What, actually, is a lot of money? It’s all a matter of perspective. If you’re a homeless person asking for change, anything that comes in note form is a lot of money. If you’re Bill Gates no amount of cash you could carry would ever be a lot of money.

In 1998, Bill Gates lost $45 billion - in one year. That’s a lot of money even if you’re a small country, but it doesn’t buy a lot of shock and awe if you want to wage a war.

To my friends child, who is autistic and adorable, three coins is a lot of money but five coins is more, if the coins are bigger that’s even better. There is certainly a logic in his reasoning, it feels like more, for sure.

Recently, Hillary Clinton’s campaign debts were published at $31 million. Two days later the figures were revised and republished with an explanation (almost an apology, but not quite). The revised figure was $21 million. Hhmm, they both seem an unspeakably large amount of money to owe. What a huge sum of money to bet - even on yourself, even when you have such supreme confidence. But maybe, if your husband is the highest paid public speaker on the planet and can command up to $300,000 per hour, it’s not such a huge amount - I wonder.

So what is a big debt? Again, it’s a matter of perspective. When I starting my business, I was in debt to the tune of $60,000. This was about twice my best years income up to that time. I met a business man who had seen some great success and he offered to mentor me. He asked me how much debt I had. I was desperately uncomfortable but knew I had to tell the truth - £31,000, I said with a wobbly voice. He paused, a long time, till I looked up and directly at him. His tone was derisive but not without humour, “Pah! I thought you were a professional”. He told me that before his first big success his debt had been £400,000.

That conversation stretched my thinking beyond the point of elasticity. It could never go all the way back. My perspective changed forever. No longer did my debt seem so huge. I had to alter my perspective to stop myself from going under. In rising above my debt, my horizons broadened. From that perspective, I began to see £30,000 as less than I had ever seen it before.

The possibility of earning more money became reality because of my debt, rather than in spite of it. My mentor had helped me to grow my thinking so that it could completely encompass my debt. I started to think bigger and then act bigger. Before long, my pay was bigger too, bigger than I could possibly have imagined from where I had been. And all it took was a shift in perspective.

What’s a lot of money to you?

This post appears in The Carnival of Money Stories at Finance Gets Personal