What’s Your Money Story?

Money doesn’t grow on trees. People who have a lot of money are bad. People who buy frivolous things are silly. I don’t want to have a lot of money because I don’t want to be one of the bad people, right? And it’s not like you woke up this morning thinking about that and talking about it with your friends. These things are pretty subconscious. They’re pretty deep, and it’s just programming, right? Your brain has just been programmed. Like, it got an old floppy disk. We put it in there, and it was like, load up all these thoughts, and then they’re just in there.

And rarely in our life does anyone come along and say, hey, do you like those thoughts? Are they true? Do you want to keep them? How are they showing up in your life? And so let me just give you an example. Let’s say you have this thought, you have to work hard to make a lot of money. Kind of sounds like a harmless thought, maybe a neutral thought, even. But when you believe this, you will then create a life where you have to work hard in order to make what you think is a lot of money. You will believe that your time or your effort or the hardness of it is what creates money. And you’ll just think that that’s a universal truth. And you’ll tell it to your kids, well, you got to work really hard if you want to make a lot of money, right? A lot of us heard you have to go to college if you want to make good money. Is it true? Is it true for everyone? Or are there some people that have made investments or leveraged a skill of theirs so well that it’s easy for them to make money? And what does work hard even mean, right? You can see as we begin to examine this thought under a microscope, we’re like, we just extra questions start coming up.

Now, some of you have this thought that you have to work hard to make a lot of money. And the feeling that you have when you think about that is motivating or hopeful because you work hard or you like working hard and then in your action line, there will be a bunch of things that look like working hard. And then your result will be, when you work hard, you make a lot of money. So for some of you, this just isn’t a problem. But some of you have this thought you have to work hard to make a lot of money. And you feel disheartened, you feel hopeless, despair, stuck because maybe your life is really full and you think there isn’t a lot of room for me to work harder if I have to work harder than I’m working, right? Now to make the money that I want, to have the money that I want. And I don’t see how I could work any harder. Then that thought would be really discouraging.

And let’s use the feeling of discouraging. When you feel discouraged, how do you show up in your life? Well, you don’t like that feeling, so you’re going to show up in a not great way. You’re going to be drinking wine or eating ice cream. Sometimes we spend money recklessly from the feeling of being discouraged, which then makes our money situation worse. And then your result line will be, you don’t work hard and you don’t make a lot of money. That doesn’t prove that you need to work hard to make money. It just proves when you have this thought you have to work hard to make a lot of money, it feels discouraging to you. And then you show up in a way in your own life that does not create the result of money.

Crazy, isn’t it? So I’m getting ready to teach a class in our Catholic Mom community, and it’s going to be about money. And I’m just going to cover the outline of it today, which will be very helpful. But if you want a deeper dive on all of these things that I’m talking about in this episode, and if you want a workbook where you can answer questions and really be guided through what is your money story, how is that showing up in your life? What do you want your money story to be and how will that show up in your life? Then I want to invite you to come join our community because we’re going to be talking about money in the month of August. We’re going to be coaching on it. We’re going to do this workbook. It’s going to bring up a lot of stuff, and then there’s just going to be a lot of vulnerability in the group. Whenever we tackle a topic together, there are always brave women who raise their hand and ask for coaching and share their struggles. And their struggles are often all of our struggles.

And you will learn so much by listening to them and by listening to the coaching. And again, you don’t have to be there live for our coaching. You can listen to the replays and get tons out of that. So first up. You have a self identity about money, okay? I want you to know what it is, and I want you to decide if you like it. Most people, if they’ve never done this work, will not like their identity about money. Most of you will want to create a new identity around money. And I really like this identity.

I am a woman who understands money and stewards it well. I am a woman who understands money and stewards it well. Just a core belief. That’s who I am. And when I believe that, I give myself permission or freedom to show up that way. And I’m going to talk about what understanding money looks like and what stewarding money looks like, okay? So you have an identity belief around money. You might think, oh, I’m so bad at managing money. I’m so bad at making money.

You might think, I’m great at making money, but then I spend it all. You might think, I just don’t know anything about my money. My husband does everything with the money, and that is not a problem. If it’s not a problem if your husband manages your money and you are totally fine with that, then your belief can be, I am a woman who trusts my husband to manage the money. That is not a problem, right? My husband doesn’t love managing our money. I’m the one who manages our money. So I don’t think it’s that husbands should do it or wives should do it. I think in couples, one person tends to be a little bit better about it or more interested in it.

And if that’s not you, totally fine. But then don’t use it against yourself. Don’t be like, oh, I don’t know anything about the money or the numbers and I feel dumb or I feel guilty. I want you to feel empowered that you’ve just made the decision to trust your husband to manage it. So what is your identity about money? And then we want to uncover your thoughts about money, right? Do you think you have to work hard to make money? Do you think you’re bad at managing money? Do you think people who have a lot of money are bad in some way? Is it harder to be holy with a lot of money? Such interesting questions. You just want to uncover what are your thoughts about money? And then you want to decide if you want to keep them or not, right? Not all the thoughts that you find will be harming you in some way, right? Like I said, you might have the thought that you have to work hard to make a lot of money, and maybe you are working hard and you love that thought and it’s working for you. Let’s keep it. We’re just going to go out into the garden of your mind and be like, which ones are flowers and which ones are weeds? Next up, just don’t be a woman who puts her head in the sand about it, right? Money can bring up fear, and a fear response is to freeze, to disassociate, to be like, well, I don’t want to think about that.

Okay? Totally natural. Because for a lot of people, money feels dangerous, and because it feels dangerous, you will have a stress response to it, right? A fight response, which is why marriages tend to have a lot of tension over marriage. A flight response, which is get me out of here. Right? And sometimes freezing or putting our head in the sand is a flight response. Just, I’m going to do something totally different, or it’s a freeze response. Like, I’m just paralyzed. I’m staring at this budget, but I just can’t hang or think about it, and I’m just frozen. So inaction shows up in either of those stress responses.

And so even if your husband manages the money, I want you to just have open communication with him about it. Am I spending too much money? Are we okay? Is my $5 coffee situation fine? Are my spontaneous target trips fine? And you can trust him with the answers. You don’t even need to know the numbers, but just have a pulse on it and he might just be like, yeah, honey, you’re fine. We’re doing great. Or you may be the one that needs to be responsible for the money. Maybe neither of you are taking responsibility for the money right now. Are you going to be a woman who doesn’t put her head in the sand about it? Money exists and it is a tool and it is important. It’s not the most important thing.

We don’t love money more than god, but I think because we have some catholic programming about money, sometimes we’re like, ick money. Stay over there. I don’t want to think about you. I don’t want to know about you. We put our head in the sand and we don’t even know what our own money situation is, okay? So I want to challenge all of you to not put your head in the sand about money next. You can be a woman who understands the numbers if you want. Money is not complicated. I have a finance degree, so I sound confident about certain financial things, and it is only because I spent time learning about it.

It is not complicated. When I listen to my friends talk about gardening, I feel like a little bit of a stress response. Like, I don’t know, that feels overwhelming there’s. Like, when do you do the start inside? When do you put the little fences around them? Are we fertilizing them? What’s this eggshells and coffee grounds thing? Right? Like, to me, gardening is a little bit stressful because it’s unknown and it feels overwhelming to me. So if you’re feeling that way about money and numbers and debt and mortgages and investments, I want you to know that it’s not like anyone was born understanding that the people who are comfortable with numbers and money just spent time learning about it. So for most of you, you have a mortgage and your mortgage is at a particular percentage interest rate. So in addition to paying for your house, you’re paying interest on top of your house. Usually that is a very low interest rate compared to other forms of debt, like student loans or credit cards or car loans.

So I am actually not a huge fan of the Dave Ramsey advice that you should pay off your house and then do other things with your money. If you really struggle managing your money and you just decide, I struggle managing my money and I don’t want to learn how to manage my money, well, maybe you should pay off your house because what that will do is it will prevent you from having access to your money. And so if you are not willing to learn how to be a good steward of your money, in that case, it is good that it’s kind of trapped in your house. But if you take your money and you pay off your four or 5% house loan and then you go get a seven or eight or 10% car loan, that is not a good use of your money because it costs less to carry the debt in the form of your mortgage than it does your car. And I’m not explaining this enough that you can just listen to this episode and be like, oh, now I totally understand debt and interest rates, but I just wanted to use that as an example of financial things, instruments. Debt investments are not complicated. They are not cartoons. YouTube animation will clear it up for you in five minutes.

Oh, okay. That’s how mortgages work. Be a woman who is willing to learn about the numbers if you want to. You have done that work somewhere else in your life. Gardening, knitting, homeschooling, nursing school, right? Like, some of you are doctors and lawyers. And then you’re like, whoa, but I don’t understand anything about money. And I’m like, what if you could go to medical school? You can watch some simple YouTube videos to understand the basics of finance. But it’s just that we have this thought like, money is scary, it’s overwhelming, I don’t know what I’m doing.

And that shuts us down. And so then we just don’t go learn about money, which would take you less than a day for most of what you guys need to know. So understand your numbers. I’m going to talk more about numbers in the class that I’m teaching in our community next. Tithing. I think tithing is so important, and I’m really grateful for those two years that I was Protestant because they just never stopped talking about tithing. It is totally normal to talk about tithing, and it just created the habit in me of tithing. So it’s not a problem for me.

So tithing technically means 1010 percent. And that’s in general, what we say is what we should be giving back. So if you make $100,000 in your household, one might say that you should be tithing $10,000. Now, I’ve heard some numbers. 5% to your parish, 1% to the diocese, and 4% to causes that are important to you. Okay? There are no hard and fast rules, but I think that’s a pretty good breakdown. I heard Matthew Kelly say once that his family made it a goal to tithe 1% more every year. So as his income grew, right, it would be 11% one year and then 12%.

I really love that. And I’ve heard that some very wealthy Christian families I don’t know specifically if they are Catholic, live a reverse tithe like they make so much money. I heard this about an oil family, a family that had oil investments that they live on 10% and they tithe 90%. So there’s no rules. But if you’re not tithing at all, I want you to start with where you can, and maybe that’s 1%. And I want you to just keep challenging yourself until you get up to that 10% level, because it feels amazing to give money away, and it shows you and your brain that you are safe, that money shows up, that you have enough money. And I love thinking, I’m so generous with money, and this is the woman with the two coins, right? We can be generous with money even when we feel like we’re struggling. And in the Protestant circles, because they talk about tithing all the time.

They talk about all these stories of people who tithe, even though they felt like they couldn’t. It was really, really tight that month. And then God money showed up. Like, money just showed up, and they were fine. And I wish we had more of that practice. We have the saints, and they’re so wonderful, and we talk a lot about miracles, but I don’t hear as many of these stories where we honor God with that first 10%, even when we’re like, whoa, don’t know how we’re going to pay for braces. And then God brings money. Just money shows up.

And so we can dig into those thoughts about God and money and providing for us, but it’s worth doing. And so how do you want to steward the money that God is giving you? Because it’s all his money, right? It’s all his money. And then the last thing that I want you to know about money and budgeting and finances is that there are no rules. You get to be a scientist, and you get to see what works for your family and your values. For example, my husband made good money at intel, and then he and I looked at each other and said, we do not like working for that company and the life that it was going to create for us. We were going to make more and more money and we were going to have less and less freedom. And we decided to leave that lifestyle, that story, and to do something much riskier, which is to be entrepreneurs, to have more freedom. And now I have lots more freedom and less money.

And I’m hoping over time that that bet, I’m betting on myself and entrepreneurship will pay out more than that corporate job. But even if it doesn’t, even if we just cover our life the way that it is, I value freedom. Now, some of you might value steadiness. You love the steadiness of a paycheck that you can count on and that brings you peace. And then you show up in your family the way that you want to show up. There are no hard and fast rules. Some of you spend lots of money on private school. Some of you spend lots of money on music lessons.

Some of you spend lots of money on organic food from Shishi grocery stores. The way that you spend your money just reflects what you value. There is no right or wrong way, but I want you to do it eyes wide open and see what you value and just own it and be like, yep, we really like buying organic strawberries. I read that there’s a bunch of stuff on strawberries, so we spend more money to buy organic strawberries. And I feel good about that. I will tell you guys, I don’t buy organic strawberries and I feel a little bit of shame about that. I feel like it’s like a secret to say or confession. Just to be like, I know that not organic strawberries are bad and I still just buy them.

Right? There are no hard and fast rules. We just get to decide what we value. And then if we want to create a different life, whatever that looks like, it’s just trial and error. But don’t look around at what everyone’s doing and think that you have to do that. You do not. You’re going to create a money system that works for your family, and I hope that you do it with the Holy Spirit and through prayer and with your husband. Okay? So what is your identity around money? What are your thoughts about money? Are you putting your head in the sand about any part of your money story or the facts about your finances? Do you want to become a woman who understands the numbers? Let’s tackle it. It’s not hard.

You could read one book and understand almost everything you need to. Are you tithing? Do you want to be? If that’s important to you, do you want to create a plan to get to where you’re giving 10%? Are you giving 10% and you feel like God is nudging you to be even more generous? And then what do you want your life to look like? There are no rules. What do you want to create? And then can you outline a plan to get there. I think that our deepest desires, our dreams come from inside of us, from the Holy Spirit, and that God gives us everything to fulfill them. We all have totally different dreams, but then he brings us different things to fulfill those desires. So if this topic is interesting to you, I want you to come join us. We’re going to have coaching calls about money. This workbook is going to be powerful and show you what your money story is.

And who knows where it’s going to lead you. Maybe you want to make less money and have more freedom. Maybe you want to make more money without working harder and figure that out. Maybe you just want to not worry about money. Like actually your financial situation is fine to you, but you are worrying about it because of this programming, because of your childhood, because of things that you heard. Let us just be intentional. Whatever it is, I love you. And remember, you were Made for Greatness.