Generational Financial Beliefs Part 2: Why Paying Yourself Triggers Fear, Guilt & Stress

Welcome back to Tea Time with Erin, where we share honest conversations about entrepreneurship, money, mental health, and the stories shaping the way we build our businesses and lives.

In part two of Erin’s four-part series on generational financial beliefs, Erin dives into one of the most emotionally charged topics for women entrepreneurs: paying yourself. Why is it so difficult to move money from your business account into your personal account—even when the numbers say you can?

This episode explores the hidden emotional and behavioral patterns that impact how entrepreneurs handle money, especially first-generation wealth builders. Erin breaks down two major patterns she sees constantly in her work with women business owners: economic mobility guilt and the absence of financial modeling. Together, these patterns create hesitation, shame, confusion, and fear around taking profit, paying yourself consistently, and building personal wealth through business ownership.

Erin also shares personal stories, client examples, and practical insight into how childhood experiences, family systems, and generational money beliefs continue showing up in entrepreneurship today. From inherited scarcity mindsets to never being taught how to read a P&L statement, this episode helps listeners understand why financial decisions can feel so emotionally heavy—and why awareness is the first step toward change.

If you’ve ever avoided looking at your finances, felt guilty paying yourself, struggled with profit, or questioned whether you deserve to make more money, this conversation will likely hit close to home.

In This Episode, You’ll Hear:

• What economic mobility guilt is and how it affects women entrepreneurs
• Why paying yourself can feel emotionally difficult even when your business is profitable
• How generational financial beliefs influence business decisions
• The difference between emotional money patterns and practical financial skill gaps
• Why many entrepreneurs struggle to determine how much to pay themselves
• How scarcity and inherited money beliefs impact entrepreneurship
• The role financial modeling plays in financial confidence
• Why community and financial conversations matter for future generations
• How nervous system responses show up around money and financial stress
• Why awareness is the first step to changing financial behaviors

Key Takeaways

• Financial decisions are often driven by inherited beliefs, not just logic or math.
• Many entrepreneurs experience guilt when earning more than previous generations in their family.
• A lack of financial modeling creates knowledge gaps—not personal failure.
• Avoiding financial decisions often stems from emotional and nervous system responses.
• Building wealth as a woman entrepreneur can create both opportunity and emotional conflict.
• Awareness of financial patterns is the first step toward healthier money behaviors.

Connect with Erin

Learn more about Erin’s work around money mindset, financial therapy, and building businesses that support your life.

• Book a free financial clarity call with Erin
• Instagram: @‌erinthemoneytherapist

Erin’s Tea for This Episode

Erin is sipping Everyday Dose Mushroom Coffee during this episode.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello and welcome to Tea Time with Erin. Today we are doing part two in a four-part series all about generational financial beliefs. Today I am drinking, I'm actually not even drinking tea, I'm drinking everyday dose mushroom coffee. I will put a link in the show notes. Obviously, I am a tea drinker, but every once in a while, if I'm craving coffee, I will drink the mushroom coffee. And honestly, I'm loving it lately. So settle in, grab your warm drink, and you might want to grab a notebook. This episode has a ton, a ton of content. I'm gonna try to keep this as concise as possible. But if you listen to the show or you know me, you know number one, I'm not good at keeping anything concise. Number one and number two, I have a lot to say about this topic in particular. So buckle up, because it's gonna be a good one. Let's talk about what we talked about in part one first. So we're in the middle of a four-part series on generational financial beliefs and behaviors. If this is the first one that you're that you're listening to, you can listen to them in any order, but part one kind of sets the foundation for what the series is about. So you might want to go back and start there. In part one, we talked about what generational financial beliefs even are. We walked through four generations: the great grandparents who lived through the depression, the boober grandparents who grew up in scarcity, the Gen X parents who built without a roadmap, and then you, the millennial sitting here trying to figure out why money still feels so difficult. We also talked about how women are one, maybe two generations into being able to build wealth independently. 1974 was the first year for independent credit cards, and then 1988 was the first year that women could get business loans on their own. Most of us are the first women in our families with this kind of financial autonomy, and that's a lot of weight to carry, but also what a gift that we have to carry that. So let's talk about what we're gonna cover in this part two episode. Today we are going under the hood to talk about those financial beliefs and behaviors and looking at how they actually show up in the business decisions that you are making every single day. Specifically today, we're gonna talk about what happens when you go to pay yourself. Over and over and over again in my work with women in business, the business is making money. The numbers are fine, they look fine, there's profit, there's revenue. And yet, when it comes time to actually transfer that money from the business bank account into their personal account, something happens. They hesitate or they leave it in the business checking account instead of making that transfer. They're taking less than they need, and it's not a matter of living below their means. It's actually a fear-based decision to just not move the money. They don't necessarily have facts behind that decision. It almost never is about the math. It's genuinely just a belief or a feeling that is preventing them from making that switch. And we're gonna talk about the primary reasons why that is and how to untangle them. I want you to think about your business. The last time you paid yourself or didn't, you maybe skipped a paycheck this month. We have all been there, okay? Maybe you took a smaller draw than you normally would, or smaller than you needed to because you wanted to quote, keep investing in the business or reinvesting in the business. That's a good excuse. That may or may not be true. Maybe you haven't even looked at what you've paid yourself in months because the whole thing feels too emotionally charged to open and just lay out on the table. So that moment, the hesitation, the chest tightening, that's what we're gonna talk about today. When you go to pay yourself and you don't, or you do, and there's a lot of feeling attached to it, and that's what we're gonna talk about. That moment right there. I want to talk to you about where it came from. And once you see the root and name the pattern, you can start to actually do something about that. So in part one, we named four common patterns for first generation builders: economic mobility, guilt, financial enmeshment, and the prove it pressure and the absence of financial modeling. All four of them matter, and all four of them are real, but for today, I want to focus in on two of them because these are the two that show up most often in the moment that you go to pay yourself, specifically the one we're talking about today. The first is the economic mobility guilt, okay? The second is the absence of financial modeling. One of them is the emotional feeling, the emotional attachment. It's hard to keep money for yourself. The other is the practical reason why you don't actually know what to do or how to do it. They collide at the exact moment that your business has finally made enough money to pay you well. So we're gonna talk about both of them. Economic mobility guilt is the feeling that comes up when you start making, keeping, or holding more money than the people who raised you. It is the guilt of moving past the financial stealing of your family of origin. Research from sociology and family systems works backs this up. When one member of a family moves significantly beyond the economic position of the rest of the family, it creates a particular kind of internal dissonance. My interpretation after years of sitting with women in this exact moment is that we are not actually conflicted about having the money. We are conflicted about what it means about us as people to have it. So in your head, this might sound like, who am I to charge this much money? My parents worked so hard for less, or my parents deserved this and never got it. Or I don't want to be seen as someone who is, quote, all about money. It feels greedy, it feels like too much, it feels like I'm going to get in trouble for having this money. And that's kind of the internal dialogue. That's what you might be feeling or thinking as you're going through the process of making money for the first time. And here's where all of that comes from. If you grew up in a home where money was scarce or where it was steady but tight, or where every spending decision required justification, you learn something in your body, money has weight. Money costs something to have. This is where the generational piece starts to really show up. If you're a first generation builder, meaning you are doing something financially that no one in your family before you has done, you are not just growing your bank account, you're changing your position inside of the family system. And that has a cost that people don't always talk about or warn you about. Claunce's work on financial flashpoints that we've talked about in prior episodes would call these the moments that wired the belief in. My interpretation, drawing on family systems work, is that mobility guilt is not just about the past, it's about the present too. It's about who you become when you start to outgrow the financial reality that you came from. This shows up physically in your body and it shows up in your actual practice in your business. When you leave money in the business that you actually need to be taking home, you reinvest in the business as a way of not having to take it personally. You tell yourself a story about how the business needs it more than you do when actually you both need it. Growing businesses need money to grow, and that's just the reality. The business does need money, but so do you. You need money to eat and function and live the life you want to live and build the legacy that you want to build. Remember that that's why you started the business in the first place. And the truth is your origin story, why you started your business may be this thing or that thing. Your story may not, you may not have started your business thinking, like, I want to start a business so that I can make money. And a lot of purpose-driven entrepreneurs are very adamant that they did not start their business so that they could make money. But I will say it all the live-long day. If you are in business, it is to make money. Whether you want to admit that or not, if you are not making money in business, it's a hobby. If you are running a business, it is to make money. We build businesses so that we can provide gainful employment, so that we can give back to our community, so that we can be more generous, all of those things. If you didn't want to do those things, you could just do what you're doing as a hobby. You don't have to turn it into a business. Just do the thing you love because you love it. But if you're gonna take the step to make it a business, it is to make money. You might take a salary that's smaller than what your own finances say that you need. You might be lying to yourself about how much money you need to bring home from the business and you feel oddly virtuous about that. You're like, oh, I'm I'm doing the right thing. I'm not taking all this money from the business. But that might not be healthy and it might not even be based in any kind of reality or truth. And when you go to move money from the business bank account to your personal bank account, or you write yourself a check, especially if you're using anything like the profit first method, you know you get to pay yourself. That's part of the process. But you feel like you don't want to do it, even though the math is mathing. So even when you know it's the right thing to do and you're not doing it, that's what we're gonna talk about here today. So sit tight. I'm gonna hold your hand while we talk about this. Outgrowing the financial reality you came from is not a betrayal to your family. It's not greed, it's not arrogance. It is doing exactly what generations of women before you did not have the option to do. The women in your lineage who could not get a credit card without their husband's signature, the women who could not borrow money to start a business, they were not asking for less from life. They were not given the option to ask, and you are the option they did not have. And when you pay yourself well, when you grow a business that's highly profitable, you're not leaving them behind. You are completing something that they started. And if they're with you, you get to take them with you. This is the beauty of the growth, right? This is why we want to run profitable businesses. This is why we want to make money. We want to build generational wealth for ourselves and for our families. And that doesn't just mean our future generations. It also means the generations that came before us that we want to steward what they did very well. So I want to be clear that growing financial ability within yourself and within your business does not leave behind anyone before you. Let's just take them with us. So we talked about the financial guilt, the economic mobility guilt is the actual term, but we talked about the guilt that comes from how you feel when you want to move beyond what you have learned or what your family did before. So the second pattern we're going to talk about today is the absence of financial modeling. This is what happens when nobody in your family taught you how to do the thing that you're now trying to do. It's not your fault. It's actually just a technical knowledge gap. So the first one we talked about, the economic mobility guilt, is a feeling, right? You've you're struggling to pay yourself because you feel bad. But this, this one, the financial modeling piece is an actual skills gap. So the most common questions I get asked from people in business, women in business in particular, is you don't know what a healthy owner's draw looks like for a business of your size. People will ask me, how much do I pay myself? How do I pay myself? You don't know how often, whether you should set a salary or take distributions or what the difference is. You might go to a networking event and you hear other entrepreneurs say things like, I pay myself X percent of revenue, and you just nod along and have absolutely no clue if that's a real benchmark or a thing that they made up or found on the internet. You open your profit and loss and feel like you're reading a completely foreign language, but it's not because you actually don't know how. It's just because no one ever sat at the table and taught you how to read it. I distinctly remember a woman in my church who sat down on a random Sunday after a potluck, very uneventful thing, and she taught me exactly how to balance my paper ledger that came with my first checkbook. And I just cannot undervalue these conversations to you guys. Do I still use a paper ledger today? No, of course I don't. We have better, more efficient financial tools, but I understand how to balance a paper ledger. I understand how you write down the debits and you write down the credits. And it's because this woman took the time to sit down and teach me. We just sat at a very unassuming table, right? And she just talked to me about how it works. And that was my first lesson in what I would consider to be cash flow planning today. Things that I'm teaching to entrepreneurs and businesses today, I learned from someone who just took the time to sit down with me and talk about it. So, studies on financial socialization, which is the term researchers use for how money knowledge gets passed down in families, consistently find that direct financial conversations in the home by watching a parent budget, watching a parent make a financial decision out loud, are some of the strongest predictors of adult financial confidence. It's not a rabbit hole I'm gonna go all the way down today, but this is also why community is so unbelievably critical for development of financial education and other human development too. Not only are humans designed to be in community, but you never know where a woman at church, for instance, one of your kids' aunties, one of your best friends, a neighbor is gonna fill a skills gap that you didn't even know that you had. And so surrounding your family and your children with people who can teach them things that they don't know is so critical. So community, absolutely critical, even for the financial piece. A lot of times in prior generations, it was almost this taboo topic. We don't talk about money. But the truth is, the more openly we can talk about money, the more we can set our future generations up for financial success. So the flip side is also true. If you don't see it modeled, you never saw your parents make clear financial decisions, they never talked to you about them. It was a taboo topic in your home. And no amount of feeling bad about that is going to retroactively change your childhood. It's not going to change what happened. So knowing that you didn't see it modeled just is what it is. A lot of the shame women carry around their financial confidence is actually grief in disguise. It's grief for the conversation that never happened, for the lessons you never learned, you know, a grieving process for the model that you never had. We can do something with grief. Grief is a process, but shame is an identity. If you have shame around money, that's it's much harder to work through that because shame is like you take that on, as opposed to grief, which, like I said, is a process. So specifically for first-generation entrepreneurs, if your parents were great with money in their context, but their context might not have been entrepreneurship. If your parents worked W-2 jobs their whole lives, they can't teach you what owner's pay looks like. So you may have had really financially responsible parents and you may still have a skills gap as a business owner or as an entrepreneur. You might still need help in this area, even if your parents were very financially sound or did teach you about budgeting and things like that. If your parents managed a household budget really well, but they might not be able to teach you about business cash flow if they didn't own a business. So again, I just want to point out that this part that we're looking at now, the skills gap is just a tactical skills gap. It's a knowledge gap. You can learn this. You can listen to this show. You can ask real life questions, you can learn about it on YouTube. There's all so many free courses from Ivy League institutions online. You can get them for free and you can learn the tactical skills required to pay yourself. So again, I want to make sure I'm clear that there's the economic mobility guilt that's separate. That's a feeling. And the tactical skills gap is the other part that may keep you from paying yourself well or correctly. You just genuinely might not know. So let's talk about Alisa, whose episode was a couple of episodes ago. If you haven't, feel free to go back and listen to that episode. It was a wonderful story. But if you listened to it, Elisa grew up watching her parents run a scrappy internet startup in the 90s. They drove their cars into the ground, they wore the same clothes for 20 years, they had their team. Like I remember her telling me that they printed four pages per sheet. So they would scale the pages down so they could fit four things on one sheet double-sided to save on paper and ink. And they survived the dot-com bubble because of that. So Elisa did have modeling. She watched scrappy, generous, resourceful entrepreneurship up close and personal. And even with all of that modeling, when she sat down to look at her own PL for the first time, she felt shame coming up before she could read it. She said something in our conversation that I thought about a lot. And what she said was how much I was actually looking at the numbers. And that's that's the key part. Even when you have modeling, even when you do have the tactical skills, there might still be gaps in your knowledge set. There's still pieces that no one just handed right to you. It's not gonna fall from the sky onto your desk and tell you exactly what needs to happen. The work of looking at the numbers is something not a lot of us are doing. And if we are, it's for the first time in our lineage or in our recent past. Even if our parents were entrepreneurs, we might still have a gap there. And that's totally okay. The important thing is we're aware and we're willing to do something about that. I want to share one other story. Um, this person has not been on the show yet. I I am hoping that she will come on. But when I asked her if I could share the story, I'm gonna share it anonymously, but I I asked her, I said, hey, can I share this story? And she wanted to be referred to as the horse girl. So we're gonna call her the horse girl. And this is her story. So she and I are having this conversation. She's got this contract on her desk, and it's a massive monthly contract, great opportunity for her business. And she's like, I just don't know if I can take it. And I said, Okay, well, let's just talk about what's that about? You know, why would you not take this? Why would you not take this contract? And she starts telling me that ever since she had a job and she got a paycheck, out of every single paycheck, she had to pay some to her parents. Her parents are essentially requiring her to pay them back for raising her. And you guys, this is kind of an extreme example, but that's crazy. I'm I'm gonna have to go back and find like she told me this and I recorded our conversation, so I have my face recorded when she's telling me this story. And I was like, What? What do you mean you have to pay your parents back? She was concerned about taking this contract on because she didn't want to have to tell her parents and pay them more. And I this blew my mind. This was insane to me. As she's telling me the story, I was like, What are you talking about? But that's just an example of a real true life story of all of it, of the generational, you know, the economic mobility guilt, her being able to move past that. And then also the tactical skills. Yeah, clearly, clearly in her story, there is a tactical skills gap of her being able to run a profitable business. She's afraid to make profit because she doesn't want to have to pay her parents. That is wild to me. Okay, but that is a very true story. So I'm sharing it in the confines of this episode because I want you to know there's a breadth of normal for one, and there's a breadth of so many stories. That's what this show is about, telling these stories. But that one is a real true one that could show up when you're trying to grow your business. These kinds of things could be coming up for you. When you go to pay yourself, here's a couple of things that could be coming up. And I I want to see if you identify with any of these. And if you do, just obviously continue listening, take your notes, come back to it. But if you don't pay yourself on a set schedule because you don't know what schedule to set, that that could be one. Um, you don't take profit because you genuinely don't know what counts as profit versus revenue and what needs to stay in the business and what you can't. Like if you have money in the bank, that might be the only metric that you use to determine can I pay myself. You avoid looking at your financials because you don't know what you're looking at, you don't know how to read it. But certainly no one ever taught you to read it, and definitely no one taught you to read it without any shame attached to it. Without that bottom line, number meaning something about you. You might not know how to read it without attaching your identity to what you see there. You might ask other entrepreneurs how much they pay themselves, and then you're feeling really guilty about asking, or you feel really weird about asking. You might hire bookkeepers and accountants and you trust them with all of your stuff because you were never given the language or the manual to check their work. So, what I want to highlight here is that the absence of modeling is not a permanent state, it's just a place for us to start. If you do have an absence of financial modeling, you're not exactly sure how or what to do, very fixable problems. Those are things we can learn and move forward from. You're totally allowed. I'm giving you the permission right now, not that you need it from me, but I want you to hear this. You're allowed to be a beginner. You're allowed to be a first-generation learner, a first-generation earner. You're allowed to not know what you were never shown, were never told, were never taught. And you're allowed to learn it now, at 30, at 40, at 50, at any age, without apologizing for not having known it sooner. All right. So we talked about the two kind of prongs of what happens when you go to pay yourself. So let's talk about where they collide. So where mobility guilt, economic mobility guilt, and the absence of financial modeling collide when you go. To pay yourself. There uh they show up in other areas too, and they often show up together, right? So they reinforce each other in a way that keeps you kind of stuck. Mobility guilt says, I shouldn't make this much. And the absence of modeling says, I don't even know what this much should be. So the result is you don't pay yourself, and you also can't tell whether you're underpaying yourself because you don't have a benchmark and you don't have the permission. So this is kind of the loop and keeping you stuck and why it keeps happening. It's so common in my work with first-generation wealth builders. And I see this constantly. That's why this series exists. That's why I'm talking about this because this is something I see in real life all the time. This is across the board a story I see. So let's just imagine this together. Your business had a good month. You look at the bank account, there's enough money in there to pay yourself. So the first thing that's going to happen is that mobility guilt is going to kick in. This feels like too much. My mom never made that much in a month. I shouldn't take all of that money. And then right behind it comes the absence of modeling. Crap, I don't know how much I'm supposed to take. Is there a right amount? Is there a wrong amount? Am I supposed to leave some money in here for taxes? How much for taxes? What's a healthy operating reserve? Let me just go talk to my robot real quick and figure this out. Like in reality, this is what's happening. And in the space between those two things, you make a decision that might not actually be a rooted decision. You leave the money in the bank account or you take a small draw. You tell yourself you'll figure it out next month. And next month the same thing happens again. It's not a you problem, it's not a discipline problem. It's not a planning problem or a strategy issue. It is just these two inherited patterns running underneath the surface and making that decision for you before your conscious brain has a chance to say, this is what we're doing. So I'm gonna talk about how this shows up in the body, but I'm not gonna hang out here. This is what we're gonna talk more about in part three. But I want to just plant the seed here that we will pick up. The reason this is so hard to think about and you cannot think your way out of this cycle is because it's not happening in your fully conscious brain. It's happening in your body in the neural network that's already laid. If you flinch or your body tightens, or your shoulders creep up, or your jaw clenches, or you clench your fists when you go to transfer money from your business account into your personal account, the knot in your stomach when you look at your financials, the way that you suddenly find seven other things to do when it's time to pay yourself, those are nervous system responses to a charge that was wired in before you ever owned this business, before you had to make these decisions. Again, we talked about money scripts before they're showing up here now. We're gonna deep dive more on that in episode three of the series. But for now, just notice that this is like this is going to show up in your body too. So here's what I'm gonna leave you with in this episode. Obviously, we have covered a lot of ground here. If you have your notebook, good, keep taking your notes. Don't let this overwhelm you. But here's where we're gonna leave it. So I'm not gonna give you a five-step plan. I'm not gonna give you a fully fleshed out strategy. We will talk more about the practical steps that you can take when we get into part four. But right here, I want to walk you through just what we have talked about today. And I'm gonna give you just a couple of very simple questions to sit with. And for today, the only takeaway is the awareness. Become aware of how this is impacting you, how these things could be impacting you, how they're impacting your ability to obviously, as we've talked about today, pay yourself or pay bills in your business or whatever it might be, because awareness is the first step to do anything else. So the next time you go to pay yourself, which likely will happen before the next episode, we have at least a month before it, the next episode in the series is going to come out. So before that episode, the next time you go to pay yourself, or the next time you avoid paying yourself, I want you to ask one question. And that question is whose voice is telling me what I deserve right now? That's all. Just notice. Is it your voice? Is it an inherited voice or a voice from your mom, your grandmother, your father, your great-grandfather who lived through the depression? Is it culture? Is it your family system? Is it whose voice in your head when you decide how much of your own money that you get to keep? You don't have to answer it. You don't have to fix it. You don't have to do anything but notice it. Because the moment you can identify the voice and bring it into your conscious awareness is now the moment we can do something with it. And you can make a choice. Do I continue listening to this voice or not? So, next episode, we are, well, you're gonna hear from my wonderful friend Anna in the next episode, but the next part of the series, we're gonna talk deeper about how this shows up in the body. We're gonna talk about how these patterns live inside of your nervous system, why your shoulders pop up, why your jaw clenches, when you open your QuickBooks and freak out, and what we're actually gonna do about that. So we'll be using what I refer to as a safe framework, and it is going to be a super tender episode. So just know that going into it. I will prepare you when I start the episode, but just know, like the next one, we're gonna go a little bit deeper than we did in this one, just like we went deeper than we did in episode one. The idea is to build upon the information so you don't feel overwhelmed. And then in part four, we're gonna talk about the actual strategies and skills you can implement that are gonna help you move through these issues and these problems that you feel like are holding you back in business. If you haven't already, follow the show so you don't miss the next part of the series. And if this episode resonated with you, please send it to a friend who's in the trenches of building something her family never built before, and she will feel less alone too. Thank you so much for joining me for tea time today. Take care of yourself, drink your tea, and I will see you next time.