There was a week when I felt poorer without actually becoming poorer, which sounds strange when I write it down now because the number that triggered it was real, my mortgage payment really had gone from €800 a month to €1,400, and €600 a month is not a small amount of money, yet when I eventually sat down and looked at my complete financial situation rather than allowing that one number to become the story in my head, I realized that almost everything I had been worrying about during that week had been built on an assumption rather than on a change that had actually happened to my financial life.
The house was the same house, my salary was still arriving on the same day and in roughly the same amount, my investments were still there, the rest of our expenses had not suddenly increased, and nothing had happened to my wealth overnight, yet somehow I had started to feel broke again in a way I had not felt for years.
I noticed it in small moments at first, because I would be driving somewhere and suddenly start calculating what another €600 a month meant over a year, then I would think about the things we could cut if we had to, and later that evening I would open the banking app again, even though I had already looked at it earlier, and before long I was checking refinancing rates at eleven o'clock at night and mentally removing expenses that had not become more expensive at all.
The gym had not become more expensive. The streaming subscriptions had not become more expensive. A weekend trip we had already paid for had not become more expensive.
Nothing had happened to any of those things, yet I was already deciding that they might have to disappear because I had seen one number on a mortgage statement and my brain had immediately started writing the rest of the story.
That was the part that stayed with me. Not the €1,400. The story I built around it.
Because when I finally stopped doing the calculation in my head and actually sat down with my numbers, I checked them twice because I was convinced I had missed something somewhere, and when I had finished, the conclusion was almost uncomfortable in its simplicity: my mortgage payment had changed, but my wealth had not suddenly changed with it.
That experience made me think about how often we do this with money without even noticing.
We like to believe that we make financial decisions because we looked at the numbers and then made a rational decision based on what we found, but very often the number arrives first in the form of a headline, a conversation, a prediction or something somebody else is worried about, and by the time we finally look at our own finances, we have already decided what that number means for us.
See, a number does not arrive in our heads by itself. It arrives with a story attached to it.
The story often arrives before the facts
There is an economist named Robert Shiller who has written extensively about the way economic stories spread, and his idea of Narrative Economics has stayed with me because it explains something that I had experienced personally without really having a name for it: economic stories travel from person to person, they become more powerful when they are easy to understand and emotionally interesting, and once enough people start repeating them, the story itself can begin to influence what people actually do with their money.
Think back to early 2020 and the empty supermarket shelves, because that is probably one of the clearest examples most of us have seen in our own lifetime of what happens when a story moves faster than the facts.
People saw pictures of empty shelves, heard that other people were buying large amounts of toilet paper and other everyday products, and then they reacted to what they were seeing by buying more themselves, which meant that the behavior created even more empty shelves and those empty shelves then became further evidence that something must be wrong.
The story and the behavior started feeding each other.
That is what interests me about financial stories, because they do not necessarily need to be completely wrong to influence us in ways that may not be helpful, and they certainly do not need to apply directly to our own situation before we start changing our behavior because of them.
An oil price rises somewhere most of us will never visit, the headline becomes a story about inflation, the inflation story becomes a story about interest rates, the interest-rate story becomes a story about mortgages, and eventually something that started as an economic development somewhere else becomes a number sitting on your own mortgage statement.
By the time it reaches you, it no longer feels like a story about the global economy. It feels like your life.
That is exactly what happened to me. The mortgage payment was real, yet the conclusion I had drawn from it had happened much faster than the calculation I eventually did to determine what that payment actually meant for my financial position.
Our brains are very good at making the story feel personal
Daniel Kahneman wrote about the availability heuristic, which is one of those psychological ideas that sounds abstract until you notice how often you experience it yourself, because the easier something is to picture in your mind, the more important and urgent it can begin to feel, even when the thing you can picture most clearly is not necessarily the thing that deserves the most attention.
A headline saying that mortgage rates could rise further is easy to picture. A large percentage printed in bold is easy to picture. A prediction about inflation getting worse is easy to picture.
Your own financial position is much less dramatic.
Your bank account is sitting quietly in an app, your salary is arriving as it normally does, your regular expenses are still mostly the same, and your investment plan is still there doing what it was doing before you read the headline.
The headline has urgency. Your spreadsheet doesn't.
That difference matters because the thing that creates the strongest emotional reaction is not necessarily the thing that tells you what you should actually do.
I had started imagining what I would have to give up before I had established that I needed to give up anything, which meant that the emotional experience of being poorer had arrived before the financial reality of being poorer had actually been established.
That is a strange thing when you think about it. I was spending money in my head before I had lost the money in my bank account.
One number can become the whole story
There is another thing I have learned from this, and it is that we are very good at taking one number and allowing it to represent something much larger than it actually represents.
A higher mortgage payment becomes "I am worse off." A falling portfolio becomes "I am losing money." A higher salary becomes "I can afford more." A higher inflation number becomes "my savings are becoming worthless."
The number might be completely accurate, yet the conclusion we attach to it can still be wrong, because your financial life is never just one number.
My mortgage payment is one part of my financial life, just as my salary is one part, my portfolio is one part, my savings rate is one part and my expenses are one part, and if I want to understand whether I am actually in a different financial position, I have to look at the relationship between all of those things rather than allowing whichever number happens to be most visible that day to become the explanation for everything else.
That is probably why I keep coming back to the word look.
Look at the number, then look at the rest of the numbers, look at what changed and look at what didn't, and only then decide what it means.
Because the headline is talking about millions of people it has never met, while your spreadsheet is talking about you.
The real cost often comes after the feeling
The first emotional reaction is not always the expensive part, because you cannot always control the first reaction you have when you see a large number, and the brain does not wait for you to finish building a spreadsheet before it starts trying to protect you from what it thinks might happen.
The expensive part can come afterwards, when you allow that feeling to make the decision for you.
That is where a financial story can become a financial mistake.
You see mortgage rates rising and suddenly feel that you need to lock something in immediately, even though you have not yet compared your options properly, or you see the market falling and decide that you need to get out because watching the value of your portfolio decline has become uncomfortable, even though the investment itself has not changed in the way your fear is telling you it has.
You hear that inflation might rise again and start moving money around because you feel that doing something must be better than sitting still.
Sometimes those decisions turn out fine. Sometimes they don't.
The point is not that every quick decision is wrong; the point is that when urgency enters the room, I now want to know where the urgency came from before I allow it to decide what happens to my money.
Was there an actual change in my financial situation, or did a story make me feel as though there had been one?
I started giving myself more time
That week changed the way I think about financial decisions because I realized that I do not necessarily need a better prediction when I feel financial fear; sometimes I simply need a little more distance between the feeling and the action.
So one thing I have started doing is deliberately nothing for a while.
If a financial number scares me, I do not immediately start changing things just because I feel uncomfortable, and I certainly do not want to make a significant decision at eleven o'clock at night when my brain has already spent two hours consuming headlines and imagining everything that could go wrong.
I give myself time.
For me, 48 hours is a useful starting point, not because there is anything magical about that number, but because most important financial decisions can survive two days of thinking, while a lot of financial panic cannot.
The feeling is usually strongest when the story is fresh. After some time, you can look at the same situation and ask a much better question: what actually changed?
That is what I eventually did with my mortgage.
I stopped looking at what I thought might happen and looked at what was happening to me: my income, my expenses, my mortgage, my investments, my savings and my overall position.
Once I did that, the problem became much smaller than the story I had created around it.
Information is not an instruction
I think this is where a lot of personal finance becomes unnecessarily complicated, because we consume enormous amounts of information and then unconsciously treat that information as if it were telling us what to do.
A headline about interest rates is information. A forecast about inflation is information. A market falling is information. An article about house prices is information.
None of those things is automatically an instruction.
The headline does not know your salary. It does not know your mortgage. It does not know your savings. It does not know how much you have invested. It does not know what you are trying to achieve with your money. It certainly does not know whether you should change your life because of what happened yesterday.
You have to make that connection yourself.
That is why I have become suspicious of financial urgency, particularly when a very specific number is combined with a very short timeframe, because the moment something feels urgent, the quality of our thinking can change.
Rates could reach six percent by winter. Prices could rise another eight percent. The market could fall another twenty percent. Maybe all of those things could happen. Maybe none of them will.
The more interesting question for me is whether knowing that prediction changes anything about my actual financial position today.
If it does, I need to look at it. If it doesn't, I don't need to manufacture a decision simply because somebody else has created urgency around the story.
An oil field doesn't raise your mortgage
There is one line from this whole experience that I keep coming back to because it explains the chain better than anything else I could say.
An oil field doesn't raise your mortgage. A chain of decisions does.
Markets react. Banks react. We react.
The first two are largely outside our control, while the last one is where the story finally reaches our own lives and where we have at least some ability to decide what happens next.
That does not mean ignoring what happens in the world, because understanding the world matters when you are making long-term financial decisions.
It means understanding the difference between information and instruction.
A headline can tell you something happened. It cannot tell you what that something means for your life without you looking at your own numbers.
That is the part I had forgotten during that week. I had allowed the headline to finish the calculation for me.
I checked my numbers twice
I still think about that week, not because the mortgage payment itself was extraordinary, but because of how quickly my mind had taken one real change and turned it into a much larger story about my financial life.
For several days I had felt as though something had been taken away from me, even though my salary had not changed, my house had not changed, my investments had not changed and my overall wealth had not suddenly disappeared; what had changed was one payment, and then my interpretation of that payment had grown much faster than the facts around it.
When I finally sat down and looked properly, I was certain I would find that I was worse off than I had thought.
I wasn't.
The number had changed. The story had become much louder than the number deserved.
That is probably what I will remember from that week, because money is full of numbers that are technically correct but emotionally misleading when we allow them to become something bigger than they are.
A salary is a number. A mortgage payment is a number. A portfolio balance is a number. An inflation rate is a number.
None of them, on their own, tells you what money means in your life.
You have to look at the whole picture.
Maybe that is one of the most useful things I have learned about money: when a number scares you, don't immediately ask what you should do; first ask what actually changed.
Because stories move very quickly, especially financial stories, and by the time one reaches your phone, your television or your conversation at work, it may already feel as though it belongs to you.
Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't.
The only way I know to tell the difference is to stop for a moment, open the numbers that actually belong to me, and look.
For the deeper story behind this, the conversation continues on the NobodyToldMike YouTube channel, where I go further into what happened when my mortgage payment jumped from €800 to €1,400 and why the story can sometimes move faster than the facts.