1. The stories that keep high-earning women from building wealth

In Episode 1 of The Other Half of Money with Annie Pietra, you'll learn:

• What the "other half" of money actually is — and why psychology and systems matter just as much as the numbers
• The specific money psychology patterns that keep high earners stuck, even when they're doing everything "right"
• Why automated systems — not willpower, discipline, or market timing — are how Rich Aunt wealth actually gets built
• How Julie went from a paralyzed savings account and credit card debt to tripling her monthly investment contributions and moving her retirement date up by a decade
• Have thoughts about this episode? DM me on instagram!

If this episode feels like a mirror, The Rich Aunt Portfolio was designed for you. In three months, we'll map your financial future, build automated systems that work while you live your life, and get you managing your own portfolio — starting from exactly where you are right now.

Apply here: https://bit.ly/richauntep1

Transcript

 There's a gap between making good money and actually building wealth.

If you've cracked the first half but the second still feels like a black box, this podcast is for you. I'm Annie Pietra. I built a projected $6 million retirement on an average salary of $85K a year. I'm the Rich Aunt, and I'm gonna make you one too.

For four years, I've helped ambitious women go from, "I make good money, but I still feel like I'm not building anything with it," to confidently crafting and funding the rich aunt life for themselves.

I've helped women move their retirement dates up by  a decade, increase their projected investments by millions of dollars, and become confident managing their own money -- without a finance degree or giving up the life that they're already living.

I believe that rich aunts are self-made, that women who earn six figures should manage their own six-figure portfolios, and that the most powerful thing you can do with money is use it as a tool to build a beautiful life for yourself, your community, and those you love.

 If that sounds like the life you're building, you're in the right place.

Welcome to The Other Half of Money.

Today in our first episode, I'm gonna tell you exactly what the "other half of money" is. I'm gonna call out the specific stories you've been telling yourself about why you're stuck with money, and why none of them is actually the real problem. And I'm gonna give you the framework that I use with every single client to solve these problems for good. 

If this episode feels like a mirror, I designed a 90-day, one-on-one coaching program with you in mind. It's called The Rich Aunt Portfolio. In three months, you and I will map out your financial future, build and implement automated systems that work while you live your life, and get you managing your own portfolio projected to two point five million dollars or more by retirement, starting from exactly where you are now. You can apply for The Rich Aunt Portfolio at the link in the show notes.

I'm Annie Pietra. You're listening to The Other Half of Money. Let's get into it!

Okay, so if you think of personal finance like a coin you can flip, which I know is like the most on the nose analogy ever stick with me, okay?

The side that usually lands up is what we typically think of when it comes to money. That's like numbers and spreadsheets, interest percentages, asset allocation, tax brackets, an absolute alphabet soup of initialisms: SEP IRA, 401, TSP, ETF, HSA, AGI, APY, you get it. All the nitty-gritty details that are in fact important to understand to form the best strategy for you and your life, your goals, and your money. And we will definitely get into each of these. There are episodes on this podcast coming where you will learn to differentiate between AGI and MAGI, and the next time you're caught at a conversation with a finance bro at a party, your eyes can glaze over for reasons other than that the jargon is confusing. But I digress!

What I want you to know is that if you're making $80K+ and you still can't see where your wealth is actually going, the answer is hiding on the other half of the coin.

Because that's right, there's an entire other side of personal finance that when it comes to getting the result you want matters just as much, if not more, than all the details I was just talking about. And that's the other half of money: psychology, systems, and experience.

As women, we experience money fundamentally differently. We interact with it differently, and this is actually what episode two of this podcast is gonna be fully about. Specifically the experience of being a woman investing, what we need that's different, the way we interact with it that's different.

But today I wanna dive into psychology and systems.

As a money coach, I got into this field for basically two reasons. Number one was that I experienced the transformative power of money coaching, but the second is that I am absolutely riveted by psychology and the way that it determines what we do with our money.

Your money psychology is incredibly powerful. It's running behind the scenes, and it's repeating lessons that you learned once, whether they're still useful to you or not. We actually know this from a study that the University of Cambridge did. They determined over a long period of time studying the same subjects, that the majority of our money scripts are written into our brain by the age of seven. Your money psychology determines whether or not you're actually gonna take action with your money, even if you've already done the work of finding the right answer.

Your money psychology determines whether you really think the goal that you're pursuing of building wealth is worthwhile. It determines what you think that means about you as a person. It determines what enough is for you and whether you're actually gonna be happy once you reach your financial goals

Your money psychology determines what you will do if you inherit money. It determines how you'll interact with the wealth you both receive and build yourself. Your money psychology determines the difference that money will make in your own life and the lives of the people that you love.

It determines in large part whether building wealth will actually become the blessing that we hope it is, or whether it will simply amplify the problems that you already have. (Believe me, I've seen it.)

This is your money psychology.

Hopefully you can already see why I think this other half of the coin is so underrated, and that's why it's the title of this show.

Okay, next, systems. Your systems determine whether wealth will simply remain an intention for you, or whether you're gonna actually arrive at the second half of your life without having to exchange your hours of labor for a paycheck. And that's because systems are what actually get it done.

I learned this phrase from the author James Clear, he wrote it in his book Atomic Habits. He said, "You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems." If those systems are automatic, all the better.

And that is my philosophy here at The Other Half of Money. Rich Aunt wealth is not built by trying a little harder every day. It is not built by white-knuckling your way to the next level. It's not built by outsmarting the market or the competition by choosing the right set of stocks, by knowing the right people, or by timing the market. (If this disappoints you, can I interest you in a high-risk, high-skill hobby instead?)

Because wealth building is so much more leisurely and democratic than that.

Around here, we build wealth steadily and automatically without your willpower, without your discipline, even without active thought or permission, by a system that we're gonna get set up once well, and then check in on for a few minutes per year. That's systems.

So these two together form a large part of the other half of money.

Let me tell you what this looks like in real life, and I'm gonna ask a series of questions. These are situations that I've heard in the wild coaching clients.

As you hear this list of questions, think on the money psychology that backs up each of them.

Okay, here we go/

1. Why do you still stick with the financial advisor who makes you feel dumb every time you ask a question?

2. Why do you keep a little bit of rolling debt on your credit card even though you technically have the savings to pay it off?

3. Why do you have no problem optimizing your credit card rewards, but you panic when it comes to looking at your 401? Why do you find yourself saying, "Oh, it's too late for me, but at least I can set up my nieces to be wealthy," even though you're still years away from retiring?

4. Why do you feel overwhelmed instead of accomplished when you finally hit the financial goal that you've been working towards for years?

5. Why do you feel like you still don't have enough, even though you make three times what you did when you told yourself, "If I just made one and a half times what I do now, all my problems would be solved and I wouldn't feel so stressed"?

6. For that matter, why does your threshold for enough keep moving? Not just your income, but your savings account too. How do you know what the true number is when you can finally relax?

These are not questions I'm asking because I want to, like, back you up in a corner and make you feel like you need to give me an answer. I'm asking them because if you're anything like my clients, these might be situations that you faced yourself, and you don't know the answer.

The solutions you've tried so far haven't been working.

Like I said, each one of these questions comes from a specific situation that I coached a woman on recently.

Each one of these scenarios was posing an existential threat to her goals, and in every single one of these situations, the answer was not, "Just do the mathematically correct thing. Why haven't you done it yet?"

That kind of infantilizing and shame has absolutely no place in this sphere.

Instead, what we did in each scenario was we used this framework that I'm talking about here, the other half of money.

We approached through the view of the money psychology that she was experiencing. We solved the problem, and then we implemented a system to make the result automatic.

I'll give you an example. That second question I asked was, "Why do you keep a little bit of rolling debt on your credit card even though you technically have the savings to pay it off?"

This comes from my client, Julie. Julie's asked to remain anonymous, so this is not her real name. But she's a high-earner. She's a doctor, and she's the daughter of immigrants. She came to me because her savings account kept growing.  That sounds like the problem we're all trying to have, until you understand what was underneath this. She was too nervous to move her money anywhere else. 'Cause, like, what if she messed up and she invested too much, and then she didn't have enough for her expenses? What if she picked the wrong accounts to put things in and she had a huge tax bill she wasn't expecting?

What if she couldn't use the money to support her parents and retire and still treat her sisters to girls' weekends now? She wasn't sure she wanted to know the answer if that was gonna be the case.

But she didn't know how to find these answers.

So instead she kept herself in this like scenario of psychological threat where she was basically telling herself, "If I stay hypervigilant, maybe this will all work out." And her solution was a guardrail. She kept a $4,000 balance on her credit card on purpose. She'd come out of med school with tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt, and she worked it down systematically once she started earning really well, but she'd never paid off that last bit And she kept that balance there as her psychological threat.

Five thousand dollars in debt was her internal threshold for like, "This is too much. I have too much on my credit card." So as long as she always owed almost that threshold amount, she was telling herself, "I'm not gonna lose control and blow it."

Mathematically, this did not make sense for a doctor with $50K in savings, but emotionally it was the only safety signal that she had. She had no way of knowing if she was actually on track for what she wanted.

So she just kept saving and kept paying the interest on her credit card, and kept waiting for a feeling of certainty that never came.

So how we approached this was we overhauled her money flow and her money mindset at the same time. We built her an investing system where she has a maxed out backdoor Roth IRA, a fully funded TSP, and automatic contributions to her taxable brokerage. (I just named three account types don't worry, we're gonna break them down. But that's another show.)

All in all, we increased what she was putting toward her future From $1,400 a month to $4,400 a month.

She had so much going to her savings that all we did was reduce her average spend about $400 a month, and that was a choice that she wanted to make. She'd been spending and not really feeling satisfied with what she'd been buying lately, and she decided, "I'd rather have the ability to retire a full decade earlier and support my parents." We moved her projected retirement date from age sixty-three to age fifty-three.

Okay, but here's the critical moment that I'm still thinking about. I was on the phone with her. I was walking up and down my curb outside my house, and She got really quiet for a second, and she was like, " I just realized that I trust myself."

It was no longer the debt on her card or a number in her savings account that she was looking for to tell her that she was on track,

but she'd set up the systems and in the meantime built the self-trust.

She now has a dashboard that shows her every financial goal being funded automatically. And for the first time, the fact that she can do this on her own, that's enough.

This is what the other half of money actually does.

Julie's story is one of dozens, hundreds, honestly. And in every single story, the answer has never been just, "Hey, do the mathematically correct thing. Why haven't you done it yet?" It's never, "Stop being emotional about this," or, "You just need more discipline." It's always, "Let's find the real cause. Let's change the behavior and the belief in tandem, and let's implement systems to make the new result inevitable."

These things happen together because that's the only way that it actually sticks.

It's gonna be the same for you, 'cause you don't need to become someone else first to build wealth. You're already the woman who's gonna do this.

Next week, we're uncovering the wealth gap you've probably never heard about.  The hard stats behind why even women who make good money build less of it than men do, and what exactly you can do about it for yourself, your sisters, and your nieces.

i'm Annie Pietra. You're listening to The Other Half of Money. Can't wait to be Rich Aunts together. I'll see you next Thursday.