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Money Isn't Scary: What Every Mom Needs to Know · That Mom

• Maria Woods: Mm-hmm. Today I'm featuring Megan Dwyer, a financial planning expert with 20 years of experience. She also hosts a podcast called Money Isn't Scary. If you have ever had big feelings about money, or maybe you thought money was scary, this is a conversation for you. Vegan, welcome. Thank you for being here. You're here to talk to us about money. I sure am. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to have you in all 20 of years of your financial planning experience to help walk through money issues specifically for women. How did you get started working with women in money? Yeah. So my experience goes ⁓ back 20 years, like we just said. So I started my career working in financial services industry. I worked for a big corporate firm. and I just wanted to get my feet wet, right? I wanted to understand. And I I remember starting that job and I didn't know anything. I didn't know what a stock or a bond was. And we were an investment portfolio management shop. And ⁓ I wanted to, I knew nothing, right? And I just wanted to be cu I wanted to learn more and I wanted to be curious. So through that, I decided to start taking financial planning courses. So I found what I really enjoyed about that was that it was something so universal. And I realized that at the age of what, 23, I I literally knew nothing. I we weren't taught this growing up, right? So ⁓ it was It that those courses helped me kind of go beyond just like the the standard like balancing a checkbook and like you know, paying attention to the spending. This really allowed me to kind of like dive deeper and truly understand like all the different aspects of our financial lives and how they all interact with each other, which I thought was really, really cool. So ⁓ between that, the what I was learning kind of on the side and then what I was doing day to day, I was starting to get to see clients and start to work with families and individuals and start to see a little bit more about how they interacted with money, how they thought about money, how they felt about money. I would be in conversations. I remember I was working there during, you know, 2007, 2008, right? During the financial crisis. And there was a lot of big emotions around money. Nobody knew what was going on then. And if especially if you were retired, you know, like this, that's a everything that you've worked so hard your entire life for. And now to see that money just drop is really significant. And so I was always really curious about those emotional ⁓ reactions and the way people felt felt and thought about money. And also kind of the ⁓ the interaction between couples and families when we'd be together to see how, you know, maybe one person would, typically the man, would step forward and have more of the conversation. And oftentimes the woman would be in the woman would be in the background. And I was always really interested and intrigued by that dynamic as well. So I did this work for I was at that company for 10 years and then I went, I got my CFP and I went to go work for a financial planning firm and I was there for several more years. And it was after I had my ki my kids. ⁓ my kids were pretty little, it was right around tw 2020. And again, we were starting to go through a little bit of a crisis in our in in the world, frankly, not just in our country. and I started to see these feelings pop up again, not just amongst clients, but amongst, you know, in my family and in my kind of small circle, right? ⁓ close to home. And I started again to think more about how universal these feelings are. And I wanted to talk more about it. So that's why I started my podcast, Money Isn't Scary, back in 2020. because I I there was multiple reasons for it. It was, it was, I wanted to get more curious about and understand more about the the clients and the dynamics and the things that I was seeing day to day, but also my own feelings, right? I had very little kids then. ⁓ they were three and one. And my husband had lost his job, just like so many people during that time. And here I was like. working from home, full-time job, trying to carry the weight of all of it, and not really knowing how to cope, especially because couldn't really go anywhere. so I think some of those coping strategies that I developed were online shopping. I was buying shoes and bags and things that I didn't need, right? Like a lot of us probably. but then I would start to see them in my closet, see them with tags still on them, because I wasn't really wearing them or using them. And ⁓ and I start to feel guilt and and some shame around it. And so that was really kind of my impetus for starting the podcast. I wanted to talk more about that and I wanted to explore that more within myself because I truly believe that what's personal is universal and and we're not alone, even though sometimes we might think we are. Yeah. And I think the name of the podcast, Money Isn't Scary, is such a great message. Although I'm not sure all our listeners would agree. Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. Because It's unfamiliar. Yeah. So and again, you know, this all this goes all the way back to we weren't taught this. Right. Unless you specifically decided to go the route of financial education on your own, which I did because I wanted to learn a lot. I wanted to learn more. Not everybody does that. Right. So unless you go that route specifically, we don't have a foundation in our country to for especially girls, right? To go out there into the world and have ⁓ A solid knowledge and understanding and confidence around money. So of course we're gonna do things like avoid or let somebody else handle it for us. And when we do that, that just makes it more we avoid, right? And we we create more space between us and the thing itself, the fear itself, and it just creates more, you know, stress and anxiety around it. But it doesn't have to be that way. And that's what I I I try to explore in the podcast. Yeah. And so with 20 years of your financial experience, why do you think? High performing, successful women are still missing about managing their money. I think there's a lot of things that we're doing wrong. and I mean that in this the most like sensitive, like kind way, right? ⁓ I think one of those things is we haven't adjusted our expectations, right? So I think we see a lot of high performing ⁓ type A, and I'm one of them, ⁓ women just constantly like driven to perform. And to succeed. And we might have been able to do that really well before we had kids because everything was controllable back then. ⁓ at least I'm speaking from my own experience, right? ⁓ it was controllable. It was easy. It was like I could I could work all day, I could go for a run right after work, I could make dinner, I could go to bed, I could do exactly what I needed to do. But then when kids came into the picture, ⁓ all of that got bl completely blown up, right? So I think When that happens, when our lives change and now we have different priorities and and different things ⁓ that constantly need our attention, ⁓ we need to adjust the expectations. So I think something that we are often doing is continuing to have those expectations of ourselves as being this high performing, we should be in control, we should be doing everything perfect all the time. And we get frustrated and ⁓ Frankly, I do this myself, mad at myself when I can't prov live up to those expectations. But ⁓ it's not us, it's society. Yeah. And how does that look like on a daily level for a mom? Kind of altering those expectations for themselves, do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think ⁓ for me anyway, ⁓ like I used to be somebody who would get up before the sun rose and I would go out for a run and I would ⁓ you know, make a smoothie in the morning and I would have everything organized and done the way that I wanted to. Right. And now with kids, it's like sometimes I'm tired and I don't want to get up. Right. Sometimes they kids might be up at ⁓ you know, in the middle of the night and I am not even available, right? Because I'm too tired or I need to catch up on sleep or I'm 'cause I didn't sleep for three hours in the middle of the night or whatever it is. And sometimes I don't have time to make that smoothie. And sometimes I don't have time to Check my accounts, right? And I'm talking, bringing the the the money piece into this right now. I think we just have to like allow ourselves a little bit of grace and allow ourselves to know that hey, it's not going to look perfect. Every day is not gonna look the same. And as long as we're starting to factor in some, some healthy habits, when I say healthy habits, I'm talking about money piece, but also life too. ⁓ as long as we're having some balance and giving ourselves a little bit of grace, and I'm gonna ⁓ Talk about this a lot probably during this conversation, self-compassion, that's a huge part of all this. ⁓ then that's okay. But we just I think the hardest part is giving ourselves that grace. Yeah. What's the what's what topic that surprised you that you shared on your podcast that resonated with the most women? Yeah. I think the what I'm gonna say is, the being alone in our thoughts sometimes. ⁓ a lot of times, so money is taboo on our society, right? And we don't talk about it. We certainly don't, ⁓ it's not something that like we often, especially as women, if we're out with our girlfriends, it's not something that we're gonna just like start talking about like, ⁓ I've got this money issue or I I we're not gonna talk about like Roth IRAs. We're not gonna be doing that. That's just not something that we talk about. And and it's all obviously there's a lot of ⁓ competition around money and there's a lot of like benchmarks and achievement when it comes to money that's that are all things that we ⁓ have absorbed and learned kind of through our culture and through growing up. what we don't do is share our experiences and our emotions around money. And I think we don't do that because there is so much shame tied up into it. And everybody has their own unique ⁓ stories, their own unique experiences with money, ⁓ how we interacted with money From how we grew up in our relationship with our parents and all of that, it's all so unique and individualized to us. And I also think that there's still so much shame around it, regardless of where you are on the wealth spectrum or or how much money you have in your bank account, right? ⁓ I think the most common thing is that that feeling of loneliness one way or the other, right? Because we don't talk about it, because we don't share these experiences. ⁓ and we don't share them because of fear, right? But when we start to normalize our experiences and we start to like actually describe, like, hey, I just ⁓ overdrafted my checking account last week. Oops, you know, if we start to share that, it'd like I'm a financial planner. One would think that I would be like perfect at all things money, right? No, I mess up all the time. The more that we start to talk about it, the more I think it helps take that ⁓ the weight off of our shoulders for so many women. Yeah, I think you're right too when You're talking about these cultural expectations. ⁓ and my background in terms of undergrad education is cultural anthropology, right? So we're taking in these cultural messages, and you're right, it's not typical to see women sitting around at lunch talking about their 401ks or talking about their latest investments, where that is a little bit more typical. For men to talk about how did they secure the mortgage or what's the interest rate, what's the bank they're using, where that it's a little more unusual. And I think that's because of these cultural expectations. It doesn't, it doesn't somehow seem like something women should be doing. Totally. And I it's as much as as much progress as women have made in society, I think we still have a long way to go. Like I feel hopeful and excited that that. ⁓ Especially for young girls that are starting to, you know, like high school kids and ⁓ go college kids and and young grads, like hopefully they're they have a different way of being going out into the world. ⁓ and that society is starting to shift a little bit in the expectations and in their personal expectations for themselves as well. But yeah, no, we still definitely live in a little bit of a finance bro culture. And I think that so many women as a result of that will take a step back because they're intimidated by it. Yeah. ⁓ from your experience, is there a call to action that women and moms need to take right now when it comes to their money? ⁓ just be informed. So I think ⁓ an easy first step, this is kind of low-hanging fruit, ⁓ just understand, know your numbers, right? Know what's going on. And what I mean by that is confidence comes from two different places. Right. Confidence comes from knowledge, which is again knowing your numbers, and I'll just explain that in just a second. And also from ⁓ being involved and ⁓ having a seat at the table, right? Being able to help make those decisions. So it's kind of knowledge and power, those two pieces. Knowledge ⁓ when I talk about knowledge around finances, it's I always encourage people to look at kind of two different things. One is ⁓ a net worth. So knowing what you own and what you owe, just having awareness of like what are those accounts, whether that's me or but that's my family unit, right? Whatever it is, what are those accounts that we have? What are my bank accounts? What investments do I have? Do I have a retirement accounts, a 401k, an IRA? Do I have property? What does that look like? ⁓ And then on the other side of the balance sheet here, we're looking at liabilities. If I own property, do I have a mortgage on it? What's the interest? How much is outstanding? What's the interest rate? ⁓ do I have student loans? Same. What is the interest rate? What's the amount outstanding? ⁓ auto debt. you know, it could be credit cards if there's credit cards. So knowledge is power here. ⁓ so understanding getting a have a good picture of what ⁓ what you have is really important. And then the other piece to all of this is cash flow. ⁓ it's really important to understand truly what's coming in and what's going out on a weekly and monthly basis. ⁓ how often are you paid? What is that gross pay relative to ⁓ net after tax pay, right? Am I contributing to a 401k? What's going into that? ⁓ and then what are those bills? And then truly being able to understand where all that's going. And also I will add one other piece to this too, knowing how unexpected bills are going to be paid for. Right. So if ⁓ the car breaks down, or if all of a sudden you've got like, I don't know, a hole in your roof or something like that. Having a plan for how that's going to be covered in the event that something you needed to or something happens, that's really important. So that I think is just something easy enough ⁓ that women can start to do to at least start to feel a little bit more empowered on a day-to-day basis. Now, a couple questions here. What if That feels scary. What if that feels like a lot? Yeah. Is my first question. ⁓ and then also, what if someone else is managing that for you, like your husband? Like, is that okay if you have different roles, you have your strengths, and maybe your husband's strength is in finances? Is that okay? ⁓ of course. Yeah. I would say there's multiple ways to skin a cat here. This doesn't have to be perfect. If it does feel scary and it feels overwhelming, take it in small pieces. Right, start to get curious. I truly think that even if you have somebody else handling the finances for you, that's great and that's amazing. That's one less thing that you have to that you have to do, but you do need to have some awareness around it. Because what if that what if something happened to that person? I see this all the time. I have clients who are widows, I have clients who whose husbands have passed away at the you know, out of nxpectedly. So I think that It's really important to ⁓ have some understanding and knowledge of at least of kind of like the the why and the how, so that we don't set ourselves up for stress and anxiety later on. So how that can be done in multiple different ways, right? I actually have had some ⁓ podcast episodes where I've had ⁓ guests on where we talk about how to approach finances with a spouse, how to approach finances with your parents, how to approach finances finances with your kids, like how to have some of these conversations. I think it's unique for every different family and every different individual. But I think asking to be involved, asking to not only have a say in some of the decisions, but just to be curious. Like, hey, ⁓ if you're gonna be handling the bills on Sunday, can I just jump in for twenty minutes and can you just explain to me like what we've got here and what's going on here? ⁓ I think again, just having that awareness is gonna be so huge for not only your anxiety now, but later on too. Yeah, it sounds Like your message is really about empowerment. Yeah. ⁓ and I think you're making decisions pretty blind if you just don't know. Yes. So maybe through this process, at least if you're spending or you're not spending, you have some context to the decisions that you're making. You're making them in a bigger picture versus just making them from a place of fear or a place of entitlement. Maybe you're you're making them from A little more grounded in reality, grounded in the numbers. Absolutely. And the zooming out is huge. Seeing the bigger picture is is the key here. ⁓ and being able to know that if anything did happen to that other person, that you would still be okay. Yeah. And help you align today's financial decisions that you're making, no matter how small they seem, with your future goals. That's right. That's a huge thing that I talk about. I talk a lot about values-based spending, and living in alignment with ⁓ What really matters to us. And I think for so many women, we don't pause or take the time to step like this is the way I describe it as like women and moms, especially. Like we're running on a treadmill all day, every day, from the second we wake up. It's just like constant needs everywhere, right? but we don't take the time to hop off that treadmill and think about what we really want, what really matters, who we are in the bigger picture of all of this, besides just this caretaker, besides this person just like providing and And making sure that everybody else is okay. So if we can pause and like take a minute and think a little bit about what matters to us, what's important to us, then we can start to take those at and action steps. And what I mean at by action steps is like using our money in in alignment with what matters. So an example of this, ⁓ say, you know, you love adventure, you love travel, you love to go places, but you haven't been anywhere in forever because you've got kids everywhere and you're just too busy, right? Well, what if you started to maybe what if you reali you ran the numbers and you realized, ⁓ okay, I don't maybe I don't need to be spending, you know, an extra whatever, twenty twenty bucks a week at Target or at Starbucks or something. Maybe I could put that into an account and I could start to save up for a trip to, I don't know, like Wherever excites you. Yeah. Whatever excites you, whatever's important. If, or if you have a goal or a dream or something that you've wanted to do, maybe we just start to be a little bit more intentional about making that happen. Because again, what I want to emphasize here is so many women put themselves last. And I think throughout all of this, we need to realize that we matter too. And we can use our money as a tool to help us get there. Yeah. That's an empowering message right there. Yeah. How about ⁓ a woman looking at her spending? Like if we're just talking about monthly spending, whether it's on a credit card or through a debit card and ⁓ balancing her checking account or looking at her checking account, there's income coming in, whether from her or from her spouse. ⁓ If how does someone start to work through that or make plans or even make sense of it? What is it, what does it mean? You know, you mentioned you kind of want to look at what's coming in and what's going out. Are there any tips or tools or methods that you recommend people start with? Just kind of starting at the beginning? Yeah, I there's software that you can use. There's apps, right? There's budgeting apps. YNAB is one you need a budget. used to be Mint, ⁓ I'm blinking on what it is now, but there's a few other ⁓ apps, and I can follow up with you on this, on on some of those other ones. But They might be subscription based, so you might need to pay a couple bucks a month or something to use them. But what they do is they help you be able to link your account. So you can link up your checking account, you can link up your credit card, wherever you do your spending from, and it helps to aggregate this data for you and summarize. So a lot of times you're gonna have to go in and categorize because it might not know necessarily. So a lot the softwares are usually pretty good and they help to like identify. But there might be some things like, okay, I Ven mod this person and it was actually for who knows, like something for my kids' school. so you might have to go in and categorize and clean it up a little bit, but it's great because it helps to see everything all in one place and you don't have to go like line by line through a physical statement or even like download the the Excel right from your credit card statement from up from like last year. So there's tools out there that can definitely help make the monarch, that's the other one I was thinking of, monarch is it monarch ⁓ money as an app that helps to aggregate all of this data and help make this an easier process. So all you have to do is log in. All you have to do is like actually look at it, which I know is the hardest part. Yeah. But it seems like that takes at least some of the calculations, some of the data collection information. That does a lot of heavy lifting and I think is a great starting place, especially for someone who feels like, ooh, I know I should do this, but where do I start? Where do I find the time? And maybe ⁓ it's not something they're super comfortable with. Yeah. And I would say too, like finding the time, like carve it out. Just like anything, right? Like we find time to go to the gym, maybe we might find time to go for a run. We might find time to like 30 minutes here and there. This doesn't have to be a big thing. You can start. Small. You can start by just downloading the app or creating a login, right? That's that that's accomplishment today. and then then maybe the next day you link your accounts or to follow the steps in the process, right? Or however it tells you to do it. So do it ch just give yourself a goal, like a a little bit of time, maybe a couple of days a week, to just look at it and then reward yourself afterwards. Go for a walk, go do something that if that ⁓ makes you feel good, go whatever, go drink a Diet Coke, whatever it is that like makes you positive reinforcement, feel good about what you're doing, that's huge. And we're starting new habits, just like anything. We have to ⁓ work our way up to it. I like that. It seems manageable to to start with downloading an app, creating a login. Step one. We can do that. Yes. Totally. ⁓ how about you? I wanna circle back to the emotional side that you started with and what really made you want to learn more about money was seeing these family dynamics or these internal emotions around money. and you also shared with me that your podcast is a little bit about your own personal experience as well as you navigate through ⁓ dealing with money. What are some of these big emotions that you think are coming up for some women around money? The biggest ones are ⁓ are fear and anxiety and shame for sure. Overwhelm Is another one. A lot of those are kind of tied into each other, but I think shame is really like the biggest one. ⁓ and so much of that shame comes from ⁓ not knowing, from or or feeling ⁓ like we should know, putting those expectations on ourselves once again. How could we possibly know if we never actually learned this, right? ⁓ but those are some of the big themes, and I've experienced all of that myself. I mean, I growing up, I didn't know anything about money. And then I got into the real world and I remember like n s trying to set up a 401k and not knowing what that even was or how much I should put into it or not really paying attention to what was coming in and what I was actually spending. And I definitely remember feeling that. And I think having worked in the financial services world at the time, it was it it kind of became a little bit more of a priority for me to understand because I had to do this like for other people as well. But But yeah, I I think what I try to talk about on the podcast is my own, my own big feelings around money and the dynamics that that I have had to deal with with having kids, with having a husband who's, you know, like been kind of in and out of work. I've been the breadwinner for years now. ⁓ that's a lot of feelings around that, especially when you grew I talk about this sometimes, how I grew up, ⁓ Watching like probably a lot of people watching all these Disney movies, right? And thinking that there was my favorite was The Little Mermaid, thinking that all of a sudden there was going to be this like prince who was gonna sweep me off my feet and make all my problems go away, and that I was never gonna have to worry about money or anything. Someone was just gonna take care of me. And I think ⁓ it took me some time to come to the realization that that's not the case and and to not be disappointed by that. ⁓ That was a hard one for me. And I think that was a kind of a universal one that a lot of people can resonate with too. Yeah. And even though we're talking about this Disney movie, I think a lot of listeners might say, ⁓ yeah, I've kind of thought that too. Or this is an underlying expectation that I've had. Maybe they've never said it out loud or they've heard someone articulate it the way that you did. and then you also mentioned ⁓ Shame and I think you started saying maybe you'd make some online purchases and then you'd see them later and feel shameful. I mean, I think I can identify with that too, where you've you're spending money and then you're like, ooh, should I have done that? ⁓ was that the right choice? How does someone work through that? Is Knowledge also the answer to shame? Well, I think knowledge is part of it. I don't think it's truly the answer. I think we need to work through there's everything goes deeper, right? So the actions that we can take are starting to understand, okay, is this purchase really make or break the budget this month, right? Like so knowing that one way or the other ⁓ is important. And it helps, I think, us if we're going out. You know, we're shopping and we're like, ⁓ okay, yeah, I do want to buy those sneakers for myself because I actually need those sneakers because I like to go running and I I need a new pair. Like that helps with the the feeling confident about our dis our financial decisions. But shame comes from deeper than that. So I think we also need to within ourselves start to peel back more of those layers and understand where that shame is coming from. And for everybody it's so different. It's so unique. And ⁓ I talk about my stories. I talk about how ⁓ growing up I was never really like I was the little I was the the little sister, right? I was the one that was never really like seen as capable, I guess. I was always just like the little girl over there, just like the silly one in the corner that's just she'll figure it out someday. But ⁓ I was I don't think I was really taken seriously in the my family dynamics. And it's so interesting how that has come into play in my adult life and how I therefore didn't really take myself seriously because of all these kind of inherited beliefs. So I think there's some ⁓ I've done my own kind of therapy work on it and I'm still kind of working through it. But I think if we can start to peel back those layers and understand where those beliefs that we're still carrying are coming from, at least at a high level, it starts to make more sense. Yeah. I mean, even the beliefs that someone else is gonna come take care of it also has within it the belief that Women or girls don't need to worry about money or don't need to know much about it if someone's sweeping in to take care of it. Yeah. So that I think is a big one. ⁓ and then also beliefs about capability. Money is about numbers, is about math. And I think there's some stereotypes around women in math. Of course, women can be great mathematicians, but there's quite a few women that might also feel like numbers are a bit overwhelming to them. So maybe that's, you know, part of it that people are carrying. Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, don't forget the family dynamics too. Yeah. There's so many messages that we received as little kids that we may not even realize that we're still holding on to. Yeah. I can imagine just conversations in the 80s and the 90s where people are saying, ⁓ we can't afford that or that's not worth it. And probably these worth conversations and these afford conversations also ⁓ makes you think about. Later in life, like what can you afford? Or how is that messaging being internalized by that young child, but still being carried into adulthood? Absolutely. And it's so much of it is subconscious. And we don't know until we're there, right? So I think one of the big messages that I also try to encourage women is lean into the triggers, right? So if something does make you feel icky or like give you that pit in your stomach or something. Ask yourself, even though it's the hardest thing in the world, all we want to do is find some coping strategy and kind of disassociate and avoid, right? All we want to do is go away. But lean into that. What is it about that that's making you feel this way and why? Right. Just get curious. That's the hardest part, I think. Yeah. ⁓ and I wanted to ask you, since you're about empowerment, what changes when a woman decides to take control of her finances? ⁓ my gosh, so much. The confidence thing I think is huge. Like I said, being able to go out into the world and ⁓ know like I can go shopping, I can go like out with my friends, I can do all this without like live my life, right? I can plan a trip, I can do anything like without feeling not only like a without without feeling this anxiety, like knowing, okay, that's gonna come from the travel budget that I've already saved for. and I'm gonna feel really proud about doing this. I feel like we just start to like live into ourselves, like we start to be more present, we start to feel more ⁓ aligned with like living our lives, right? Because and doing the things that we actually want to do because those things are now ⁓ thoughtfully planned out and we have more awareness of of what they are and why. It feels like in that example someone can confidently say yes and enjoy the spending. Or confidently say no that this isn't a priority for them based on their knowledge of the situation and based on their priorities. Yeah. So either way, it seems like a win. Yeah. Even, you know, regardless if the decision is to spend or to save. Totally. Like how many times have we gone out with friends? Like, say it was we got invited to go to some like dinner, and we're just like we even though we love the people that we want to be with, we just don't really want to go. And maybe that's because. it money is tight right now or maybe it's because ⁓ you already went out to dinner or whatever it is for you like if it doesn't feel authentic then let's figure out why right and that and having that knowledge of why and what's really going on here is is huge. Yeah. And I think that really plays into living a more intentional life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Megan, will you tell everyone where they can find you if they want to listen to your podcast or reach out to learn more about your work. Yeah. So ⁓ the podcast is called Money Isn't Scary. you can listen you can find that anywhere you get your podcasts. ⁓ I also ⁓ you can check out the website, Money Isn't Scary. I do some money coaching work where I do some one on one work with women to try to again do this work to go back and do understand where some of those beliefs are coming from and how they play into ⁓ where we are today and then and then from there kind of How can we take action to be to get to where we want to be? So ⁓ yeah, check out the website, check out the podcast, ⁓ and up on Instagram as well. So feel free to reach out. Great. And we'll link everything for everyone to find in the show notes. Is there any final words ⁓ for women and for moms that you have? Yeah. So I I one thing I want to just emphasize here is ⁓ if you're not there. Right. If you still feel like money is scary and intimidating and sc and overwhelming for you, that's okay. It's okay. It makes sense. Just be kind to yourself. One of my favorite episodes of my podcast that I've ever done ⁓ was with ⁓ Dr. Kristen Neff, who's the pioneer in self-compassion research. And we talked about self-compassion, and I've brought that into so much of the the work that I've done since. Women are so good at ⁓ I think providing compassion for other people, but we're not so good at Providing it for ourselves. So let's try to just be kind to ourselves, understand that there's a reason where for where we're at, and take it from there. Like take this slow and simple, and every little step is progress. That's great advice. Thank you so much, Megan. Yeah, thank you for having me. This has been great. This is Maria, and you've been listening to That Mom. Thank you for being here. If this episode resonated, share it with a mom who needs it too. And if you're ready for more, your next episode is waiting. Because every conversation here is meant to empower you to live better.