You earn. That part works.
It simply never stays, and you have stopped being surprised by what takes it.
My name is Ren Kagetsuki. For fifteen years I was paid to arrange exactly this for other people, and it has a shape I can describe before you tell me anything.
It does not make people poor. It stops things stacking.
Where a money curse actually sits
Not on your earning. On the space between earning and keeping.
People under it usually work hard and are often good at what they do. The income is fine. Some of them earn more than the people asking them what went wrong.
What fails is accumulation.
A balance forms. And then, usually inside a month, something arrives that is exactly the size of the balance.
The boiler. The car. The tax letter about a year you had forgotten. The relative who needs help right now.
Every one of those is an ordinary thing that happens to everybody. The tell is not the event. It is the timing and the amount.
The test: what happens when you save
This is the single question I ask first, and most people answer it before I finish asking.
Does trouble arrive when the balance goes up, and settle down when it goes back to nothing?
Ordinary money trouble does the opposite. It is worst when you are emptiest, because being empty is what makes small problems into large ones.
What I am describing runs backwards. Things are calm while you have nothing, and they start the week you begin to hold something.
People notice this about themselves and then talk themselves out of it, because it sounds mad.
It is one of the most consistent things I see, and after fifteen years I am no longer willing to call it coincidence.
A man once listed four occasions for me. Each time he had built up a few months of expenses. Each time it went inside six weeks.
A roof. A flooded flat. A court fee. His mother’s care.
Four unrelated events, and not one of them left him with anything over.
Why money is such a common brief
After separation work, money was the most common thing I was asked for.
It is what people reach for when they feel something was taken from them.
A sibling who was passed over. A partner in a business that split badly. A colleague who watched a contract go elsewhere. A former spouse who watched a house be kept.
They rarely ask for the person to suffer. They ask for the money not to work.
In their own telling that is not cruelty. It is balance.
Which is worth knowing, because it tells you where to look. Not at who dislikes you.
At who believes they were owed.
Three places it comes from
A person
Sudden, datable, and tied to an event about money. An inheritance, a sale, a settlement, a promotion.
If your run began within weeks of money changing hands, start there.
The family line
Slow, and older than you.
Your parents never held anything either. Nor did theirs. Everyone in the line works hard and nobody arrives anywhere.
In Japan we call this kakei no noroi, and money is the form it takes most often.
A place
The house or the premises. Trade that fell away after a move. A business that was fine in one building and never right in the next.
If it began when you moved, say so first. It changes the whole approach.
What responds, and what does not
Budgeting, saving plans, giving, better habits with money. None of that is wasted and I would not talk anybody out of it.
All of it works on your behaviour.
And the people I am describing do not have a behaviour problem. Many of them are the most careful people I meet, because ten years of this makes a person careful.
A line running from somebody else to you does not care how you budget.
What has settled is cleared. Then that line is cut. Then it is sealed, and only after that does keeping money become an ordinary skill again: how a run like this is taken off.
If you think you are cursed financially
Do not send me your accounts. I do not want figures and I would not know what to do with them.
Send me three things.
The last three times you had money put aside, and what took it. Whether your parents held anything. And whether any of this began near an event where money moved between people.
That is enough for me to say which of the three I am looking at, and whether it is something I can take off you: the twelve questions I ask before I take a case.
You have been told for years that you are bad with money.
If this is what I think it is, you never were.
