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# Scarcity Goes Undercover
- URL: https://www.thetaxgazebo.ca/money-and-mind/scarcity-vs-sufficiency/
- Published: 2026-01-26T00:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-01-26T00:00:00.000Z
- Author: Emily Mantle
- Tags: Money & Mind, Week 2, #Import 2026-07-01 16:11

If you looked at my investment portfolio today, you would see someone entirely comfortable with risk. I deploy capital. I acquire income-producing real estate, private investments, and marketable securities. I have no issue with the mathematical probability of investment loss.

But ask me to spend money on a luxury purely for myself? My nervous system reacts completely differently. I feel a sudden, heavy friction. *Some of my socks have holes in them. So do some of my everyday shirts and pants. I still wear them.*

To understand why, you have to look at my earliest memories of money. As we discussed last week, you absorb your money story quietly through the everyday of your childhood.

For me, it is my late mom sitting at the kitchen table every month, old country music playing, crying as she budgeted her $800-something monthly social assistance cheque with grocery coupons spread out beside her. I remember credit cards literally frozen in blocks of ice in our freezer to physically stop her from spending money — and then taking a hair dryer to thaw them quickly because an emergency came up.

When you grow up in that environment, you learn that spending money is dangerous. Every dollar spent is a dollar closer to the edge of survival.

We assume scarcity looks like panic over an empty bank account. But the reality is that once you achieve financial success, **scarcity goes undercover. It can disguise itself as financial discipline.**

As I shared last week, my innate instinct is to hoard. My nervous system wants to grip cash tightly. You’ve probably heard me say time and time again that material things will never “own” me. I wholeheartedly mean that. To my core.

But as a financially literate CPA, my intellect knows that saving cash to never do anything with it doesn’t build wealth; it just builds a well-funded prison. So I forced myself to learn how to actively release capital. I taught myself to invest. Today, deploying capital feels safe because it is an act of creation — it builds walls of safety higher. I can confidently force my scarcity brain to let money flow out for growth. And watching growth happen… compounding working for you instead of against you… is amazing. *I LOVE investing.*

But spending for pure consumption? That still triggers the little girl who remembers tears and frozen credit cards.

This week, we are going to look closely at hidden scarcity. We will unpack the ways our nervous systems hold onto survival mode long after the math says we are fine, and how that contrasts with true sufficiency.

**Scarcity tells you that you must constantly build a fortress to survive. Sufficiency tells you that it is finally safe to step outside of it.**

Reflection 

Where does a feeling of hidden scarcity still show up in your life, even if your bank account says you are perfectly fine? Why do you think that is?