How Strong Mental Health Improves Your Wealth with Crystal Flores

Today I sit down with Crystal Flores to trace the line from her father's suicide to her early marriage that led to depression and codependency. Crystal broke free from her picture-perfect, yet miserable marriage, to carve out a new life built on values, clarity, and fiercely practical money care. The reset wasn’t flashy. She moved to a quaint country home, complete with a flock of chickens, and chased non-negotiables like connection, thrift, resourcefulness, creativity, and environmental stewardship, 

Crystal defines wealth as more than dollars—emotional, physical, and financial systems working together so you can live your best life. She shares why “enough” must be personal before culture sells you “more,” and how a simple three-wheel model—earn, spend, save—reveals where your ride is wobbling. We keep it tangible: tracking spending as an act of self-compassion, quarterly balance sheets to reduce fear, and friction tactics for impulse buying--particularly important for the bipolar brain.

You’ll walk away from this episode with tools that put money back in its place: a resource that serves your life. Subscribe for more real, raw mental health conversations, share this episode with someone who needs it, and leave a review to help others find these stories and skills.

Transcript

Sponsor & Content Advisory

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We are supported by the Soar with Tapping app. Tapping is a powerful science-backed tool that calms your nervous system. I've been using Soar with Tapping nightly for insomnia, and I am sleeping well. Visit the Soar with Tapping app at Apple and Google Play Stores to start your journey towards freedom right from your phone. Welcome to Bipolar She. The content of today's episode does include suicide. There is always help out there, and if you're in immediate need, please dial 988-A Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Today we are talking about money and our minds with financial wellness expert Crystal Flores. When Crystal was a teenager, she learned that the silence surrounding her father's early death was because he died by suicide. At age 15, she saved up babysitting money to purchase a gravestone for her father's unmarked grave. As an adult suffering deep depression from a codependent relationship, Crystal reinvented her life by getting clear with her values and examining her emotional wealth. We break down how people think about money, particularly those that handle mental illness. We cover a lot of territory on this show. So let's go. So thank you, Crystal, so much for coming on the show this morning. It's great to talk to you.

Crisis, Codependency, and Divorce

SPEAKER_00 1:35

I likewise.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

And uh I always get started with a tough question to some extent, but take me back to a crisis time when you were struggling with your mental health.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

Yeah. I will go back to almost 10 years. It was 2016, the beginning of 2017. I had just lost my uncle, who was like a father to me. So my natural father passed away due to suicide when I was very young. I was five and a half years old. And this uncle had stepped into my life and really did the bulk of kind of being a dad. And I lost him unexpectedly. And that was really kind of the beginning of this sort of a breakdown for me. There was natural grief from that. But at the same time, my marriage for years had not been going well. And there was something about my uncle's death where I sat up and I said, okay, hang on. I am not living a life that he would have wanted for me. This is not the marriage that he would have wanted for me. And back then, I was 38, 39 years old. I didn't know what codependency was. I didn't know that that was a thing, that it was its own kind of special form of addiction. I did not know that. I knew that we had an unusual marriage. It was goofy, it was different. I didn't have words to understand that I was suffering from depression and codependency in some really, really bad ways. And it got worse and worse and worse. The more I tried to quote unquote fix my marriage, the worse it got. I understand now, of course, it takes two to make a marriage work. My husband at the time was dealing with his own set of issues. I didn't understand that. But eventually, Janine, it got to a point where I contemplated suicide for the first time in my life. I moved out and a friend actually said, you know what? And this is Texas. So like everybody's got a gun, right? Everybody's got a gun. And a friend of mine said, Hey, why don't you just take one of our guns and just keep it with you just for protection? And there were a couple nights where I was so depressed and I couldn't see a way out of any of it. I understood for the first time in my life how my father might have been driven to take his own life. And the second time that I had that and I thought about that gun, it was sitting in my kitchen drawer. The next day, I went and I dropped it off at my friend's house and I said, I can't have this in the house. I can't do that. And I didn't tell her what was going on, but I just said, I can't have this in my house. And I had this little one-bedroom apartment. But really hitting bottom with depression and codependency, not seeing a way forward, not knowing what, in hindsight, was actually one of the greatest gifts of my life. And from the outside, I want to be clear, we had all the picture perfect life, right? Like my husband had graduated from Harvard Medical School. I went to Dartmouth Business School. Like we had, we were like the poster children from affirmative action. Like I came from a household from a single raised by a single mother with a high school education. He came from an immigrant family. We made great money. We lived in a beautiful house. Like from the outside, it all looked beautiful. But the truth was that on the inside, it was a miserable existence. And we was a really unhealthy dynamic between the two of us. And I eventually got to the point where I was like, you know what? I'm going to throw a grenade into my whole life. I'm going to blow the whole thing up and I'm going to start over. Because everything I've done so far has not moved me towards a degree of happiness or peace. And I thought anything is going to be better than this. So I'm getting a divorce. I don't know what I'm going to do for work. I don't know where I'm going to live. I'm 39 years old. I think I'm going to figure it out. Worst comes to worst, I don't figure it out and I move home. Like that's so that's what I did. I got a divorce, got a lot of good therapy. And but it was a very hard time. Very hard time.

SPEAKER_01 5:12

It sounds really difficult. I'm curious if you have an example of codependency. Oh my goodness.

Manipulation, Rage, and Rock Bottom

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Yeah. So one of the things that codependence, like we're experts at manipulating other people's emotions to make sure to keep the peace. So my ex-husband loved to go camping. I remember one time we went camping and I forgot the utensils. I forgot our utensils. I left the utensils at home. It was an accident. And I had a grown man who had a full-on meltdown in the campground about how I was ruining his life. I had no attention to detail. I mean, it was it was really destructive. And I said to him, hey, look, all we have to do is unhitch the truck from the camper. I'm going to run down to the gas station. I can get us some plastic utensils. Like I am problem solving. And it this tirade about my lack of attention to detail and how could I do this to him just went on and on. I mean, there were times he would come home and I can remember he would be so angry, so full of rage, that I could hear him, he bought himself a baseball bat and he would go into the garage and he would beat things and scream. And I can remember being in the house with the three dogs, just shaking and wondering what it was going to be like when he was done with that tirade and would come through the door. And eventually I hit a point where I was like, I don't, when my uncle died, I was like, I this is not the life he wanted for me. I'm not gonna do this forever.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

What do you mean by blowing up your life and what were the next steps that you took?

Reinvention and Rural Reset

SPEAKER_00 6:41

Yeah, so blowing up my life for me meant and having the finding the courage to end the marriage, being willing to leave behind. Well, at that point, we had two houses. When I laughed, we had two really, really nice houses. I'm gonna leave the houses behind. I'm going to find an I'm gonna have to find a new job because actually by that point I was taking some time off from work. I thought, you know, I'm going to have to reinvent everything about my life. So I thought, I'm gonna change everything. Certainly, what I'm doing isn't making me happy. So I'm gonna do something else. And I had this really great journaling exercise that a friend of mine, one of my best friends, Lizzie, gave to me. And and one thing that kept coming up for me, Janine, was I want a little house in the country. I want chickens in a garden. And I was like, oh my God, that is so cliche. That's almost embarrassing. And I thought, you know what? But what whatever. If that seems to speak to me, I'm gonna go do that. And if that doesn't make me happy, then fine, I'll try something different. So I did. I bought a little house in the country on a few acres. It was a total gut job. I now have I have a flock of chickens, have some gardens, have some fruit trees. But, you know, obviously that's what spoke to me. And just having the courage to follow that was was hard, but it was ultimately the path to my happiness.

SPEAKER_01 7:54

Well, I'm sorry, I didn't know that about your father.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

You know, I used to never tell people. I would tell people that my father just died when I was young.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 8:03

And then I think somewhere in the past four or five years, I just started telling people my father died of suicide when I was young. And I try to say it as matter of fact, as matter-of-factly as possible because I really think we've got to lose the shame around depression and suicide and normalizing it. I I thought, you know, I want to be able to say my father died of suicide the same way that you would be able to say my father died of cancer.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

Absolutely. That's the mission of this show, too, is that normalization. Yeah, absolutely. But it also does bring up issues when you're looking at the actual act of suicide. And that's a lot to hold and to carry in your life. And to be five when that happens, you know, such a loss.

Naming Suicide and Ending Shame

SPEAKER_00 8:51

It is a loss, you know, and I wasn't the concept of death is hard enough for children. Like that's a big concept. The concept of suicide, like that's something I think probably the average five-year-old can't can't grasp. So they just told me that daddy had gone away and he wasn't coming back. And I they tell me that I looked at my mother and I said, Are you going anywhere? And she said, No, I'm not going anywhere. And I said that, okay, then I'm okay. And that was sort of it. And for years, my family didn't know how to tell me about this. And as and for years, they also didn't mark his grave. And I was about 13 when I was like, hang on, something's not right. And I figured out, I was like, okay, the only reason that no one wants to talk to me about my father's death has got to me that there's so that it's something so awful. And I finally asked, I said, Did my father die of suicide? And they finally told me that yes, it was the case. And and no one had marked his grave. And I don't really know why, but I remember feeling really frustrated with the adults around me. I was like, y'all gotta get your shit together, seriously. So I asked my mom, I was about 15, I said, okay, how much is a headstone? And she said, Oh, baby, you know, and this was, I don't know, this was 1990. She said, a basic headstone's gonna cost$250. And I was like, all right, I got it. I know how to, that's I knew exactly how many babysitting jobs that was. And I said, okay, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna save up and I'm gonna buy my father a headstone. And so I was about 15, 16 years old when I saved up the money from babysitting jobs and things like that to buy my father a headstone, which still sits there today. And I realized now in hindsight that buying your father's headstone is not an average experience for a 15-year-old. But, you know, my mom was a single mom. She only had a high school education. I watched her work three part-time jobs, pulling it together and going to school for like a vocational nursing license. And I used to do her math homework because like she's in math is not her strong suit. And I was like, girl, you gotta get through school because we need income. But all those experiences, I think, you know, they're hard. There are gifts. Like, I'm I tell I tell people now, like, I'm really scrappy, I'm super resourceful. And like, I joke and I told people, like, I'm an economic cockroach. Like, you can't kill me. But, you know, I I couldn't have gotten there unless I'd had those experiences. I mean, that was the tuition I paid for the gifts that I have now. Right. It's a high tuition. It's a very expensive tuition. Yes. I wouldn't, I wouldn't wish it on anybody, but I look at the experience of when my marriage fell apart and the heartbreak, and I learned a lot of really beautiful lessons about what it is to really live a meaningful life.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

I've been really impressed by your work around money and self-worth. And mostly my interest is fueled by the somewhat sad reality that people with mental illness struggle with money and finances more than others. It's been a huge struggle of mine, tied up, I'm sure, with the way that I was raised, the way I feel about myself. And so if you could share some of these theories on money and oh yeah. I that would be so helpful.

A Teen Buys Her Father’s Headstone

Money, Self-Worth, and Mental Health

SPEAKER_00 11:53

Yeah, and the money is money is a hard topic. I grew up in this household where there was a lot of overspending, but at the same time, I would spend the summers with my aunt and uncle who had really raised himself up by their bootstraps and, you know, gotten an education and all the things, and actually, compared to us, had a very high income, but they were also equally unhappy. One household that has an excess of money, and both of the adults seem to be equally unhappy. So there's not any correlation between happiness and degree of income. What I have come to learn through both through my work professionally, I was a private banker for years, and then I worked in mortgage. So I've lifted the lids on lots of people's finances, is it really isn't about how much money you have, but it is about using it well. And, you know, I tell people now when I'm teaching about money, how to think about money and different ways to use money. I think each one of us has to define what enough is for ourselves. It's really important. What is my enough? What does it look like? What kind of house is it? What kind of car is it? How many vacations do I take? In our material life, what is enough? How much money do I want to be spending on therapy every year? What is it? What's my enough? And it's really critical to define that for yourself because I tell people if you don't define that for yourself, this culture that we live in will define it for you. And this culture's definition of enough is more. And then some more. It's always a bigger house, a bigger car. And comparison, we all, you know, we all use social media. Comparison is absolutely the thief of joy, no question. But the other thing that I tell people is, and you would be shocked. You know, when when you look at social media or you look at someone else's external reality, we see the car that they drive, we see the house that they live in, we see the clothes that they wear. We don't get to see what's actually in their bank account. Do they have an extra month of savings? You would be shocked. And I got to see this, you know, when I worked in mortgage, how many families are really living on the edge? There's not enough. And some of that is that pressure to kind of keep up. Some of the pressures I see that people are dealing with these days are very real. Like inflation is real right now. The job market is soft. That is real. So the question is okay, great, there's all these really challenging realities. I've got to define my enough, but what do I do day to day? And what I tell people is, you know, there's multiple times of types of wealth, and I can talk about that if you want, but think of every financial transaction that you have as falling into one of three buckets, or think of it as a three-wheeled tricycle, and it's earning, spending, and saving. So pretty much every transaction you have in your financial life falls into one of those three three buckets. And you got to look at it and say, okay, which one of my wheels is misaligned or is underinflated? And usually for all of us, there's some improvement that we can make in all of them. What I tell most clients that I work with now individually is focus first generally on the spending wheel, because that's the place where we generally have the most control and we can make a pretty quick impact in our lives. And what I like to see people do, and by the way, all of this, if you want to practice self-compassion and self-love, this is a great way to do it. It's one path, one practice. For me, it's tracking my spending. So it's not a budget. I don't go, well, I can have so many coffees per month. No, no, no, I don't do that. But I do track my spending. So I just live my life, but I want to know where money is going. How much am I spending eating out with friends and family? Because that's important to me. Connection's a value for me. So that falls into a different category than eating out when I just got lazy. How much does it do we need for groceries? How much do we need for healthcare? How much do we need to live a life that is enough for us? And you eventually get to a pretty good picture of kind of what a normal month looks like. And then you can sit back and say, where am I spending that's not in alignment with my values? Where can I cut back? Or more importantly, where do I need to spend more money? But it is about using money as a tool. Money is just, it's a resource. It's no different than time, than health. It's a resource. And it should be spent out of a sense of, I believe, out of a sense of alignment with one's values, out of a place of agency. And I think, my gosh, I would love it if we lived in a world where all the shame about money went away. Shame of not having enough, shame of I made mistakes with money, I failed at money. And by the way, this whole concept of I failed at money, whether it was like, oh, I made a bad loan, I made a bad purchase, I made a bad investment, whatever. Reframe those things from failure to tuition. I made a mistake with money, it cost me X amount, I learned a lesson. Because it's A-OK to pay tuition as long as you learn the lesson. The problem is when we pay the tuition and we don't learn the lesson, and then we end up repeating it. But, you know, it just, I really want people to live with a degree of comfort around money.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

You've also talked about, or you've done a little diagram about mental health and money as well.

Defining “Enough” and Social Comparison

SPEAKER_00 16:48

Yeah, I'll I'll break that down. And I like to remind people that first of all, there are multiple types of wealth. And we've got to first of all define like what is wealth. I define wealth over the definition I've come to over the years in my work is that wealth is having an abundance of a resource such that I can live my best life. An abundance of a resource such that I can live my best life. There are multiple sources of wealth. So time is a source of wealth, knowledge is a source of wealth, but there are really three primary sources of wealth. There's physical wealth, emotional wealth, and financial wealth. Like those are the kind of the big three. Again, there's some others, but those are the big three. So physical wealth is like, is my body actually physically healthy enough to do the things that I want to do? And we all have varying degrees. And then there's our financial health. Do we have sufficient financial resources? Are we managing them properly? Do we feel comfortable? Are there holes in our knowledge that we need to fill in? And emotional wealth is a big umbrella. This encompasses your relationship with yourself, your degree of mental and emotional wellness, your relationships with your community. By the way, relationships and community, that alone is a totally other type of wealth. It encompasses your relationship to a higher spiritual power, whatever you conceive that to be. When I talk about these three sources of wealth, physical, financial, and emotional, I remind people that the most important is actually emotional health. Like that's what all the data shows us. You want to live a long, happy life, invest in your emotional intelligence and your relationships. Super critical. And I tend to think of every family, you know, once we figure out kind of what your enough is, every family is like a basically a giant math problem to me. But ultimately, what we are solving for is happiness. We're not solving for a number. We're solving for fulfillment. Because, you know, I would love to live in a world where we were all walking around emotionally healthy and non-judgmental and we could all hold one another and give space and be loving. Like that's the world I want. And for that world to happen, we've all got to be pursuing our own version of enough.

SPEAKER_01 18:55

So enough, okay, so I'm in a really hard financial situation right now, and it's been really difficult. But I've been living like month to month in this very fancy neighborhood. And I live in an in-law unit. I feel very like self-conscious about that because I'm like this old lady in the in-law unit. I feel like I don't fit in this community. I've been on disability for at least 10 years now. So it's been this kind of frustrating situation. But at the bottom line is that I am living on very little money right now. And enough seems so far away, just enough. So when I hear that, I'm like, I'm never even gonna get to enough.

SPEAKER_00 19:45

Here's what I will say. And it's hard to remember this and have faith in this when you're going through it. But sometimes there are just seasons of life that are about survival. And that is okay. That is, and they might last for years, might be a decade. When you're going through it, it feels like I don't know when I mean I I know when my mom and I were struggling financially, and you know, like, and and our house, by the way, was taken away from us. Like we, you know, we our house was repossessed. It is a horrifying thing for a fifth grader to walk down and see her mother crying in her bed and say, and I said, like, mom, what's going on? She said, she said, honestly, the bank, we can't make the mortgage payment. The bank is coming for the house. I don't know where we're going. We might go to a homeless shelter. I don't know. There are seasons, and nothing has to be forever. But what I will also say is for some people these days, getting to enough, it may mean making some drastic changes. It may mean moving out of an area that has where the cost of living is way too high. It's just unrealistically high. This is where you got to get really clear about your values. I mean, we, my husband and I now, like, we didn't want a big housing expense. So our house is 1200 square feet. It's two bedroom, two-bath. It does not look like a fancy, because it's not, it's not a fancy house. We didn't, that's not what we created intentionally, but it is getting really clear about like, okay, maybe I live in an in-law unit and maybe I'm good with that. I'm okay living in 400 or 500 square feet, whatever it is, because it's going to let me live in accordance with my values. And that can be really hard. But it doesn't mean that it's unhappy.

SPEAKER_01 21:21

Right. So the other issue with those going through mental crises or dealing with mood disorders, one of the big symptoms is overspending and impulse buys.

The Three Wheels: Earn, Spend, Save

Track Spending as Self-Compassion

SPEAKER_00 21:35

So we're, by the way, we're all human and impulse buying is it's easier than ever, right? Because now you've just got a phone at your fingertips. You can be in line at the grocery store for heaven's like, and you can make a huge Amazon order. Like it's really, really easy. So there's a couple of really simple things. If you want to put friction between yourself and the transaction, I mean, there's a handful of one of my favorite ways is deleting shopping apps from the phone. Number one. Get them off the phone. Like that's a very simple thing to do. I've also set a rule with myself. Some months I'll do an experiment and I say, I will don't do no online shopping. If I have to do any shopping, it has to be from a store in real life. That's really interesting because that limits you to what you can buy, particularly for me living in a rural area. So there's some friction you can put into it. You can also try, you know, substitute activities. So for me, I love to buy books. Like that's my thing. That's my problem. For some people, it's clothes, shoes, or whatever. If I'm gonna have a book spree, I first take myself to the public library, like to scratch that itch. So if there's something else that you can do as a substitute activity, that's great. And last but not least, this is a valid strategy because I will be honest, I have fallen into times where I need emotional comfort and I want to go shopping. Like that's what I'm like, you know what would feel good is I'm gonna go shopping. So guess what? When that happens and when it hits and when it's bad, I go shopping, but honestly, I go to Goodwill. Where like if I buy 10 things, if I'm going, if like if it's going to happen, I don't let it be so financially devastating. Right. Like it's really, really hard to make financially devastating purchases at the thrift store. So if you're gonna have to scratch that itch, do it in a way that's not gonna break the bank. If you can't find a replacement activity, if you can't get it off your phone, if you're just if it's just you've got to, you've got to scratch that itch, then find a way to do it that's not gonna be terrible. For me, it always comes back to what are my values? My values are connection, thrift, resourcefulness, creativity, environmental stewardship. Huge for me. For some people, I tell them, you put a little card in your wallet that literally has your values written on them, or alternatively on the back. I will ask clients sometimes to say, if we've got a spending issue, put a list of questions on on the back of that card. And it might be, do I already own this? Because we tend to, especially with clothing, we tend to buy things that we like. So we end up that's how you end up with, you know, seven pairs of black pants or whatever. Do I really need it right now? Can I wait 24 hours? Again, just putting a little bit of friction around that purchase. There's a couple of things that one can do, and I and I like to introduce the concept of financial self-care. Because if you ask a woman or ask a person, what's your what's your physical self-care routine, they'll be like, oh, I go to yoga and I go to the gym, and then I don't know, I do a charcoal, I don't know, I do charcoal like detox, whatever. Like they can tell you. If you ask someone what is your emotional self-care routine, they'll say, I go to therapy, I journal, I meditate twice a week, like they they can name their practices. But if you ask someone what is your financial self-care routine, you get deer in the head, like they don't even know what you're talking about. They'd be like, Well, I paid the bills, which is a little bit like saying my physical self-care routine is I eat, I ate breakfast. Like that's a bare minimum. But the concept of financial self-care, it to me means if there are holes in my knowledge, this is a portion of self-love, right? I'm gonna fill in that knowledge gap. Here's an example of a financial self-care practice. Every quarter, every three months, I do a balance sheet for myself. It's just a list of all of my assets and all of my debts. And it and it shows me over time, am I taking care of myself? It's my overall level of of what of financial wealth increasing, decreasing, what happened, what is the degree of change. But if like if you do nothing else, you don't read an article, you don't, you don't want to read anything from about finance, fine. You don't want to do a balance sheet, fine. If there is one thing that I wish every family in the whole wide world did, it would just be just start tracking your spending. Get some categories. I do mine really simply on a spreadsheet. Um and the spreadsheet sometimes gives people hives. Do it in paper if you have to. But it will bring awareness to your spending patterns, and it is the beginning of that financial self-knowledge. It is really about using money as a tool, using money as a servant to your life rather than the other way around. But for me, you know, the most basic practice for anybody would be just start tracking your spending because you will get so much insight and so much data and so much awareness just from that practice.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

Wow. I feel like I have like major homework to do now. Sorry. I'm so afraid, I'm so afraid to do the spending side of things.

SPEAKER_00 26:19

I know. Okay, but but okay, so that fear, that's a great thing. That's very informative. Like when someone tells me, oh, I'm really nervous, I'm I'm a little afraid to do that spending thing. That to me is a sign that that's probably something that we need to do. For me, when I feel fear or envy around something, I'm like, those are the those are my most informative emotions. Money is a skill. And the good news is skills can be taught and they can be learned. But also, like any any other type of health, like we have to work at it a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 26:49

Well, thank you so much for sharing your personal story as well. And as I said, I have to look at my Bank of America account.

SPEAKER_00 27:01

Go look at your bank account. Just as an as think of it, and you know, it's it's a great opportunity to be non-judgmental. It's so hard to be non-judgmental towards ourselves. So hard.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

Thank you so much for listening to Crystal's story and her advice. If you found this episode interesting or informative, please do share it. The mission of Bipolar She is to normalize mental illness through real, raw conversations. So help spread our stories to those who might really need them. And as always, thank you.