Every mom carries a money story — beliefs about finances that were formed in childhood and are still running the show today.

Maybe your story is “there’s never enough.” Maybe it’s “money is the root of all evil.” Maybe it’s “I don’t deserve nice things.” Whatever it is, it’s shaping how you spend, save, and stress about money right now.

In this episode, I help you uncover your money story and examine it through the lens of Catholic stewardship.

We talk about:
* What a “money story” is and how to identify yours
* Common money beliefs that keep Catholic moms stuck
* The difference between financial fear and faithful stewardship
* How to rewrite your relationship with money using truth and prayer

If you liked this episode, you’ll also enjoy:
 Being a Working Catholic Mom: Balance, Guilt, and Grace
 Trusting That God Is Taking Care of You
 The Feeling Every Mom Is Chasing (And How to Find It)
        
If money stress is stealing your peace, you don’t have to figure it out alone. Inside Mary’s Heart Martha’s Order, we address the thoughts and beliefs behind your stress — including money. Join us at catholicmomcalm.com/marysheart

And yet money is such an important resource for how we live. So we have been studying money in the Catholic mom community over the summer and it has been such a fruitful experience for me and I think for the people going through this course. And I just wanted to share some of it with you. 

So the first thing that I wanna teach you about money is it almost everything about money is completely arbitrary and made up almost all of it, even the worth of money, right? If you think about the worth of the dollar or of gold, those are kind of two things that we value. The value of those things changes over time, and the value of those things are just what we collectively have decided. We’ve just collectively decided. This is worth $10. 

And as you’ve seen with inflation, particularly over the last five to 10 years, things now cost two or three times what they used to cost. The thing is the same, but the value that we have assigned to the dollar is different, and so now it takes more dollars to buy something that you used to be able to buy for fewer dollars in the past. And this is happening all the time. 

It is also completely arbitrary. What is a lot of money or not enough money? What is expensive? What is cheap? We all have completely different ideas about this. We have different ideas about what we shouldn’t spend money on. 

Right. If I just took a hundred of you and then started listing a bunch of things that you could purchase, maybe houses, cars, vacations, purses, piano lessons, private school, all these things, right? I would just list things that we could buy with money. Organic blueberries for $10 a pound. And some people would say, yeah, that’s a really good use of your money. And other people would say, that’s outrageous. I would never spend my money on that. 

Sometimes we judge only what we spend money on. Sometimes we judge others on what they spend money on, and particularly as Catholics, and I’ll just say Catholics and Christians and people. Who are conservative religiously, we want to honor the Lord, and we know that there is this warning that says we should not have a love of money. 

There is also this warning about how it will be harder for a rich man to get into heaven. As a camel going through the eye of the needle. What’s misunderstood about that teaching is there was an actual kind of arch walkway. I feel like it must have been leading into some city in Jerusalem, but I don’t remember. 

And camels with too much stuff on their back couldn’t fit through. So often we hear that and we actually picture an actual camel and then an actual sewing needle to show that it’s impossible, right? It would be impossible for an actual camel to fit through the eye of a needle, but what they were talking about was this walkway. And so if the camel had too much stuff on it, it couldn’t go through. So we often use that as a scary feeling inside our bodies around money. 

And then we just heard the story of the guy who was storing up grain in his barns and he wanted to, you know, tear down the barns to big, bigger barns so he could put more grain in them. And the Lord said, what are you doing, man, because you’re gonna die and none of that matters.

So we have these kind of conflicting messages about money. So it makes a lot of sense that you would feel confused about it. And then layered on top of that is I think a lot of misunderstanding miseducation cultural programming for women around money. That women, we just tend to receive the message that we are silly and we don’t understand finances and we just spend money.

Culturally, it sounds like women are dumb when it comes to money. What I have found actually is that a significant number of women run the finances of their household, and that was really true of Jewish women as well, you know, way back when. 

So I think women have historically been involved in money. It’s just in recent times we make it sound like they aren’t. And we think about those fifties moms that are just like, I don’t even know where the money is.

Now in my money course I’ve been coaching women who don’t run their finances and don’t know where the money is, and that’s okay too. And the conversation we had around that was about like, Hey, if your husband passed away, do you at least have a place that you could go to find out where all the accounts are?

That’s totally fine if you’re not managing the accounts. And he does all of that and he feels confident that everything’s being taken care of. I don’t think women have to be involved in all of the finances.

But you should at least know we have an Evernote document. Evernote is kind of an online secure place where you can put sensitive information and we have all of that information listed there, insurance bank accounts, things like that. And so if my husband died, I could go there and find that information, including passwords to get into things.

So right now, I want you to just to take a deep breath. And I want you to know that money is a resource like air and like time, and God gives us enough air and enough time and enough money to do what he wants us to do, and we do not own air. Or time or money, they are things that just pass through us. They’re things that just exist.

Now we steward those things for the Lord. We want to use our time well. We want to use the air that he gives us well. We want to breathe in and breathe out His praise and thanksgiving always on our lips. And we want to steward the money that he gives us well, and he gives us different amounts of money, and that’s okay. He gives us different amounts of time, and that’s okay.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make around money is that they panic about it. They have lots of negative thoughts about it. They have really kind of twisted toxic programming. From their childhood, from the culture, it doesn’t matter where it came from. And then in a stress state, they just keep making unwise decisions.

And you know this is true because for those of you that have ever really struggled with finances and really tried to hunger down and save, what ends up happening is we feel kind of bottled up and then all of a sudden we spend a lot of money. Or we spend money on things that we didn’t even really want, and we have a lot of regret and shame afterwards.

It’s kind of the same thing with dieting. You know, you can have really, really strict diets, but then it just, if you don’t learn how to live in peace, if you don’t learn how to manage your mind and manage stress, it has to come out. So it’ll come out and binge eating eventually. It’s the same thing with money.

So in this money course. We talk about understanding your money story. What do you believe about money? And I’m telling you right now, it’s all made up for everything that you believe. There’s a person who believes the opposite, and it’s not binary. It’s really on a spectrum. 

So, you know, you may be, in marriages, one person tends to be more of a saver and one person tends to be more of a spender. So we’re just moving people along those spectrums, but that tends to be what happens. And your money stories will clash into your spouse’s money stories. 

Maybe not on everything. My husband actually, we really agree on a great deal about money. There’s very little, there’s just like a few little things where I’m like, well, it’s silly that he wants to buy that and he thinks it’s silly that I wanna buy other things. And so that is always, I think, present a little bit. But money does not have to be super stressful. 

Now, some of you might say, what are you talking about, Sterling? I am really struggling financially right now. I think that the things in the world are four times as much as they ought to be. If you look at the charts around housing and food pricing for the last 40 years, you can just see it, it’s just crazy how the job prices haven’t increased, but things are now three to four times more than they used to be.

And that’s not your fault. You didn’t buy too many lattes and then stumble into a house that cost three times more than it should have. Like really imagine if your housing and food costs were half of what they were. I think they’d be even less than half. But even if they were just half of what they were, you would be doing all right.

Now, I think that happened to us, whether it’s governments or capitalism or like BlackRock buying everything, it really doesn’t matter why, but I don’t think we need to have guilt or shame over what’s happening on a macro level in the economy. 

But we still get to choose how to show up with the resources that we have, and you will never steward the resources that you have well, if you are panicked and you do not trust the Lord, and you do not ascribe any moral value to having or not having money, it’s not a moral issue. 

And I think one of the most beautiful things that we can realize is that we literally, 100% of the days of our lives have always had enough money. Even if you foreclosed on a house and filed for bankruptcy or had a car repossessed, those are like the big, scary things.

Even if you have $150,000 of student loans right now and you have no idea how you’re gonna pay them up. You’ve always had enough money, you’ve always had a place to sleep, and you’ve always had food to eat. If you were listening to this podcast, that is true for you, and I want you to sit in the sufficiency of that, sufficiency is the opposite of scarcity.

Scarcity is that choking, panicked feeling that we don’t have enough. And some of you can have a hundred thousand dollars in your bank account and still feel scarcity, and that choked up feeling that you don’t have enough.

But I want you to feel sufficiency. Sufficiency that not only is God going to give you all the money that you need to carry out the mission that he has planned for your life, but also. You are just borrowing it. It is just touching your hands and flowing out from you into the world, and you will not get to keep any of it.

And I really love the comparison to air. Right now you’re breathing air and you breathe it in and you breathe it out and the air just keeps moving on in the planet and the air will exist after you die, and you’ll not need any air after you die. I mean, I don’t know what the physics are like in heaven, but let’s just assume it holds up.

I really want you to sit in this feeling of being so held, so taken care of. And some of you might be thinking, I’m so tired of eking it out. I’m so tired of living paycheck to paycheck. I’m so tired of only ever having the basics, but I wanna suggest that part of the reason that’s happening is because you’re living in so much stress and you lack peace.

And when we drop that stress, when we feel held, when we feel sufficiency, enoughness, then we start to see more ease in our lives, not just. Because your brain has calmed down. You’re not, your brain isn’t on fire as much anymore, but when you are calmer, you make better decisions. You just do, and that will improve your life.

The second thing that we’ve been talking about. In this course because there’s kind of two buckets of people. There’s the paycheck to paycheck. I’m really struggling group. And then there’s the, you know, I’ve worked really hard, I’ve saved money, and now I make more money than I grew up with. 

And there’s this cognitive dissonance that happens when you start making more money than you grew up with. Cognitive dissonance is believing two things at the same time that are opposite, and it kind of like feels funny in your brain. So you may be making a lot of money, and again, a lot is totally arbitrary, made up, let’s just say a lot. 

But you didn’t grow up with a lot of money, and so your brain is like, I don’t have enough money. I’m still poor. I can’t buy those things. And you’re still acting in a way that doesn’t make sense for how much money you make. Your brain hasn’t really caught up to the level of wealth that you have. 

And that’s when we also start to wonder about this, you know, camel through the eye of a needle stuff. And you know, is it bad to be wealthy? Is it ridiculous to buy luxury things? And those are real challenges that show up when you start creating financial stability and building wealth.

But all of it is arbitrary. I’ll tell you right now. Just make a list of what you think is too ridiculous to buy. And what’s interesting is I still kind of have a list in my mind, but I know it’s not true. I know it’s not. And my husband and I were talking about that the other day. We were talking about, we actually were talking about winning the lottery and we’re not really lottery people.

But I don’t know. We were somewhere and we saw that it was $410 million and after taxes, and if you take the cash version, I think you end up with about a hundred million is I think, how it worked out. I asked ai, I forget what the number was, but let’s just say it was a hundred million, which is still a ridiculous number.

And I could feel in my body, I went, oh, that’s too much money. Like it was almost as if I put my hands up. And went, Ooh, I do not want that much money. That felt like a scary amount of money to me. That felt like all of a sudden you wouldn’t really know who your friends are. 

And even for my kids, I actually felt scared for my kids that they wouldn’t know how to work in the world or if their spouses really loved them or just wanted money. Like, it was so interesting that my brain really triggered on. A hundred million dollars. 

And my husband didn’t have that at all. He was like, oh, it’s no big deal. We would just invest it. And he’s like, we buy a couple fun things and then we’d invest it and maybe we wouldn’t talk about it. It’s no big deal. Like he did not have this kind of strong reaction in his body. 

And it’s different for each one of us. What that number is where our kind of internal nervous system goes. Woo. Hold on. That’s too much. And the same thing is true about purchases, right? Some of you might think that buying a hundred thousand dollar boat is ridiculous. Like, oh my gosh, I would never do that.

And I remember seeing a lot of headlines on the internet when Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, had a $50 million wedding. But the funny thing is. I had a friend recently who had a $15,000 wedding, and I bet that the percentage of her wealth that she spent on that wedding was much, much more than Jeff Bezos spending $50 million on his wedding compared to his wealth.

And I’m not making a judgment about that. I just want to show you how arbitrary we all think it is. A lot of money, a little money, something you shouldn’t spend money on, something that’s wasteful. 

I do personally think that we should all be tithing 10% of our money, and if you are not doing that, I highly recommend tithing 1% of your money and making it a goal to just keep increasing that percentage maybe every three or six months. I do think the Bible’s pretty clear about that.

But almost everything else’s just kind of made up you guys. So whether you’re struggling with money or whether you’re struggling to adjust to having more money than you grew up with, I want you to be clean about money. Being clean about money means writing down your money story and seeing what’s in there and just questioning.

Is that true? Do I wanna keep believing that? If your thoughts create your results, what kind of results are they going to create? Are you scared of money? Are you putting your head in the sand amount money? Do you need to go learn something? 

In my money course, I teach the basics of finance, I think in less than two hours. And I say, listen ladies, it is not that much. There are some basic concepts and you could learn it pretty quickly. I also list some books if you wanna read a whole book, ’cause books make you feel good. I list some books that you could read. It is not very complex to understand the basics of finance. 

Now, if you are managing a $10 million family trust, and you need a family office to do it. And that’s very layered and complex. Yeah, we might need to go get more education, but the vast majority of us are not playing at that level. The vast majority of us need to understand about what our budget is, where our money is going.

The interest rates of things that cost us money, or the interest that we are making in investments. And that’s pretty much it. Stop telling yourself that you’re bad at money, you’re bad at managing the household finances. If you wanna get better at it, get better at it, but not from this place of fear and panic and shame and guilt. God does not ask us to live like that.

And by this time in your life, you also know that money just shows up. Unexpected money shows up, unexpected costs show up too. And again, money just, it’s kind of flowing in and it’s flowing out. It’s not even ours. We just steward it for a short time. For the Lord, we wanna be prayerful.

I also talk a great deal about. Not being on the same page as your husband about money. And I just wanna say, of course you’re not, because you both have different programming. You both have different money stories that are made up, and I don’t think that’s a problem. I think that you can get on the same page enough to do what God wants you to do.

And sometimes that means surrendering things to your husband and watching him do things that you have lots of thoughts about. And sometimes it means being really honest with yourself about your spending, but I think we make that a little more complicated than it needs to be as well. And I don’t think that we need to be completely on the same page about money.

So as we head into the fall. Which always feels like a natural reset time. I want you to consider what your money story is and what you want it to be. What do you want your finances to look like for the rest of the year? I’ll tell you right now that Christmas is coming. It’s not a surprise. 

You can start socking some money away from that, or you can start buying presents a little bit each month for the next five months so it doesn’t feel like such a hit. It’s a lot of back to school sales. A lot of the Catholic companies have back to school sales, so you can get really cool Catholic stuff.

I mean, I guess I’m not buying Catholic things for Christmas, maybe for other people. I am. The boys are in this phase where they just want Lego sets and it doesn’t seem like there’s any very clever way to buy Lego sets. Like they’re so popular that. There aren’t very many of them on Facebook marketplace.

So what’s your money story? What do you want it to be? Do you have peace around money? I think the eye of the needle is your emotional baggage around money. And are you too attached to your things? Let us seek not to be attached to anything because none of it is ours. We don’t get to keep any of it.

We’re just stewarding it for a time. We’re like the caretakers of someone else’s property. There’s a really great book, I forget the author, but it’s Die With Zero, and he talks about organizing your life so that you really do give everything away by the time that you die. 

And he says, why do we wait to give inheritance to people when we die? Why wouldn’t we do it while we’re living and get to watch them enjoy it, and obviously still protecting ourselves to make sure that we have food and shelter. But it’s such an interesting concept.

So if you wanna check out my money course, I’ll put the link in the show notes and I want you to just take responsibility there. Take responsibility for. Your money story for the lack of peace that you have around money, for the lack of trust that you have in the Lord. Who are you to tell him how it’s gonna be or what’s gonna happen?

Let Him hold your heart. Let him tell you that not only are you gonna have everything that you need, but he’s gonna bless you with more than what you need, but it requires that you calm down and that you empty your hands of lies and expectations. And things that we’re too attached to. We have to come to him with empty hands in order to receive what he has for us. But I think he just has the most beautiful gifts waiting for us. 

And you know that that’s true because you can look back at the 10 years, the last 10 years and see evidence of how he’s given you amazing gifts, things you didn’t even ask for. Perfect gifts, things that were beyond your needs. He’s so good. He’s so gracious and loving. Let us walk around believing that. 

Alright, my friends, I’m praying for you. Please pray for me. Thank you so much for listening and have a blessed day.