One Day You'll Wish You Started Today

Episode Summary: Why do smart, capable people consistently fail to save, invest, or build wealth — even when they know they should? In this episode, we go deep into the psychology behind financial inaction. Drawing on behavioral economics, cognitive science, and real-world money psychology, we unpack the hidden mental biases that quietly steal your financial future. This isn't a lecture about spreadsheets. It's a conversation about the strange, irrational, deeply human reasons we self-sabotage — and exactly what to do about it.

Topics Covered:

• Present bias and hyperbolic discounting: why your future self feels like a stranger
• The Marshmallow Test myth — and what it actually teaches us about willpower
• Loss aversion and why the fear of losing money hurts more than the joy of gaining it
• Mental accounting: the quirky way our brains create "fake" money categories
• The "someday" trap — why we keep deferring the start date
• Social comparison, lifestyle inflation, and keeping up with people who are secretly broke
• The identiy gap: why you may not see yourself as "the type of person who invests"
• Practical behavioral hacks: automation, commitment devices, implementation intentions, and more

Key Concepts & Terms:

• Hyperbolic Discounting – The tendency to prefer smaller, sooner rewards over larger, later ones, with the preference reversing as the time horizon changes
• Present Bias – Overweighting the present moment relative to the future
• Loss Aversion – The finding, from Kahneman & Tversky's Prospect Theory, that losses feel roughly twice as painful as equivalent gains feel good
• Mental Accounting – Richard Thaler's concept describing how people categorize money in psychologically distinct "buckets"
• Status Quo Bias – The preference for the current state of affairs, making inaction the default
• Implementation Intentions – Peter Gollwitzer's research showing that "if-then" planning dramatically increases follow-through
• Commitment Devices – Pre-commitments that make future bad behavior harder (e.g., auto-escalation savings plans)
• Identity-Based Habits – James Clear's concept from Atomic Habits that lasting behavior change starts with identity, not outcome goals

Books Mentioned:

• Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
• Misbehaving – Richard Thaler
• Atomic Habits – James Clear
• Your Money or Your Life – Vicki Robin
• The Psychology of Money – Morgan Housel
• Nudge – Thaler & Sunstein
• Predictably Irrational – Dan Ariely

Research Referenced:

• Kahneman & Tversky's Prospect Theory (1979)
• Walter Mischel's Stanford Marshmallow Experiment
• Shlomo Benartzi & Richard Thaler's Save More Tomorrow (SMarT) program
• Peter Gollwitzer's implementation intention studies
• The "future self continuity" research by Hal Hershfield, UCLA

Actionable Takeaways:

1. Automate one savings transfer this week — even $25
2. Write a letter to your future self at futureme.org
3. Use the "10-year rule": ask yourself how you'll feel about today's decision in 10 years
4. Set up auto-escalation on your retirement contributions
5. Identify one financial identity statement: "I am someone who pays myself first"
6. Create an implementation intention for your next money habit: "When [X happens], I will [do Y]"
7. Conduct a 30-minute "money date" with yourself or your partner once a month

Connect & Subscribe: If this episode resonated with you, please share it with one person who needs to hear it. Leave a review — it genuinely helps more people find me!

Transcript

Intro

The Stranger In the Mirror

The Marshmallow Test Lied To You

Losses Hit Different

Your Brain's Funny Money

The Someday Trap

Who Do You Think You Are?

Practical Magic - Behavioral Tools That Actually Work

Outro - Your Future Self Is Real

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hi everyone, welcome to Personal Finance with Molly, where we talk about all things personal finance. I am your host, Molly Ford Coates. Let's dig in. Hey, welcome back. I am really glad you're here today because the episode we're about to do together might be one of the most important conversations you have about money this year. So today we're gonna talk about something that I think is foundational. We're gonna talk about why you're not doing the things you already know you should be doing. Because here's the truth most of us already know the basics of personal finance. Spend less than you earn, invest early, build an emergency fund, don't carry credit card debt. These aren't secrets, they're not complicated. A motivated teenager could understand them in an afternoon. And yet, collectively, as a society, we are terrible at actually following through on them. And that's fascinating to me. That gap, that gap between knowing and doing, that is the subject of an entire field of science called behavioral economics. And it turns out that gap isn't a character flaw. It's not laziness, it's not stupidity, it's your brain doing exactly what evolution designed it to do. Just in a financial environment it was never built for. So today we're gonna walk through the psychology of financial inaction. We're going to name the biases, we're gonna understand where they come from, we're gonna feel the truth of them in our own lives, and then critically, we're gonna talk about how to work with your brain instead of constantly fighting against it. The title of today's episode is One Day You'll Wish You Started Today. And by the end, I want that sentence to feel less like a warning and more like a gift. Let's dig in. Here's a question for you. When you imagine yourself at age 70, retired, gray hair, maybe, looking back over your life, how vividly can you actually picture that person? Not in a generic abstract way. I mean really picture them. Their face, their daily routine, what they worry about, what they're grateful for, what they wish they had done differently. Most people, when they try to do this exercise honestly, realize that their future self feels more like a stranger than like them. Psychologically distant, a little hazy, almost like a character in a story rather than a continuation of the person sitting right here right now. And this is not a metaphor, this is neuroscience. A researcher named Hal Hirschfield at UCLA did a series of fascinating studies where he used neuroimaging or brain scans to look at how people process thoughts about themselves versus thoughts about other people. What he found, friends, is remarkable. When most people think about their current self, their brain activates in a particular way. And when they think about a celebrity, for example, someone they don't know at all, their brain activates differently. But here's the kicker. When people think about their future self, their brain activates more like the celebrity pattern than the current self pattern. We are neurologically treating our future selves as strangers. And if that's true, if your 70-year-old self is basically a stranger to you now, then think about what that means for financial decision making. When you choose to spend$300 on something you don't really need today instead of investing it, you are essentially stealing from a stranger to give to yourself. And we are surprisingly comfortable doing that. This phenomenon has a name in behavioral economics. It's called present bias. And its mathematical cousin is called hyperbolic discounting. Here's what hyperbolic discounting means in plain English. Humans, we are very bad at waiting for rewards. But we're worse at it the closer the reward is to right now. So if I asked you whether you prefer$100 today or$110 in a month, most people will take the$100 today, even though a 10% monthly return is extraordinary, and you'd never turn that down in an investment context. But if I ask you whether you'd prefer$100 in 12 months or$100 or$110 in 13 months, same trade-off, same one month gap, suddenly most people have the patience to wait. Because future you waiting one more month feels very different than present you waiting one more month. The closer reward is to right now, the more magnetically attractive it becomes. And the cost being placed on the future, on that stranger, well, that barely registers. This is why people say, I'll start saving next month, every month for 15 years. Next month never arrives, it's always next month. The present bias continually resets. The starting line just keeps moving. Now, and this is important, now I don't want you to feel bad about this, friends. This is not a moral failing. In our evolutionary past, present bias made perfect sense. If you were a hunter-gatherer and someone offered you a handful of berries right now versus the possibility of more berries next week, well, you took the berries right now. Because next week was genuinely uncertain. You might be dead. There might be a drought. The rational move was to seize present resources. But in the modern financial world, where we're trying to build 30-year wealth plans, that ancient wiring works against us every single day. So what do we do about it? Well, one of the most powerful things that Hirschfield found was this: if you increase the vividness of your future self, if you can make that stranger feel more like you, your financial behavior changes. In one of his experiments, participants who were shown age-progressed photos of themselves, their actual faces digitally aged, allocated significantly more to hypothetical retirement account than those who weren't shown the photos. That's remarkable, friends. Just seeing your future face changed what you did with your money. And you can replicate this yourself. Write a letter to your future self. You can even use a service like futureme.org, which will hold your letter and deliver it in a year or five years or 20. If you don't want to do it online, just grab some good old pen and paper. Describe what you hope your life looks like, what you're grateful for, what you're proud that past you did for you. Now, it may sound soft, it may sound like a journaling exercise, but what you're actually doing is collapsing the psychological distance between present you and future you. You're making that stranger more real. And when your future self becomes real, taking care of them stops feeling like sacrifice and starts feeling like loyalty. Okay, friends, we need to talk about the marshmallow test because I think most people have taken exactly the wrong lesson from it. If you're not familiar with the marshmallow test, in the 1970s, uh the psychologist Walter Michel at Stanford ran a series of studies with young children. He'd put a marshmallow in front of the kid, he'd tell them that they could eat it now, or if they waited while he stepped out, they'd get two marshmallows when he came back. And of course, they were hidden cameras to capture the children's strategies. The ones who covered their eyes, the ones who sang to themselves, or who turned the marshmallow upside down so they couldn't see the fluffy side. And the famous longitudinal finding was that kids who waited, in other words, kids who demonstrated the ability to delay their gratification, those kids went on to have better outcomes in life. They had higher SAT scores, better social functioning, and lower rates of substance abuse. And friends, the internet ran with this. For years, the cultural takeaway was willpower is a fixed personality trait. Either you have self-discipline or you don't. Poor financial outcomes? Well, you just lack that willpower gene. You're a kid who ate the marshmallow. Except, except, subsequent researchers found something the original study missed. When they replicated the experiment with larger, more diverse samples, they found that the single biggest predictor of whether a child waited wasn't their inner reserve of willpower. It was trust. Kids from more stable, reliable environments waited longer because they had experienced adults following through on promises. Kids from less stable, less reliable environments ate the marshmallow immediately, because for them, waiting had frequently meant the reward never came. Eating the marshmallow now was the rational response to their actual lived experience. Now, when you translate that to adult financial behavior, it becomes profound. For a lot of people, the decision not to invest or not to save or not to plan long term is not irrationality. It's a deeply rational response to a history of instability. If paychecks have been unpredictable, if emergencies constantly wipe out savings, if the financial system has not historically worked in your favor, the idea of deferring gratification for a future payoff feels like an absurd gamble. And even for people who have had stable environments, the marshmallow test teaches us something important about the design of our choices. Willpower is a limited resource, friends. Decision fatigue is real. You cannot rely on discipline as your primary saving strategy because discipline runs out. This is why the behavioral economist's most powerful insight isn't about motivation. It's about architecture. If you want to build wealth, you cannot depend on choosing to save every month. You have to engineer the choice away. You automate the savings transfer. You set it up so that the default, the thing that happens if you do nothing, that default is that money moves into your investment account. You remove the decision from the equation entirely. Richard Thaler, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in behavioral economics, and who I talk about often, demonstrated this with something called the Save More Tomorrow Program, or SMART for short. Instead of asking people to save more now, which, of course, as we know now, the present bias resists that. Savings rates increased dramatically over time. The marshmallow didn't move. They just made it harder to see. And that's the game. Not more willpower, it's better design. Now, I want to bring up one of the most well-established findings in all of behavioral economics because I think it explains a huge amount of self-destructive financial behavior. And it comes from the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Taversky, and it's called loss aversion. And you've heard me talk about this before too. Here's the basic finding of loss aversion. Psychologically, the pain of losing something is roughly twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining the equivalent thing. So, in other words, losing$100 feels about twice as bad as winning$100 feels good. Now, on the surface, that might just sound like humans are kind of negative, but the implications go much deeper than that. Think about investing. If you have money in the stock market and the market drops 20%, the psychological pain of that is roughly double what you felt when it rose 20%. Even if you haven't sold anything, even if it's all just on paper, even if you logically know the market will recover, the loss registers with enormous emotional force. This is why people panic sell at market bottoms. They know intellectually that buying low is good. They know the market has historically always recovered, but the emotional weight of watching a number go down day after day triggers an almost physical need to stop the bleeding. Even if stopping the bleeding means locking in a real loss and you're missing the recovery. Loss aversion also explains why people hold on to losing investments too long. And that's what's called the disposition effect. Selling a stock that's down means you're realizing that loss. And realizing a loss makes it psychologically real. As long as you don't sell, you can tell yourself it might come back. So people hold on to their losers and sell their winners. The exact opposite of a rational strategy. But here's where it gets really interesting for everyday financial behavior, not just investing. Loss aversion shows up in how we think about saving too. When you transfer$200 from your checking account into your savings account, your brain registers that as a loss of$200. Even though you still have it, even though you're literally just transferring it to yourself. The reduction in your checking balance triggers that same neural secretry as any other loss. This is part of why saving feels like deprivation, even when objectively it isn't. And it interacts with something called the endowment effect, the finding that we value things more once we own them. Once your money hits your checking account, your brain immediately treats it as yours, as something you possess. Moving it feels like giving something up. Which is why, again, the behavioral solution is automation. Move the money before it ever lands in your checking account. If it never arrives, you never owned it. You never lose it, and the loss aversion circuitry never fires. Now, loss aversion isn't purely bad news, friends. You can actually use it. So there's a concept called commitment device. In Odysseus and the Sirens fashion, you pre-commit to good behavior and make deviation costly. One of the most effective modern examples of this is apps or services that let you commit to a financial goal and then penalize you if you withdraw early. The potential loss of the penalty money leverages your own loss aversion against your future self who might want to raid the savings jar. There are also programs that let you set a savings goal and require you to donate to a charity you dislike if you miss it. The asymmetry of loss is weaponized in your favor. Suddenly, not saving has a sting to it. I think there's a beautiful irony in this. The same psychological wiring that makes you want to sell stocks when they dip, if you learn to redirect it, can become one of your most powerful savings tools. Okay, let's talk about something that might make you feel a little bit called out. And I say that with love. Have you ever had the experience of putting a$100 bill in a birthday card, but feeling weirdly fine about spending$100 at a restaurant? Or being very careful with your salary, but spending a tax refund like it was burning a hole in your pocket? Or, and this is my personal favorite example, have you ever categorized some money in your head as fun money or the gambling account, and been totally relaxed about losing it? When you logic when logically you know it's the same money as the money you're carefully protecting in your savings account? What you're experiencing, friends, is called mental accounting. And that's a term coined by Richard Thaler that describes the way people psychologically sort money into different buckets, quote unquote, based on where it came from, what it's labeled for, or how it feels, rather than just treating all money as fungible, which is what economic theory says we should do.$100 is$100, regardless of whether it came from your paycheck or a bonus or a casino win or your grandmother. But psychologically, we treat these differently, and those differences lead to real behavioral consequences. The tax refund phenomenon is a great example, and as I'm recording this, we are in April, so let's use the tax refund example. A tax refund is not a windfall. It is your own money that you overpaid to the government and are now getting back. But because it arrives in a lump sum that feels separate from your regular income, people treat it as extra money and spend it freely on things they would never buy from their regular paycheck. The mental account is labeled differently, so the behavior is different. Birthday gift money, same thing. When parents give their kids cash for a birthday, kids often spend it more freely than their regular allowance, even though it's the same currency with the same purchasing power. Now, friends, mental accounting isn't always bad. Sometimes the buckets are useful. Having a mental account labeled emergency fund helps you not rate it for concert tickets, for example. Having a vacation fund helps you actually take vacations without guilt. The problem arises when the mental accounting is working against your actual interests. For instance, there are people who maintain a savings account earning 2% interest while simultaneously carrying a credit card balance at 22% interest. Mathematically, they should pay off the credit card. There is no savings account in the world that beats a guaranteed 22% return. But psychologically, the savings account is the safe mental bucket, the emergency fund, the security blanket. And touching it feels dangerous. The credit card debt is in a different mental account. The two accounts don't talk to each other, if you will, in their in their brain. Or consider lifestyle inflation. You get a raise, your paycheck goes up, but instead of automatically adding that to your investment contributions, it gets absorbed into your lifestyle, like a nicer apartment or home, a car upgrade, better restaurants. Because the raise created a new, bigger mental account labeled what I normally spend, and now anything under that figure feels like deprivation. How do you work with mental accounting rather than against it? Well, friends, you may Make it explicit. You give your money actual labels and actual purposes. Not just in your head, but in your systems. If you're the kind of person who would spend extra money freely, don't let extra money exist. Automate a when I get a bonus, X percent goes here, rule in advance. Remove the psychological slack. And if mental accounts help you, if having a named savings bucket for a vacation makes you actually save for a vacation without guilt, well, friends, lean into that. Give all your money a name. Zero-based budgeting systems like YNAB, you need a budget, Y-N-A-B, work partly because they structure this mental accounting deliberately. Every dollar has a job. The buckets are real. You're not fighting against your psychology, you are using it. I want to take a moment to name something that I think is quietly devastating to people's financial lives. I call it the someday trap. You might recognize it by some of its common phrases, like, I'll start investing once I pay off my student loans. Or I'll get serious about money once I make more of it. Or I'll set up my retirement account after we get through this busy season. Someday when things settle down, I'll get my finances in order. Someday is not a day of the week. And the insidious thing about the someday trap is that it's not obviously wrong. It has a certain logic to it. Why start investing$50 a month when you're drowning in high interest debt? Why build a budget when you can barely cover your bills? But the someday trap is a moving goalpost. The conditions for someday are never quite met. When the loans are paid off, there's a new car payment. When you make more money, your lifestyle has inflated to match. When the busy season ends, there is another busy season. Meanwhile, time is the only resource in personal finance that genuinely cannot be recovered. You can earn more money, you can change your habits, you can cut your expenses, but you cannot go back and invest at 25 when you are 40. Let me put some numbers on this because I think they're genuinely clarifying. If you invest$300 per month starting at age 25 and you earn an average annual return of 7%, by age 65, you'll have approximately$740,000. Now, if you wait till age 35 to start, so 10 years later, and you invest the same$300 per month at the same 7%, you'll have approximately$340,000 by age 65. You waited 10 years, you contributed for 30 years instead of 40, and you ended up with less than half the money. The first 10 years of investing aren't just important, they are, in a meaningful sense, worth more than all of the years that follow. Because the compounding happens on top of compounding. The early years are the foundation that everything else is built on. That$400,000 difference isn't a math problem. It's the cost of someday. And I say this not to induce panic or despair, especially if you're listening to this at age 40 or 50 and feeling the sting of I should have started earlier. It is always worth starting. The second best time to plant a tree is today. Every month you wait is a month of compounding you give up. Every month you start is a month you keep. The someday trap is broken by one thing: a small, imperfect start. Not a big dramatic financial overhaul, not waiting until you've read every personal finance book, not waiting until you have the perfect budget. Just a small, imperfect start.$25 a month,$50 a month, one automated transfer today. Now, friends, there is one more layer to why people don't build wealth that I think gets underappreciated, and it might be the deepest layer of all, and that is identity. And you've heard me talk about this before as well. James Clear in Atomic Habits makes the case that the most durable behavior change doesn't start with goals or systems, it starts with identity. With what you believe about yourself. I am trying to save money, is a completely different psychological posture than I am someone who saves money. The first is aspirational. I am trying to save money. The second is definitional. I am someone who saves money. And the behavioral research supports this. People who describe themselves as voters rather than people who plan to vote are significantly more likely to actually vote. People who identify as exercisers maintain workout habits better than people who are trying to exercise. The identity precedes the behavior, and then the behavior reinforces the identity. So ask yourself honestly, do you see yourself as an investor? Do you see yourself as financially responsible? Does someone who invest sound like you? Or does it sound like someone else, like someone older, someone more established, someone who makes more money? For a lot of people, especially people who grew up in households where money was scarce or stressful or never discussed, the identity of financially savvy person feels alien. It belongs to other people, people who wear suits, people who had parents who talked about stocks at dinner. Not people like us. And this is what I'd call the identity gap, the distance between your current financial behaviors and the identity of the person you'd need to be to close the gap. And like all identity challenges, it can feel like a personality transplant is required, which of course shuts most people down immediately. But the identity gap closes in small steps, not leaps. If you automate a$25 savings transfer, you are now someone who saves automatically every month. That's not aspirational, it's already true. The identity follows from the action. And then, importantly, the identity reinforces more action. Oh, I am someone who saves. I guess I should probably learn a little about where this money is going. And then you read one article, and you open a Roth IRA, and you read another article, and the identity grows with the behavior. There's also a social dimension here that we can't ignore. We are deeply influenced by the financial behaviors of the people around us. Not just in an obvious keeping up with the Joneses way, though that is very real, but in a subtler social proof way. If everyone in your peer group treats credit card debt as normal, debt becomes normalized. If no one in your social circle talks about investing, investing feels inaccessible. Research on social norms and financial behavior shows that simply telling people, most people in your neighborhood are saving for retirement, shifts behavior. We are herd animals. Our sense of what's normal is social. You can leverage this by deliberately building a financial community, even a small one, one friend who will talk honestly about money with you, one podcast community, one accountability partner. Change the inputs to the identity, and the identity starts to change. All right, friends. All right, we've covered a lot of psychological territory today. Present bias, we talked about loss aversion and mental accounting. I talked about the someday trap, and also, of course, the identity gap. Let's land the plane with some concrete evidence-based tools you can actually use. And I want to say this clearly before I give you the list. The goal is not to do all of these. The goal is to do one. Pick one, do it today. The research on behavior change is unambiguous. Small, specific commitments taken immediately beat large, vague intentions every time. So here are some tools. I've got five. Tool one, automation. You know I'm a big fan of automation. This is a big one. Set up an automatic transfer from your checking account to a savings or an investment account scheduled for the day after your paycheck hits. The amount doesn't matter as much as the behavior.$25 a month invested consistently beats$500 invested twice a year whenever you remember. Remove the decision. Make saving the default. If your employer offers a$0.1k or retirement account, enroll today and set the contribution, even if it's just 1%. Then, if available, turn on the auto-escalation. And that'd be a feature that automatically increases your contribution rate by 1% each year. This is the SMART program. Remember, I talked about that earlier. This is the SMART program in real life, and it is genuinely one of the most powerful retirement tools available to ordinary people. So that's tool one, automation. Here's tool two, implementation intentions. This comes from the research of psychologist Peter Gollwitzer, and it is deceptively powerful. The idea is simple. Instead of saying, I'm going to start investing, you say on Friday the 15th at 9 a.m. I'm going to log into my account and I'm going to open a Roth IRA. Studies show that if then implementation intentions, like when X happens, I will do Y, dramatically increase follow-through compared to just purely goal setting. Because you're doing the decision-making work in advance. And when the moment arrives, there is no deliberation, no friction, the action is preloaded, the behavior is on rails. Write it down, put it in your calendar. When I log on to my computer on Monday morning, I will set up an automatic$50 monthly transfer to my high yield savings account before I check my email. So that's implementation intentions. Here's tool three, the 10-year test. When you're about to make a significant financial decision, like a large purchase or a debt you're considering taking on and or an investment you're thinking about skipping, ask yourself, how will I feel about this decision in 10 years? This is a simple temporal zoom out that counteracts present bias by forcing future self into the frame. It doesn't always change the decision. Sometimes the answer is, I'll feel great about it in 10 years and you should make the purchase. But it adds friction to impulse decisions and creates space for deliberate choice rather than automatic reaction. Here's tool four. Write to your future self. I mentioned this earlier, but I want to emphasize it here as a practical exercise, not just a metaphor. Write a letter to yourself, and you can schedule it for delivery if you're doing it online or put it in an envelope, but describe your life today. Describe what you're worried about, and describe what you're committing to doing, the specific financial action you are taking this year. Then sign it with something like, I am doing this for you. This collapses the psychological distance to your future self in a way that is remarkably durable. It's not a spreadsheet, but the neuroscience suggests it may change what you do with your money more than any spreadsheet could. And here's tool five, the identity statement. Write down one sentence that describes the financial person you are becoming. Not I want to be someone who saves. Not I'm trying to invest. I want you to write, I am. I am someone who pays myself first. I am a person who invests every month no matter what. I am someone who builds wealth quietly and consistently. Read it when you wake up. Put it on a sticky note on your computer. It sounds almost embarrassingly simple, but the behavioral research on identity and habit formation is clear. The story you tell yourself about who you are shapes the choices you make. Give your financial future a character to live up to. Let's land here, friends. So the title again of today's episode is One Day You'll Wish You Started Today. And I want to spend just a moment sitting with what that means. Friends, it's not a thread, it's not a lecture. It's a love note from your future self. Because here's the thing: your future self is real. They exist, they will arrive, and they will be living in the direct consequences of the decisions you are making right now. Not the big dramatic decisions, but the ordinary, daily, quietly consequential decisions about where your money goes and whether you start or whether you wait. Your future self cannot reach back through time and fix this. Only you can do that right now, with the resources and the options and the time you actually have today, not the better resources you imagine you'll have someday, but the real, imperfect, sufficient resources you have now. Behavioral economics sometimes gets depressing when people focus on all the ways our brain works against us. But I find it genuinely hopeful because if the problem is irrational wiring and bad environments, then the solution is better environments, better systems, better defaults. You don't have to become a different person. You don't have to win a war against your own psychology every single morning for the rest of your life. You just have to build the right architecture once, and then let your ordinary, imperfect, beautifully human brain run on autopilot toward the future you want. That's the work. Not heroic, not dramatic, it is humble, it is systematic, and friends, it is deeply worth it. One last thing before I let you go. Please share this episode with someone in your life who needs to hear it. Not to lecture them, not to make them feel bad about where they are. Just because sometimes the right words at the right time shift something. Sometimes the conversation we have today is the one we look back on later and think, that was when things changed. You started listening today, that counts for something. You got this, friends. Hey, thanks for listening to Personal Finance with Molly. If this episode resonated with you, again, I ask, please share this episode with someone in your life who needs to hear it. Because sometimes the right words at the right time just shift something in us. This is when things will change. And if you find value in this podcast where our money, our mindset, and our behavior intersect, please follow the show, leave a review. It helps more people see it. Until next time.