How to Build a Healthier Relationship With Money

Money works best when it supports the life you want to live.

Dana Miranda, author, content creator, and money writer joined me on Get Ready Before Life Happens to talk  about what it means to build a healthier, more empowering relationship with money.

We explored why traditional money advice often misses the lived experiences of women, people of color, and LGBTQ communities, and how understanding financial tools can replace fear with confidence and choice.

Key Takeaways

🔹 Financial products are tools, not goals.

🔹 Understanding how money works helps reduce fear and uncertainty.

🔹 Traditional advice often reflects an idealized life that many people do not live.

🔹 Your identity and lived experience shape your relationship with money.

🔹 Good money management does not have to mean restriction.

🔹 “Enough” is personal and can change over time.

🔹 Money should support your life, not become your boss.

🧠 Tony’s Take: Healthy wealth begins with self-trust. Financial readiness is not about following someone else’s rules. It is about understanding the tools available to you and using money to support the life you want to build.

Connect with Dana Miranda:

• Website and newsletter: https://www.healthyrich.co
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justdanamiranda/overlay/contact-info/
• Forbes Advisor Columnist: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/author/dmiranda/

Books:

• You Don't Need a Budget: Stop Worrying about Debt, Spend without Shame, and Manage Money with Ease (Amazon) 

Bio: 

Dana Miranda is a Certified Educator in Personal Finance and author of You Don’t Need a Budget: Stop Worrying about Debt, Spend without Shame, and Manage Money with Ease (Little, Brown Spark 2024). She’s been writing about personal finance as a staffer, freelancer, author, and creator since 2015, sharing her innovative budget-free approach, which recognizes the ways financial education fails to meet the needs of marginalized folks and shifts the conversation toward a better relationship with money for everyone.

☕ Support the Get Ready Movement.

If these conversations help you think differently about money or prepare for life’s what-ifs, your support helps expand financial readiness education and keep this work accessible.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:04

Get ready before life happens. The podcast helping you navigate life's blood.

SPEAKER_00 0:16

What if the real problem with money advice is the assumption is that there's only one right way to do things. Welcome to Get Ready Before Life Happens. Today I'm joined by Dana Miranda. Dana, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_02 0:32

Thanks so much for having me, Tony.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

Yeah, excited to have you on. I've been following uh your Substack for a while and really enjoy your writing and what you're writing about. So, you know, so how about sharing with the audience? What is your origin story and how did it lead you to launching Healthy Rich and writing You Don't Need a Budget?

SPEAKER_02 0:53

I guess my origin story in personal finance starts out sounding a lot like other people's, which is I was in my 20s, I knew nothing about money. Um, I had debt, I was getting by making money, uh, in my case as a freelancer. Um, but where it's kind of different is I didn't find personal finance as a way to answer all my questions and start to, you know, a lot of people start investing and get out of debt fast and that kind of thing. I didn't sort of take on some big financial challenge. I just found personal finance as a writer because I got a job writing for a personal finance site. And for me, I just thought this is gonna be pretty boring probably, but it's a writing job. I'll stick with it for a year if I can and just and then it'll get my foot in the door in the industry. But I ended up loving writing about personal finance specifically because it allowed me to dig into this subject that had sort of never been presented as for me or people like me before. I grew up in the Midwest in Wisconsin in a working class family. And so no one ever really talked to me about growing my money, you know, finding success in life and joy in a career and that sort of thing. It was really just any financial lesson I got was to work hard and avoid debt. Um, and that's about the extent to which we talked about it. And I just loved digging into learning how loans worked, how mortgages worked, how credit cards worked, all those kinds of things, because it started, it empowered me to really understand my situation, you know, how credit scores worked. I started to understand how I could improve my credit score after years of being in debt and not knowing how I was going to pay it off, how I could deal with student loans without just burying my head in the sand, um, without it becoming a huge burden, right? It doesn't, it didn't have to just be about how could I get rich as quickly as possible, or how could I get rid of debt as quickly as possible, and how could I be more disciplined, which is what so much personal finance advice is about. As I started learning about it, I realized I could understand money as a tool and all of these financial products as tools to have the life that I wanted to have. And having that understanding allowed me to incorporate money and financial tools into my life in the way that worked for me without fear. Um, so much financial advice is really fear-based. And I eventually, so I worked that job for four years, and then I went on to be a freelancer for another four or five years in the personal finance space and just found that everyone was kind of sharing a lot of the same types of advice. Like personal finance is really based, like I said, in that like make as much money as possible, hold on to it, get, you know, pay down debt as fast as possible. There's sort of a prescribed set of goals of what it means to be good with money and what you're supposed to want to achieve with money. And most of those were not appealing to me or a lot of people that I knew. And I just realized that largely the advice was coming from um, you know, people whose background was not like mine. It was often men from the middle class were kind of leading the personal finance space at the time. And we were just not hearing from a lot of voices, um, uh, women, people of color, people from working class backgrounds, people who lived in rural areas, uh, LGBT people, people with disabilities. And so I started Healthy Rich to create a space to start to um have a conversation with those people specifically about like how does your identity intersect with your relationship with money and how does it impact your relationship with work and money? And I started having really cool conversations with people and learning um through the things that we were publishing at Healthy Rich, kind of this new way to approach money. I was able to take everything I'd learned in traditional personal finance and then start to expand on it and question it and think about what might be a better way to start to kind of break some of those rules and figure out how we can make them work for us. Because the message that was coming from a lot of those people was the rules we're hearing about personal finance aren't working for me. They don't take into account, you know, the fact that I'm being discriminated against at work or the fact that I came from a low-income family and dealing with generational poverty. Um, the fact that I am um, you know, paying the half of my income is going toward paying for family members who are dealing with debt or poverty or something like that. So um there's just so much that's not being addressed when we just have this sort of one set of rules. So that's how I that's how I came to Healthy Rich and um wrote my book, You Don't Need a Budget, to kind of condense that information and everything that I was learning from the folks that I was talking to through the newsletter.

SPEAKER_00 6:05

Well, that's well, you said so much there. I mean, you dropped so many points, we could probably just wrap up the episode. Um, there you go. So um I I think, you know, I mean, we could we could delve into so many of the parts, but I think, you know, to emphasize what you're saying is that traditionally the money world has said these are a set of rules, they apply to everyone rather than taking a look and saying we're all individuals and we need to make money work for us. And I think what you said too is really important for people to understand is the more you know, the more empowered you are, is that you said early on that learning empowered you. And I think that's a super important thing. I mean, are you finding that when you, you know, because you're talking about serving all these different audiences with different identities, that knowledge really is power for them?

SPEAKER_02 7:03

Absolutely. It that was my experience, and that's what I am seeing in in conversations that I have with other people as well. That it's a very classic thing of like you have to know the rules in order to break the rules, right? Like we accept that in a lot of places, in a lot of areas of our lives, but there's something about our sort of cultural relationship with money that makes us believe that there is just one set of rules for everyone, and either we can follow them or we can't, or we don't, or we choose not to. And if we don't follow that specific set of rules and work toward that specific set of goals, then we are bad with money. We're failures with money, right? And that's just sort of the identity that we adopt. And it's very clear when you start looking at those rules that they're made by certain people for certain people to maintain money and power in um in certain places, you know, that that it has been historically. And so, in order for the rest of us to use money as a tool to live the lives that we want, in order for the rest of us to benefit from these systems in any way, we have to understand how to manipulate those rules to work for us and when to question them, when to break them, when to um when to use products in a different way that, you know, that can just help us achieve our goals and not the ones that have sort of been laid out. So, yeah, understanding how these things work takes the fear out of it, like um to be more specific, things like, you know, a bank account and understanding how you earn interest, uh, credit cards, understanding how they using them impacts your credit score, understand how using them and the ways that you pay them impacts, you know, how much interest you're paying, how much it's gonna cost you, um, student loans and any other kind of debt product like that, understanding what your options are for paying it back in a way that is gonna fit um align with your resources. So once you know that, then you don't have to be so afraid of um, well, I got a I got a bill in the mail and I have to pay it, you know, or or a debtor is calling me and or a debt collector is calling me, um, I'm gonna go to jail if I don't pay this or something, right? There's all these like fears that you think your life is just gonna crumble if you don't do things a certain way around money. But once you start learning how those products work, um, how money works in our society, you can let go of some of that fear because you kind of realize it's it's really not as rigid as it seems. Money is is really fluid. It's really um kind of a vibe a lot more than um than people really want to believe.

SPEAKER_00 9:48

Yeah, well, I think you know, what you're talking about is taking the fear out of money is really important. And I, you know, and going to what you're talking about is, yeah, the set of rules are set up for a certain subset of the population. And I think just what you're saying is that the whole thing is money is not for me, turns off a lot of people from the money world. So it's not a question of intelligence, it's not necessarily even a question of financial literacy, it's a question of mindset and openness to, and for me, it's curiosity is I've you know, I've come to the conclusion that we have to empower people to be curious and ask questions. And then when we shut people down, and this is very common in financial services, and you know, you've been in the business for all, so you know what I'm talking about, is there's a lot of times we're asking questions, and it's like, and I think this gets back to what you're saying is that's just the way it is. You can't question it. And yeah, so we get stuck in the same pattern.

SPEAKER_02 10:57

It scares people to to question the system too. My book is called You Don't Need a Budget, and that concept alone really kind of freaks people out that that's enough, sort of, for for some people to just, you know, walk away and decide that they're not ready to question that concept. Um, but you mentioned mindset, and I I agree with that. It's not so much about financial literacy. We've definitely seen as uh financial education is rolling out more across the US in schools, um, financial education mandates, we're looking at access, you know, what when people had access to financial education and how that impacts them down the line. Um, sometimes there's an improvement, but there's not really a correlated, consistent improvement that is shown yet. There, because there's still so many other factors in your relationship with money throughout your life and um what kind of debt you'll be in, what kind of income you'll be earning, what kind of savings you'll have 10 years out of high school, regardless of the financial education you had. So that that alone isn't going to get you where you want to be. And that's what people want to believe, because learning the rules of money feels like it can put you in control if you can just get that figured out, what those rules are. Um, but it's that's really not the case. But I also want to stress that when we say mindset, it's not just about this sort of blame of like, you just have to believe you can do it and you can, right? Like that's also not true. You still will have a system kind of fighting against you. Um, but in that mindset, there's also like there's there's trust and there's your history and your relationship with money that all plays a part. It's not just about how much you know. Um, it's about what is your relationship with our financial systems, how do they treat you and in and your, you know, your family and and people like you historically, and how do you respond to them and how do you use them and interact with them accordingly?

SPEAKER_00 12:55

I think you hit on something that's really important there. And, you know, the stats that I'm most familiar with are the stats for women. For example, women and money is, you know, there's a gender pay gap, then there's uh, you know, career gaps where women take time out to raise children or care for parents, and then women live longer. So they're earning less money over their career, but they have to make it stretch for longer. And that just in and of itself, that's a whole different planning issue than men. And it's not a matter of, well, you just need to save more. Uh, that doesn't cut it. And so that I I mean, and for me, that's just one example that comes right to mind.

SPEAKER_02 13:37

It's a great example. Um, I'm also thinking of um immigrant families who might have a reason to, you know, mistrust institutions, distrust institutions that they're not comfortable having a relationship with their bank for whatever reason, right? Um, I've I've heard that story many times. Um maybe they're maybe you're not treated well by your bank. Maybe your bank doesn't accommodate people who speak the language that's most comfortable for you to speak and those kinds of things. And do you really want to deal with money in a language that you're not comfortable with, right? Money is already difficult to deal with. So um there's also there's that kind of relationship too, that um, you know, how have these systems how are these systems treating you, welcoming you or not welcoming you? Um, and how does that impact your relationship with money too?

SPEAKER_00 14:32

Yeah, I I think that's so important is, you know, how are the systems treating you? And, you know, I have had on some first generation uh financial coaches on this program, and that's that's something they talk about is you know, you have that cultural adjustment. You know, things are done a little bit differently, perhaps in a country that you came from as an immigrant. And you said with trust. And a lot of organization, financial service uh institutions have done a really poor job of maintaining trust. Looking at you, Wells Fargo. I'll just call you out by name because Wells Fargo seems to be in trouble every other year for doing something that it shouldn't be doing. And it's like, and then they turn around and go, Well, gee, people don't like us and people don't trust us. But it's I think the financial institutions and financial planners, financial planners, I think overall do a pretty good job, CFPs, especially of getting trust. But a lot of people, advisors are not doing a good job of getting trust, I guess. I didn't state that very well.

SPEAKER_02 15:37

But if you follow headlines in the news, it's difficult to have a trust of sort of our financial system at large, too, right? Like who's pulling the strings of interest rates that are really having an impact on your life? What is impacting the stock market that's making your savings go up and down and kind of adding this volatility to your retirement plan? So it's those kinds of things make people want to bury their head in the sand and not take any steps to use money as a tool in their life, or it makes them want to opt out of the systems, which is a reasonable response if you don't trust the system or if it's not treating you well. Um and also if that's what you're gonna do, it's really helpful to have that knowledge to be empowered to make that decision while understanding the impact it's gonna have on you. If you're not, you know, if you're not going to work with a traditional bank or a traditional lender or credit cards, understanding the impact that that has on your credit score and planning accordingly, right? So having that knowledge is just really helpful to help you make those decisions so you don't feel like it's just do it one way or essentially fail with money.

SPEAKER_00 16:54

Yeah, and I I think that's really important is that even if you don't like the rules of the way the money game is played, it's still important to know how the traditional financial services world works. So you can decide if it's for you or not for you. Because I think that's that's the key is you know, the the money world is big, things work in a certain way, and you know, credit scores, yeah, there's a lot of things wrong with them, but they're not going away tomorrow. So you have to understand how they work today, as well as maybe how we can change uh credit scores to more ref, you know, to reflect people of different cultures and backgrounds and ethnicities and how credit scores are biased. Um, and I've had guests on the show talking about how credit scores are biased. And so those things are all real. And so for people out there watching and listening, you've I mean, if you're listening to my podcast, you're already comfortable with this fact, is you know, this stuff is real. It's happening. And that if we want to make change, we do have to understand how it works before we can make change and decide, like you say, is whether we want to play that game or not. But if we don't even know how the game is played, we're not going to get there.

SPEAKER_02 18:14

Right. And that's where so many people are, especially like where I was in my 20s, um, and and when people are first sort of embarking on adulthood, you're just kind of given this set of rules. And that's what a lot of even financial education, um, formal financial education in school, is just a set of rules for what you're supposed to do with money. And if for any reason those rules don't align with what's possible in your life, which for most people they don't, um, because they're created based on some ideal scenario that most people don't experience, then you just think that being good with money isn't going to be accessible for you. And it's it's much easier than to just, you know, to take out student loans to get through school or to pay your rent or whatever it is you need to do, and then bury your head in the sand about it and and ignore the phone calls and ignore the mail that comes in and hope that it just goes away. Because it seems like either I have to pay this $600 bill that's coming at me every month, or I have to just ignore it and let it go because there's no other option, right? But if you understand that there are different payment plans you can be part of, that there's um that there's uh consolidation, that you can um make your debt easier to pay, you can negotiate things. There's there's so many options that are available to people that aren't taught as part of formal financial education, because that education seems to assume that you're going to be in an ideal financial situation. So nobody says, if you can't pay your bills, if you can't pay off your debt on time, here's what your options are. Here's how you can handle that situation. Um, that all kind of gets ignored. So things like negotiating debt, filing for bankruptcy, um, moving bills around, financial triage, none of that is taught. And those are all the skills that people tend to really need in life. Um, much more than like, you know, how to properly write a check, which is still a big topic in financial education, even though most people becoming adults right now don't need to learn that skill.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

Yeah. No, that's funny because yeah, checks are not a thing except with insurance companies. But insurance companies are behind the curve on a lot of things.

SPEAKER_02 20:31

Yeah. So and that's also very Googleable information. There are pictures all over the internet on how to fill out a check and figure it out. Or you can just ask the person in front of you while you're doing it, take that time in the class to talk about uh how to do financial triage when rent is due and you have a credit card bill due, you know, how to make that decision. I think would be a much more valuable use of time in financial education.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

Yeah, I completely agree with you, is that I I think financial education doesn't hit on a lot of the real issues that are facing people. And a lot of it comes back to my experience as a consult as an insurance consultant is that a lot of the questions people would ask would be like, you know, I evaluated insurance policies as an insurance consultant, and they would say, like, well, is this insurance policy any good or not? Nobody came into to me and said, Well, can you tell us, you know, how this policy compares to five other types of policies, you know? And it's like, that's the question people want to take care of. They go, okay, well, if I get this policy, is it going to take care of XYZ? You know, I think people are trying to take care of problems. And the financial services industry does a really good job of lecturing and talking at people instead of listening and creating products and services that help people get to where they're going. And I I think that's a huge mismatch.

SPEAKER_02 21:55

Yeah, and that's that's a really great point. And that's actually. What was sort of the motivation for me behind my book and sort of enumerating this different approach to money? Because when I see people trying to manage money, trying to figure out the best kind of budget, figure out their some new magic bullet sort of money management method, it really comes down to a simple question like that. You know, when it when it comes to spending, usually the question is just can I afford to buy this, whatever it is, right? I'm can I afford to go out to eat with my friends tonight? Can I afford to take this vacation? Can I afford to buy this thing that I want? Um that is what people are looking for when they're making a detailed budget. And a lot of times that budget doesn't answer that question. It just kind of adds some shame and stress to your life and adds a chore that's not very useful. Um, and so I encourage people to think about money in a different way that is about answering that question, um, setting it can be down to that kind of detail, like as when you, you know, have an opportunity to spend money, can you afford that? Right. But even if it's not that, if you, you know, think about what it is that you want money to help you achieve in life, and even taking that out of it, what is it that you want your life to look like? And then take the step back and say, how can money help to support this? I think is a much more useful way to approach money management than to start with some set of rules about uh how to make a budget and you have to save 10% of your paycheck and you should have this much in your retirement savings by this age, like this, these sorts of set of rules that don't get to that crux, like you said. Like people just want to know, will this insurance policy take care of my family if something happens? How do you answer that question, right? That's basically what we're all looking for with money. Is this going to give me the life and the security and the comfort that I want in life?

SPEAKER_00 24:04

Yeah. And I think you say it so well is that it's all about the goals and what it looks like for each of us. I think that's the thing that's forgotten is, you know, like you said, is these rules. It's like, you know, okay, well, you need to X amount at retirement. Well, maybe, maybe not. It depends on what you think your retirement's going to look like. Um, you know, there's some people and I've mentioned it often on the shows like Elon Musk, who doesn't seem like there's any amount of money that's going to make him happy. And, you know, and there's a lot of people, well, Warren Buffett is somebody that I come back to, is you know, he still lives in the same house he bought in the 1950s. And it's a relatively small house. Yeah, I think it's a five-bedroom house. And for him, that's enough. And he could go out and probably buy the whole uh buy all of Nebraska if he wanted to. Yeah. So it's like, you know, what's right for each of us.

SPEAKER_02 25:03

Yeah, absolutely. And it's probably true for everyone, no matter where you're starting, that no amount of money is going to bring you happiness. Um, that that that's sort of the most insidious thing in our culture is that you're sort of always trained that there's some more that you're missing out on that you could be achieving. And so if you're somehow very high achieving, like an Elon Musk, um, and you're able to accumulate a lot of wealth and ownership and money, then there's still a message, you know, that says, but you could you could do more, right? You have that ambition that wants to take you for more. Um, if you start out and you don't have a lot to begin with, there's something in you telling you that if you just could work harder, if you could save more, if you could spend less, you know, you could be happier. So it's always this like, how can you accumulate more money and how can you spend less is is sort of the message underlying our cultural relationship with money. So it's it's not always about greed, um, you know, with a with an Elon Musk figure. I think that there is greed there underlying that in some way. But um that same message sort of trickle trickles down, makes its way to all of us as the way to relate to money. And so there is this underlying sort of tone of greed in how we're taught to relate to money, um, regardless of of how much we have or how generous we are or what goals we have in life. The rules that we're trying to follow that we think are the right things to do with money are all about sort of accumulating more and spending less.

SPEAKER_00 26:51

Yeah. Well, I think you said it so well as you know, the, you know, we're all tattooed, like we need to accumulate more money. And for a lot of people, you know, the better question is what is enough? And that's different for each of us. And when we figure out what enough is, is oftentimes we're like, oh, okay, I actually have enough. And, you know, for me, it's I talk about people achieving financial independence rather than retirement, is, you know, because it's like, what's going to make you happy? What's going to make you feel comfortable? Like you said, we're seeking comfort, we're seeking security with our money.

SPEAKER_02 27:30

Yeah. And that enough can change, you know, it's going to be different for everybody, but it also is probably going to be different for each person throughout your life, too. Um, and and it can be hard, I think, to come up with a number that's enough. That's I I don't talk, other than just being comfortable talking about money, um, I don't talk about the numbers in money all that much. I don't think that that's all that useful as an educational tool. And that's why something like, you know, save 10% of your retirement income and that's how you'll have enough at retirement. Um, or even just saying, like, what is a number that's enough for you is so hard to come up with because you don't know what you're going to want, you know, a month from now, five years from now, 50 years from now in your life. So I try to think about what is the life that you want to live. What are the things that you want to do and that you can adjust enough based on that? And that's largely what I've been able to do throughout my life is um sometimes it makes sense for me to really hustle and work toward earning more money or work towards certain financial goals because that is just what is making sense for me and my family at the time, or there's things that I want to achieve, or I think there is stuff that I want to do and I don't have the money to do them. And so if I work harder right now, I will be able to do them. Um, and sometimes enough is much, much less because I'm taking a year off to write a book, or I'm, you know, I'm doing something else, I'm getting something started. Um, and and that, so enough looks a lot different then because then I have different priorities. So that that can change throughout your life too. Enough is not like, you know, a retirement savings goal that you achieve. Um, I've I've heard from people who are have been involved in the financial independence retire early movement. I could probably just say fire. I'm sure everyone in this audience knows that, but just in case, um, people who are working to achieve fire who will set a big lofty goal and then realize after saving for 10 years that they're actually comfortable where they are and they're at, you know, 25% of their goal, but they think I could leave my job and I can live on this. It's it's 25% of the annual income than I thought I would get, you know, but but that's fine. So it doesn't have to be, you know, this like set number. It's just sort of where are you? What makes you comfortable? When are you ready? Is this savings enough of a cushion to make you want to leave work and live the life that you want to live or not depend on traditional work, you know, in that kind of way? So I think that sort of the way that people approach fire in that way can be a really good example of being able to adjust that enough number and not just have to work diligently, you know, uh toward a very specific number.

SPEAKER_00 30:23

Yeah. And the thing that's been interesting for me too is with, you know, talking with people who've been part of the fire movement, is that some of them regret it as well is because it's that they give up too much of the present, you know, to for, you know, uh hope for early retirement. And that's that's the other thing too, is like you said, is you took a year off to write a book, and now is enough for you at the time to meet a goal instead of saying, well, I'm gonna work for 10 years, put my aside as much money as possible, and then I'm gonna write my book. Is you know, like you took the time to write the book on your journey. And I think that's the other thing is that, you know, as you're talking about it, that the money just enables us to be able to do the things we want to do. Um, one thing I want to ask before we wrap up is, you know, you use the term healthy. Healthy rich is, you know, the title of your Substack. What does healthy mean to you in the context of money? And why do you use that framing?

SPEAKER_02 31:26

That's a great question. It c it started as something that just sort of came to me, I think, like a shower thought when I was starting the newsletter, um, as the opposite of filthy rich, the idea that the goal in personal finance is so often to become filthy rich, and that's what people are celebrating. And healthy rich was the opposite of that, which was can't we just feel good about being rich? Why does it have to be like dirty, you know? Um and that, you know, and that doesn't mean rich, like a bunch of a you know, big number in your bank account necessarily either. So it's, you know, it's it's that idea of like rich can mean a lot of different things, but it is, you know, just about money. So it's about a healthier relationship with money, a more joyful, more fluid, more nuanced relationship with money than this idea of just working toward accumulating the most possible and parting with the least amount possible, which is like what filthy rich really kind of means to me.

SPEAKER_00 32:30

Yeah, no, I I like that because I think, well, one, a lot of our habits are unhealthy, as we've been talking about when it comes to our financial life. And we we pick up those habits and a lot is because we think that's what we're supposed to do. And I think social media has made that a lot worse, is because, you know, we see these pictures of the best days of someone's financial life. And it's like, oh my gosh, they're going to XYZ on vacation. You know, we're not doing that. We don't have a new car. Um, and we all think like, oh my gosh, you know, and I would imagine that's probably part of what you're talking about with healthy goals and everything.

SPEAKER_02 33:11

Yeah, definitely setting aside that comparison game. Your, yeah, as with anything in life, um, your financial journey is not somebody else's financial journey. Um, you you never know what's behind the story that they're telling. Um, whether it's a mountain of riches and joy that they have access to, or it is a mountain of debt and stress, right, that they're dealing with and not talking about. Um, you don't you don't know either way. And it doesn't really matter. Um, everyone is can use money in whatever way they want, and that goes for you as well. So you um your struggles are your struggles, and your successes are your successes. So yeah, I step away from that comparison game for sure. Um, and that I think helps take a big step toward a healthier relationship with money.

SPEAKER_00 34:09

Yeah, I I I love that that anyone, everyone can use money in the way that they want, and that we need to step away. I'm just making a note, step away from the comparison game. I I think that we forget that is that we can use our money in our own way, and we have agency over our money. And I think that gets back to your whole message that you've been talking about is that you know, our money works for us. Um, you know, that that you can use it to do what you want, and that we're gonna be different. You and I are different. We have different goals, we have different backgrounds, you know, whatever. So we're probably gonna have different financial goals or things that are gonna be my enough is probably not the same as your enough, and that's okay.

SPEAKER_02 34:59

Yeah, yeah. I love that you said, you know, money should work for us. Don't work for your money, essentially, right? Don't let it be your boss and dictate what is possible in your life. Don't let it dictate what your days look like and and what you choose to do with your life. It's um in addition to just sort of following a certain set of goals that the culture lays out for us, um, like you have to have a certain car, you have to take the certain vacations, you have to have the house, whatever it is. Um, there's also just kind of this idea that once you make financial commitments, you're stuck with them and then they make all the decisions in your life, right? Like you have a mortgage. So that means that you have to work a certain job to earn a certain amount of money and now and you're miserable. So you can't go on vacations and you can't have the you can't do the art that you wanted to create or whatever, right? That's sort of the story of your life now. And it's just not true. You can sell your house, right? You can you can walk away, you can find ways to do that, you can make changes. And I know every decision that you make in life comes with all kinds of consequences. So I'm hearing people respond, like, I can't just sell my house. I have a family that lives there, you know, like what do we do? But that's just an example because that's such, you know, housing cost is like such a huge part of people's financial lives that can really keep you anchored to a certain kind of life. And so I always like to throw that out there. There's a story in the book that I talk about a couple who uh ended their lease in Los Angeles, downtown Los Angeles, that was very expensive and sort of restricting them from achieving some goals that they wanted and keeping them in uh work that they didn't want to be doing. And they moved into an Airstream RV. Um, and for a year it was a very tiny one, and then they realized they loved it, they bought a bigger one. But they drastically changed their lifestyle in order to do the kind of work that they wanted to do. And you're the changes you make don't have to be that extreme. The kinds of like commitments that you let go of in your life don't have to be that extreme. But I love it as an example because it just I think it's very inspiring to see the the ways that you can the control that you have over your life that you might not realize, right? That these financial commitments don't have to be the anchor that they feel like. You can um restructure debt, you can sell assets, you can, you know, take money out of your retirement account. There's all kinds of things that you can do to use money as a tool in your life instead of allowing the choices that you've made with money in the past to dictate what you can do in the future.

SPEAKER_00 37:44

I I love that. And, you know, and and that's a trade-off that you're talking about with a couple is, you know, is like, you know, there's a lot of people who may be making a high income, but they're very miserable in those jobs. And uh, which part of the reason some of those jobs pay that much is because they're not that fun. Yes. And you know, so it's kind of like, you know, you only have one life to live. So you have to decide what is most important to you. Um, so Dana, to wrap up, I have what's called the get ready how take trio. These are three quick questions I ask all my guests. The first one is what's one money myth you're trying to break?

SPEAKER_02 38:26

That you need a budget, I guess. Um my whole book is is actually lays out kind of nine tenets of budget culture that that I want to uh counter. But the simplest one is that you need a budget, that you uh good money management equals restriction and discipline. And I don't uh I don't agree with that at all.

SPEAKER_00 38:49

I love that. And that's something I feel that it doesn't mean restriction, you know, is there is popular financial advice not as much as it was a few years ago. Like, don't have your daily coffee. Well, that's to me, it's like, okay, well, what if you like daily coffee? And you know, wouldn't it be better to save some money on your mutual fund expenses than giving up a five dollar, well, coffee maybe more than five dollars now at Starbucks, but you know, yeah, um, you know, but that's smaller potatoes and you know, effectively managing your investment portfolio. So yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:28

Or again, you know, changing your housing situation, um, supporting affordable housing in your community, or um uh uh applying for housing vouchers or assistance with your health insurance or um uh food stamps, they're what they're called in in different uh states, um, but you know, assistance with the big things, you know, or or ways to move around money with the big things so that you can enjoy those little things which aren't going to have a major impact.

SPEAKER_00 40:00

Exactly, exactly. I love that. So don't give up your daily coffee if you enjoy it. That's that's the message here. So let's get out the time machine for a minute. If you could go back in time knowing what you know now about money, what advice would you give your younger self?

SPEAKER_02 40:20

I would say I would try to download just all of the knowledge that I've gained, right? Um uh the the kind of financial education and the comfort with financial products and systems, um, understanding how debt products work in particular, because that would have removed a lot of fear. And I don't have a ton of regrets. I didn't um accumulate a ton of debt and get myself in a really bad situation or anything in my 20s, but I just had it, there was a lot of avoidance and a lot of fear and sort of thinking that I was bad with money and just sort of uh adopting that identity that I didn't need to do. Um, I was doing pretty normal things with money and debt throughout my 20s. And if I just understood how my student loans worked, how credit cards worked, then I could have just addressed those things without it, you know, while I was still broke, um, I could have uh addressed those without it impacting my credit score and then me having to rebuild it and um and things like that. So, and I would have just felt a lot less shame and and not adopted that identity of being bad with money, which just wasn't fair to myself at the time.

SPEAKER_00 41:40

I I think that is a huge topic that, you know, unfortunately we don't have time to really go into, but that adopting the identity as we do so often with money, we let that identity rule us. And we can't let that identity rule us as that we, you know, we've been talking about it, that you have agency and the power. And the power is the knowledge to learn things. And as you talk about it, to figure out how to run these bigger issues. And now with, you know, AI, yeah, AI is not 100% accurate, but it's pretty good and can give you some pretty good tips, like on how to manage a deadload, um, things like that. So the the information is out there. Um, you have to seek it. And so for me, that's it, is you know, with the show, I'm hoping to encourage people to be more curious and to ask more questions so that they get that information, like you've been talking about, to empower them.

SPEAKER_02 42:37

So yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 42:40

Yeah. So last question is what's your number one tip to change the way we think about money?

SPEAKER_02 42:48

I encourage people to trust themselves. I think that's a really important place to start in your relationship with money. So trust yourself to know what you need from money so that you're not always seeking some third-party set of rules that are almost certainly made for somebody else's life. You have to start with I, you know, I talk in the book about listening to your gut or tapping into your inner voice, kind of whatever um, whatever language speaks to you, but I like to say listening to your gut to understand what you really want. And then once you know that, most people have a pretty intuitive understanding of how they can use money uh to make that happen. Um, learning the ins and outs of the products and the system then is a pretty small step. Um, once you have an understanding of um what you want and a trust that you're gonna be able to get it, then the other things are just sort of icing that can facilitate that and make it easier. Those are just details, really. Um, so trust yourself to use money in the way that's right for you, even if it doesn't look like, you know, what people, what people on social media are are telling you or what your friends are doing with money or saying that they're doing with money. Um, you're doing what's right for you.

SPEAKER_00 44:27

Yeah, it's it's funny, is it when you talk about that? Is it, you know, many, many moons ago when I played basketball, you know, is that's what coaches would say. They'd say, pay attention to your own game. Don't worry about what everyone else is doing. You know, you play your game and go out there. And I think, yeah, that definitely applies with money, is you know, play your own game. You know, I mean that's a great way to frame it. I love basketball, but you know, so that that's great advice. So, Dana, where can people learn more about you? Subscribe to Healthy Rich and pick up a copy of You Don't Need a Budget.

SPEAKER_02 45:03

You can follow the newsletter, Healthy Rich, at healthyrich.co, um, or if you're on Substack in the Substack app, just search for Healthy Rich and you'll find us there. And you can find the book at you don't needabudget.com or anywhere that you buy books. Um ask for it at your local library, um, request it at your local bookstore, they have access to the places to order it. And I'd um I'd love to get it into more people's hands that way.

SPEAKER_00 45:32

Cool. And for people watching and listening, if you have access to the show notes, there'll be links there in show notes. And if you do want to support your local bookstores, you can order uh your book, I'm sure, through bookshop.org, which supports local independent bookstores. So if you want to support your local independent bookstores, go to bookshop.org. So, Dana, thanks for joining us on Get Ready Before Life Happens.

SPEAKER_02 45:55

Thanks so much for having me, Tony. This was great.

SPEAKER_00 45:58

Yeah, love it. And thank you, everyone, as always, for tuning in to this episode of Get Ready Before Life Happens. If you learned something today to change the way you think about money, please be sure to subscribe and to share with a friend. You can also go to my website at Tony Stewart.com to join the Get Ready Movement, get access to my resources and newsletter. And if you'd like to support the podcast, you can do so now at buymeacoffee.com/slash Tony Stewart. Because when life happens, the way you think about money matters.