question people asked when a twenty-year-old got their first job:
“Can you cover your bills?”
It wasn’t glamorous, but it mattered.
It was really asking: Can you survive? Do you have enough?
Somewhere along the way, survival started to feel like deprivation. Not because it is — but because we live in a world of endless access. A world that constantly tells us we don’t have enough, that we aren’t enough, and that we’ll finally feel complete if we just add one more thing.
How do you fight that when it’s everywhere?
A while ago, one of my oldest daughter’s friends was over. I mentioned I was going to go read for a bit, and she asked what I was reading. At the moment, it was a wizard-detective series about vampires — the kind of book that makes you smile at yourself for loving it, and then turn the page anyway.
She asked what I read when I wasn’t reading that.
Before I could answer, my daughter said,
“Money books.”
Her friend looked confused, then curious. She asked a few more questions, and as I tried to explain it, I realized something: most of what I read is about financial behavior and the psychology of money.
Not because I love money — but because I’m fascinated by what we do with it.
How something meant to help us live ends up quietly controlling us.
How we spend money on things we don’t even really care about.
How often we confuse more with better.
And underneath all of it, the same pattern kept showing up.
People weren’t failing at money because they were irresponsible.
They were struggling because they never defined the shape of “enough.”
That’s why this matters.
Because until you define “enough,” no financial decision truly makes sense.
And once you do, almost all of them do.
For us, that meant one car instead of two.
It meant buying a multi-unit property and living in one unit — not because we loved the idea of being landlords, but because as two teachers in a high cost-of-living area, we knew our salaries would never be “enough” by the area’s standards.
The math simply didn’t work if we tried to live the way everyone else around us was living.
So we redefined enough.
We built a container that let us stay where we wanted to be, doing work we cared about, without constantly feeling behind.
Your container will look different. It has to — because your life is different. Your values are different. What matters to you is different.
But the principle is the same.
You can’t experience surplus until you define the shape of enough.
And once you do, money stops being the thing you’re chasing.
It becomes the thing that protects the life you’ve built.
What follows are a few small but important lessons I’ve learned about “enough.”
You don’t need to read them in order.
You don’t need to agree with all of them.
Take what’s useful, skip what isn’t, and notice which ones stick.
Why “More” Never Finishes the Job
If more money automatically created freedom, people with high incomes wouldn’t feel stressed about money.
But many of them do.
That’s why people with high incomes still feel broke.
Not because they lack money — but because they lack a container.
Without a container, money doesn’t create clarity.
It just expands outward.
The Problem Isn’t Excess. It’s Diffusion.
Imagine your life as a wide open field.
You’re standing in the center.
The things you want — comfort, experiences, convenience, joy — spread outward in every direction.
None of those wants are wrong.
Many of them are good.
The problem is that without a boundary, there’s no moment where the field says, “This is full.”
So income keeps expanding the field instead of deepening the center.
Without a container, money spreads.
With a container, money settles.
“Enough” Is Not Deprivation
This is where people get stuck.
They hear “enough” and think:
limitation
sacrifice
settling
But that’s backward.
“Enough” is not deprivation.
It is the shape that allows surplus to exist.
Without a container:
you can never have “more than enough”
you only ever have “not yet enough”
Surplus doesn’t appear when income rises.
Surplus appears when boundaries exist.
What Collapse Looks Like Without Boundaries
This pattern shows up everywhere, not just in money.
Hoarding isn’t about wanting too much.
It’s about a container that never says “full.”
I once lived across the hall from a woman whose apartment was filled floor to ceiling with boxes, leaving only a narrow path from room to room — a life literally shaped by the absence of a place where “enough” ever said stop.
Experience chasing isn’t about loving life too much.
It’s about novelty with nowhere to land.
High-income stress isn’t about greed.
It’s about expansion without a container.
Different behaviors.
Same problem.
No boundary.
Why Finance Actually Starts Here
Budgeting requires limits.
Limits require boundaries.
Boundaries require defining “enough.”
Income is slow to change.
“Enough” is the fastest lever you have.
That’s why nearly every path toward financial independence begins with expense awareness — not because people love cutting back, but because defining “enough” is the first moment money becomes directional.
Enough Comes Before Strategy
Before investing.
Before optimization.
Before “what’s the best account.”
You decide:
what matters
what’s protected
what gets space
and what doesn’t
That decision creates surplus.
Surplus creates flexibility.
Flexibility protects time.
What Comes Next
One simple way to give money a shape is to group it into four buckets:
Priorities.
Passions.
Play.
Problems.
I’ll unpack those next.
But first, this matters:
Enough isn’t the end of the journey.
It’s the place where the journey finally makes sense.