Always Felt Unlucky With Money? This 1-Minute Quiz Shows Which Weight You've Been Carrying Alone

I'm 64.

I work three mornings a week at the public library, shelving and checking out, because Social Security alone doesn't stretch, and because I like being around books more than I like being alone in my apartment.

I'll tell you something I've never told anybody at work.

I've believed I was unlucky my whole life.

Not in a dramatic way. In a quiet, everyday way. The good parking spot is always taken. The raise comes the year after you leave. The sale ends the day before you go. The refund check gets lost in the mail.

My mother used to say it about herself, and somewhere along the way I started saying it about me.

"Knowing my luck."

You know the phrase.

After my husband passed in 2019, it got worse.

Because then it was just me and the numbers. Every bill, every balance, every what-if.

I'd wake up around three and lie there doing sums. I'd open the bank app before I'd even put the coffee on. I'd check it again at lunch. Then before bed.

I remember one night in particular, last winter. It was 3:12 by the clock on the stove. I was standing in the kitchen in my robe with the phone lit up in my hand, adding the heating bill to the car insurance in my head, for the third time, as if the answer might come out different.

It didn't. It never does.

I stood there long enough that the screen went dark by itself. And I thought, very clearly: this is just what my life is. Some people catch breaks. I do the math.

I didn't tell anyone that, either. Who would you tell? My niece calls on Sundays and I always say I'm fine. I'm good at fine.

I'd started to believe what I think a lot of us believe and never say out loud.

That some people are just cursed.

It was a Tuesday. A book came back on the return cart called The Luck Factor, by a British professor named Richard Wiseman.

I almost shelved it without looking. Then I saw the dog-ear.

Somebody had folded down one page. I opened to it, and I read it standing up between the stacks.

Wiseman spent about ten years studying around 400 people who called themselves either very lucky or very unlucky.

He gave them all a newspaper and asked them to count the photographs in it. That's all. Count the photographs.

The unlucky people took about two minutes.

The lucky people took a few seconds.

Because on page two, he had printed a half-page message in letters more than two inches tall. It said:

The unlucky people never saw it. They were too busy counting.

He put a second message further in, offering £250 to anyone who told the researcher they'd seen it. The unlucky people missed that one too.

I had to sit down on the step stool.

Then I read the part that made me cry right there in the self-help aisle. He wrote that unlucky people are generally more tense, and that anxiety gets in the way of noticing the unexpected.

I want to be careful here, because I'm not a scientist and I don't want to sell you something Wiseman didn't say. It's an experiment. It's not a promise.

But it changed how I see myself.

I had been looking so hard. At the app. At the bills. At the sums at three in the morning.

The harder I looked, the less I saw.

Think about it. If someone had walked up to me that night at 3:12 and said, "Joan, there's a refund in your junk mail, and a pantry box at church, and a discount at the pharmacy you've never asked for," I wouldn't have heard them. I was counting.

A few weeks later my niece, who knew I'd been reading about all this, sent me a little stone pyramid for my birthday.

I put it right where I'd see it. On the kitchen table, in front of the chair where I used to open the bank app.

It's small and heavy, about four ounces, real stone you can feel. It's from a small company called Spirad; they call it the Sovereign Abundance Pyramid. Inside, you can see:

It isn't a lucky charm. I don't wear it. I don't do anything to it. It's just a thing that makes me look up.

Now when I sit down with my coffee and reach for the phone, there it is, blue and gold in the window light, and I look at it instead.

But not five times a day anymore. Once. Sometimes not at all.

And I've started noticing things.

A pantry box at church I'd walked past for a year. A senior discount at the pharmacy I'd never asked about. A refund on my renter's insurance that I'd have thrown out with the junk mail six months ago: $64.

Small things. That's how luck works for people like us, I think. Small things you finally see.

My niece noticed before I said anything. On one of our Sunday calls she stopped me and said, "Aunt Joan, you sound different. You sound like you used to." I told her it was her present. She laughed and said, "It's a rock." I said, "I know. That's the point. It's a rock, and I look at it instead of the phone."

The lady from my Sunday group, the one with the book, asked me after service what I'd changed. I didn't know how to explain it without hurting her feelings, so I told her the truth: I stopped trying so hard to believe, and started looking up.

I promised I'd come back to prayer.

I still pray, every morning, with my coffee. The stone sits on the table while I do. It doesn't replace anything. If anything, I pray with less panic now, and more thanks.

My pastor's wife asked about it, so I looked it up. In Exodus 24:10, under God's feet there was "a paved work of a sapphire stone," and Bible commentators say the stone the ancients called sapphire was most likely lapis lazuli. The same blue that's in mine.

It was never my faith. It was never a curse. It was the weight of doing all the math by myself.

My niece got the deal they do: buy two, and they add the third free, on their own. You see it in your cart at $0.00. So she kept one, sent me one, and gave one to her mother-in-law.

Every piece comes in its own pouch, in a gift box. They email a little card to print, "Set it down once," a verse card, and on the 2 + 1 a short printable guide, the Kitchen-Table Guide, with a gift note.

Right now there's an extra 25 % off with the code FALL25, until Sunday, November 15.

And there's a 60-Day Table Trial: keep it on your table for 60 days, and if you're not glad, you write to them, they send the return label, they pay for it, and they refund every cent, opened or not. You're charged once. Nothing every month. I'd want that, because I've been burned before.

What happens when you order:

1. Tap Check availability below. The page opens with 2 + 1 free already selected.
2. Add FALL25 at checkout for the extra 25 % off (until Sunday, November 15).
3. It ships in one parcel with tracking, at your door in 5-7 business days. Put one where you look up, and give one to someone carrying it too.

Tomorrow morning you'll sit down with your coffee.

You can reach for the phone and do the sums one more time, by yourself.

Or you can look up, at something real and blue and gold that asks nothing of you, and let the numbers wait a minute.

It's not that you're cursed.

You've been carrying it all by yourself.

— Joan

P.S. Wiseman's book is called The Luck Factor. Your library probably has it. The newspaper chapter is worth the trip.