You Make Good Money So Why Do You Still Feel Broke

You can be doing everything right and still feel like you are falling behind financially.

If you have ever looked at your bank account and wondered why you still feel stressed even with a stable income this episode is for you.

In this conversation we break down the growing problem of financial anxiety affecting Gen Z and Millennials and how social media comparison quietly reshapes expectations around money success lifestyle and self worth.

We explore the difference between being broke as a financial condition and feeling broke as a psychological condition. Constant exposure to vacations promotions income screenshots luxury lifestyles and highlight reels can create pressure frustration and self doubt even when your financial situation has not actually changed.

This episode also provides practical personal finance and money mindset strategies to help you regain emotional control improve financial habits and build long term stability.

💡 In this episode you will learn

How social media increases financial stress and comparison
 Why stable income does not always create financial peace
 The psychology behind feeling broke
 How lifestyle inflation destroys financial progress
 Why emotional spending keeps people financially overwhelmed
 The gap rule for building savings before upgrading lifestyle
 The 24 hour rule to reduce impulse spending
 How monthly financial resets improve awareness and control
 The debt snowball strategy for creating momentum and consistency
 How to separate income lifestyle emotion and financial identity

This episode is about more than money. It is about reducing pressure rebuilding perspective and creating financial habits that support long term peace and stability.

📌 Subscribe for more conversations on career growth productivity personal development workplace success leadership and financial mindset.

💬 Share this episode with someone feeling financial pressure and leave a review with the financial habit you want to improve this month.

Transcript

Broke Versus Feeling Broke

Social Media Creates Financial Pressure

Reality Check On Comparison

Lifestyle Inflation And Relief Spending

Systems That Build Real Stability

Personal Money Reset And Snowball

Small Daily Savings That Compound

Closing Challenge And Subscribe

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hello, friends. Welcome to another episode of your motivational Gen Z and Millennial Expert podcast. I am your host. My name is Dr. Jason Wiggins, and we will be talking about the leadership blueprint, career growth, motivation, and workplace success for Gen Z and Millennials. Well, welcome. I'm glad to have everybody here. I want to start with something that might sound uncomfortable at first. And I don't mean that in a demissive way. I don't mean your problems aren't real. What I mean is something more precise. A lot of people today are financially stable, but emotional unstable when it comes about money. And the distinction changes everything because being broke is a financial condition. But feeling broke is a psychological condition. And those two things don't always match. You can have a lot of different types of variations of income from gig income to full-time work, but you can be functioning completely normally and still feel like you are behind in life. Who doesn't feel like that sometimes, right? And the reason for that is not your bank account, it is your environment. We live in a world now where financial reality is no longer just what you experience directly. It is what you are exposed to constantly. Every day you are seeing someone buy a house, someone quitting their job, someone making money online, someone traveling, someone showing income screenshots, somebody upgrading their lifestyle. This is everything you're seeing through social media. And even though your logical brain knows this is not correct, your emotional brain does not process this at all. It just absorbs that repetition of all those good things happening to all these people. It's like it becomes normal. And then that expectation becomes normal. You see all of these people living the good life. You think everybody is like that, but you the expectation becomes the pressure, and that is how someone can have a stable life, but still feel like they are falling behind. Remember, every person in your social media platform is not having success. But it's just that one every once in a while you see them doing great things, they go, how come that's not me? This is a very emotional experience happening for millennials and Gen Z's right now. It is not panic, it is not crisis, it is something quieter. It is a constant background pressure. You're working and earning and paying bills, you're doing what you're supposed to do. But there is still this feeling, I should be further along than I am. There's always that constant pressure about how come I'm not living up to not only my standards, but standards of everybody else. So you begin to internalize that. And after a while, if you're not making the money you want to make, or you're not having the status you want to make, you start to think, what am I doing wrong? I must be bad with what I'm doing. I must be bad with my money, or I'm just not doing enough. But what if neither of those are true? What if the issue is not financial structure, but your distorted environment? Because here's what changed. You are no longer just living your life. You are constantly exposed to all the thousands of humans at the same time on social media, but not their full lives. You're only seeing fragments that highlighted the moments of success. And your brain does something very important here. It does not label that this is not real for everyone. It only talks about the key points. So over time, what you think is normal life begins to shift, knowing that everybody's doing great things, everybody's financially successful, everybody's going on trips, but that's not real. That's not exactly how it is. So the pressure is not on you. It's just distorted on you about your financial success and your future. You are not thinking about money, you're just scrolling through social media, and you see someone, maybe your age, maybe a little younger, similar background, and they are showing success. Maybe they're financially well off. They have a great income, their lifestyle is about partying, having fun, or they show professional success. But all of a sudden, you start shifting and looking at yourself. Not logically, you start looking at more emotionally. Nothing's changed in my life. But your perception of your life ultimately changes in a heartbeat. And now you feel this sudden pressure about what is going on in your life and how you're not changing it. And guess what? Nothing's changed. But here's the key part most people don't realize that the distortion people are feeling inside. They don't realize that they're being impacted in a way by having all those people have all the successes. And then you react to those successes of everybody, go, how come not me? So that is why we have to learn to be content about our financial success. Learn about how we can continue to build financial success and momentum. And we have to ultimately make sure we feel good about ourselves. So when you feel all this financial anxiety, the first thing we should ask ourselves, did anything change in my finances? Or did something change in my perception? Because if the perception is what shifted, then money's not the problem. We have enough money. And if you don't, then we need to make and find additional ways to make money, gig money. But let's not get trapped in what I call the comparison trap. Human beings are wired to compare. This is not new. What is new is the scale that we measure ourselves by. We are no longer comparing ourselves to a small group of people around us. We are comparing ourselves to millions of different fragmented lives, not even their full lives, just those great moments. So we start looking at what is life supposed to look like? And then we start thinking, I am behind. And that's where that illusion in our mind is just that. It's an illusion. I'd like you to think about this for a second. Somebody you know posts on social media. I mean, it could be anything: a job, a business win, a personal milestone, a financial success. And suddenly your life was fine five minutes ago, but it doesn't feel the same anymore after hearing about this. Because nothing's changed. Nothing, your reality's not changed. But you're looking at why is somebody else continuing to be more successful? So when you look at your lifestyle, think about how that money leak in your life, emotional, financial, thought process. It's not about one big mistake we make, it's about the small feelings of success that we have. We get a raise, we upgrade our life slightly. We get to go out and eat out, enjoy a great movie with our friends and our family. We find things that we can buy that make us feel better. We do something to make us happy. And then all of a sudden, we forget about our worries, we forget about that financial gap. Some of you might have heard about David Ramsey. He teaches a very simple principle. Live on less than you make. Live on less than you make on purpose. Because living marginally is not optional. Marginally living is stability. Without it, everything feels tighter, even when income increases. But that's the emotional trap. When people get more money, they don't feel rich, they feel relieved. And the relief leads to justification spending. I'm making more money. I need to buy a car. I need to buy a house. I need to have better clothes. I deserve this. I work for this. I can remember working at a job I didn't necessarily like, but I was making more money than I had made. And so I remember thinking that, okay, I don't like this job, but I want to buy something that's going to help me feel better about what I'm doing. So at the time I ended up buying a jet ski so I could go around in the water and I made this purchase because I wanted one all my life, but I felt like I don't even like this job. So I'm going to do something just to give me reason that I can appreciate what I am doing. And that was why I purchased a jet ski. You know, could I afford it? Yes, maybe. But is it something I really needed? So David Ramsey really talks about how you can get over your financial disruptions by using the snowball effect. So you tackle the first smallest bill that you have. If it's a credit card bill, maybe it's a$200 bill. You pay that off, and then you start paying on another bill that's smaller. Then all of a sudden, you start paying off all of these bills one after one after one until you start hitting your heavy hitters. Then you also find ways to improve your financial duress by looking for a new job, reducing your expenses. These are all things that will help you feel more comfortable and relieved. So when someone gets a raise, what do you feel like at first? You feel progress. But guess what? Within months, your rent increases, your spending increases, your expectation increases. Why? Because you're making more money and subconsciously you start spending more money, you start going out to eat more often, you start buying more clothes, you decide you want a better car, and suddenly nothing's actually changed. So, what have you felt? You have felt financial inflation. So, what we should do, what should you do? I like to call it the gap rule. When income increases for us Gen Z and millennials, uh don't upgrade immediately. But think about that money that you just increased by and start saving, start investing, and then you have more options. Save and invest 50% of that, and then delay any upgrades in your life for the next 90 days, because time will really reveal whether something is an emotional purpose of spending or a necessary purpose of spending. People who build systems with money and people who consume income as it arrives. Now we need to start breaking the loop. Now we need systems because awareness alone is not enough to help us save money and be financially secure within our early age. So here's what I'd like to propose 24-hour rule. We delay impulse spending and we utilize that emotional tagging, which will basically identify feelings before we spend. Do I need this? Is this going to make me happier? After a week or two, is this going to be something that I think, ah, I'm glad I purchased this, or am I going to have regret? Let's stop thinking about how we compare ourselves with others, as we talked about earlier. We got to stop identifying ourselves compared to those friends and those people that we try to imitate via social media. And let's have what I call a monthly reset. Let's evaluate the behavior that we have, not just the income. Because money is more than just a number. It is more than math. If we have the money, let's put it where we can put it to good use. Let's invest it. Let's do things that will delay upgrading our life for the next 90 days and realize: is it something that we need? Is it something that we want? Or is it something that I can do without? Think about this for a second. Two people, the same world, that have different behaviors. One builds their financial income slowly, they protect what's important around them financially, they avoid impulses and purchasing, they avoid that inflation, while the other increases spending with their income. One builds stability, the other builds financial pressure on themselves. You could be working at the same job, earning the same amount of money, but then when something happens, you have an emergency, then you're not able to get through that emergency without borrowing on your credit card, without borrowing from a friend. You might work at the same job, have the same environment, feel like you are just right up there with them when it comes to financial successes, but you're completely separate. You're completely different. And that's why you have to build systems. I can say when I was in my younger years, I really struggled financially. Even going into my mid-30s, I had no sort of savings. Everything that came in, I spent. He stated, I can't help you. And that just hit me so hard knowing that I had put so much financial stress on myself and inability to pay my bills. And so what I ended up doing at that point is I changed the way I think. I changed my environment and I built systems to help me. What did I do? First things first, I used the snowball effect that we talked about with David Ramsey. From that point on, I reduced my rent. I reduced what I was spending. I found ways to start saving. I paid off all of my small bills, paid off my vehicle, and then I started making an impact into my student debt. My income grew as I continued to move up and secure better opportunities that were more financially fruitful. And then at one point, I finally started to save money. And then I snowballed that money to good investments online, trading stocks, and I built some financial success. But I had to look back and go, look at all the mistakes that I made over time. And that's real life. Real life about admitting the mistakes you did. And that's why, if anybody takes anything out of this podcast, I really want you to think about you know looking at your life and not living with inflation, not trying to spend as much as you receive. First of all, take that money and reinvest once you've paid your bills. It's interesting because I had a friend growing up, and it's it because we talked about wanting to save for a cruise when we after one year, and we thought about if you save at least five dollars a day over the course of every single day, that's it. You have saved$1,500. And you know what? You can go on a trip for$1,500, and that's just by saving five dollars a day,$35 a week. So when you start thinking about the coffee you buy, the small thing that you don't need, and you think about saving that. Now, let's say you're not gonna go on a trip, you want to compound that, you want to make more money, you want to reinvest. All of a sudden, that$1,500 that you saved in five years, if you invested right, is now$5,000. I know we've kind of dived in a little deeper to the financial part, but that is what it takes. But before you get to that point, don't make those same mistakes. Be emotionally secure about your purchases. Stop reviewing your life, you know, compared to everybody else when it comes to social media. We all do great things. We just do it at different timelines in our life. I've had to look at people going, oh, wow, look at what they're doing. This is great. But then I reflect, oh, I've done these same things, but they're just different timelines about when we did it. So that's why don't get caught up in focusing on your success versus someone else's success. Think about how your life focuses on the great things that you have done. Most financial stress today is not financial. It's the perception, it's our own emotional well-being. And we have to stop personalizing that going, how does this affect me? It shouldn't affect me. We should celebrate their successes, feel good about what they did, and stop thinking it in a distorted manner. Start thinking about what their goal would have been and how they achieved it, and then reflect on how what we can do, how we can be successful. And that goal in our life is about being emotional stable. And that emotional stability creates freedom in our life. Not that comparison, not the increase in income, not all the validation we need around us, just the stability that makes us focus on who we are and how we can improve. If there is one thing that I want you to take out of today's episode about being emotionally stable and financially secure and building wealth and reinvesting and not comparing yourself to others, I want you to be influenced in a way that you can realize. And that moment you separate the perception from reality and that emotion from behavior, and the income from lifestyle, you'll stop reacting and start building because the rules are constantly changing. And most people are still playing the old game. And that is where opportunity begins. So, as Gen Z and millennials, we feel a lot of pressure. We see it on social media about all the successes that everybody's having. And that's great. But you and I, we can do exactly the same thing. You have to set your mind to it. Focus on the greater impact that you can make. Are you doing something right now that says this is counterproductive? This is not what I should be doing. This is not how I should be wasting my time. I've been there. Take that time to focus on being you. So I want to thank all my great listeners out there. And I want you to continue to listen, share, like, subscribe. So truly, be happy with yourself. Know that you are here for a purpose, you are here for a reason, and you are here to conquer everything that is in front of you moving forward. Remember, don't ever let anyone tell you you're not great. You are great, and if somebody does tell you that, you just look the other way and go, huh, really. I'll show you. Watch this. So thank you, everyone. My name is Dr. Jason Wiggins, and I am your motivational Gen Z and Millennial expert. Take care, and we'll talk to you later. Bye bye.