Episode 33 – The #1 Thing Sabotaging Your Money

Have you ever wondered what is sabotaging your relationship with your hard-earned money? Maybe you feel angst about spending or can’t seem to keep money in your account because you feel a need to get rid of it?

Spoiler, it all has to do with understanding your money story and that’s what this episode of, “Heart of Your Money Talks” is about.

I’m sharing a client’s story that might really resonate with you and how she was able to stop self-sabotaging. She is now working with her finances from a place of self-love and care, rather than shame and self-doubt. It was an incredible transformation.

To learn more about how our minds can be our own worst enemy or our own best friend when it comes to our finances, listen to this episode.

Show Notes:

Hey there. Welcome back. This is episode 33. Today, I’m going to talk about the number one thing sabotaging your money. Now it seems that life is going by at super speed, so fast and we’re working hard trying to get ahead while still checking off our to-do lists. Maybe your list looks something like this, pay off debt, start a savings bucket, lose five pounds, spend time with family and friends, meditate. 

We always make these lists and usually it’s the new year or in September, it’s like a new year and reset. I go through these lists. They go on and on for some of us. Sometimes I never get to tackle any of them. Sometimes I tackle them all, but I want to ask you something on your list.

Where is your checklist for your money? For your self-love with your money? For your love-fest, with your money? Has anyone ever put that on their list? Your relationship with money starts with self-love. And it’s really hard to recognize and prioritize that. Last week I shared that self-love equals self-care and self-care gives us the motivation to nurture our financial health.

We talked about financial health last week. There is a sense of deserving that needs to happen for self-value and self-worth to kick in. You do deserve an elevated sense of your worth in every aspect of your life. Our judgment and attitude to work towards what we believe, what we think we deserve our link to our money story and our first memories around money.

It’s about connecting the dots. If we feel undeserving, we can be our own worst enemy and create roadblocks to improving our financial situation. By not relating our money story to our sense of worth today, we are sabotaging that relationship with money. Remember I said, it is the longest relationship we’ll ever have.

I want to share an example. I want to share a real-life story. I met with a client who had come from a divorced family. In the conversation of getting to know each other, we got to know the family history. Her father left when she was 10 and her mother raised her.

She grew up struggling financially, but also emotionally, there was a lot of baggage there that she shared with me that she felt abandoned. She doesn’t understand why her father has not continued to have a relationship with her and her brother. She is accomplished today. She went on to graduate from university with full scholarships.

She found the most amazing job, stable employment, and then she completed her master’s degree while working. And this is all debt-free the entire time while getting her post-secondary education – phenomenal. She earns over 150,000 a year plus bonuses. When I met her, she had credit card debt, no savings and was living paycheck to paycheck.

She was not in a good place and didn’t feel very good about herself. If she accumulated any amount of cash, she felt she had to get rid of it. It burned a hole in her pocket. She experienced an unsettling feeling. She told me with an almost urgent feeling that money shouldn’t be there. She needed to spend it.

She would shop and it would be gone immediately. Her scarcity mindset paired with her self-worth and self-love were causing her to release money because deep down she felt like she didn’t deserve it. And this came out after months and months of just chatting. I am not a therapist, but you would be amazed at what the walls in our boardroom hear.

Money is completely emotional and it’s like an onion. We just start peeling back the layers and truth bombs come up and light bulb moments. Once we went through her history, her money story, her memories, she connected her self-value in how she perceived herself worth.

So nowadays she can still spend and not feel restricted, but not until after she is taking care of all her savings buckets and retirement savings she needs to protect and love her future self. So there was some conversation around that you need to hold onto some of this money and put it in the right buckets because we need to love your future self as well. 

In the current state, she wasn’t loving her current self or her older self. So this is huge because retirement planning is about loving our future self and taking care of it.

We put her on a cash flow plan. It’s not hard, super easy to put everything into buckets where they need to be all the fixed expenses. Retirement planning becomes a fixed expense and then what is left is guilt-free, from a place of abundance with self-love in mind.

There’s no, you can’t buy that. No, you can’t have a latte. That drives me absolutely bonkers. I’ve said this and I will repeat it again and again, if I cannot have my lattes and specialty coffees someone’s gonna lose ahead and go bonkers. And so I have to be able to put my money where I want to.

But once you’ve taken care of all your buckets and your future self, and you filled those buckets with love and money, you can do whatever you want with that spending money after that. It’s about coming from a guilt-free place of abundance with self-love in mind. So I’ve shared my story numerous times and that relationship for me with money because of a marriage breakdown.

All it takes is a mini wake-up call. And I hope it’s not a devastating wake-up call like mine was, but maybe you just have that long nagging feeling of unease like this client had. She knew she had to do something. She got tired of not being happy about it. You have got to take control.

Taking back control is one of the keys and coming up with a plan with purpose, which is what we did with her. It helps. Do not ignore your money story because by doing so, it could be the number one thing, sabotaging your relationship with money. So let me repeat this because the number one thing sabotaging your relationship with money is ignoring your money story.

Our money attitudes are financial but mostly emotional about how our parents handled money. That has a large impact on how we deal with our own money today, whether we overspend or are in debt, or we agonize over our money decisions and save everything -penny-pinch coupons, doesn’t matter. We can trace it back to having either accepted our parents’ money, beliefs or having rejected their attitudes.

Either way, we reflect our history into our current money behaviors, the keys to know and recognize. That’s your financial story. Talk about it, honor it, then separate from it. If you have to choose to create your own if it’s not coming from a healthy place. So I’ll repeat that. The number one thing sabotaging your relationship with money is not relating your money story to your sense of worth today.

Your mission, if you so choose, look back, think back to your first money memories and connect the dots to how you handle and view money today – then honor it. If you need to rewrite your money story, that’s it. Let me know if you see a connection, at [email protected]. Until next week, take care.