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Transcript

The Saver's Trap · After the Rush Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: There is a jar in my kitchen,
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: on the shelf above the coffee maker, and inside it are coffee beans I am saving.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I do not know what I am saving them for.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: They are good beans.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Someone gave them to me.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: A small bag.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: The kind of thing you buy when you want to give a person a treat that is
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: a little nicer than what they would buy for themselves.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I looked at them, and I thought, I will save these for a special morning.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then I put them on the shelf.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: That was four months ago.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: I have walked past that jar maybe 400 times since.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Every morning I reach past the good beans for the ordinary ones.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: The big bag from the grocery store.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because this is a Thursday.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: It is just a Thursday.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the good beans are for something better than a Thursday.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: The beans are going stale on the shelf.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: I know they are.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Coffee does not improve with waiting.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: And still,
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: I cannot quite bring myself to grind them,
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: because the special morning has not arrived.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: And as long as the beans are in the jar, the special morning is still coming.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: This episode is about that jar.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Not the coffee, the habit.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: The one that takes the thing you saved and quietly turns the saving into the point.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Until you have a shelf full of good beans and a lifetime of ordinary Thursdays.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you cannot remember when the two were supposed to meet.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to After the Rush.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Catherine McDowell.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: If this is the first time you have found this show, you can start right here.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: You have not missed anything you need.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is a place where I think out loud about the chapter of life that comes after
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: the big rush is over.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: The years of building and raising and earning.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: And what it actually takes to design what comes next instead of just drifting into it.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Today we are talking about saving and the strange thing that happens to good savers
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: when the saving is supposed to stop.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: I want to say at the front that I am not a licensed financial planner,
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: and nothing in this episode is financial advice.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: What I offer is the perspective of someone who has lived the financial conversation
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: at every level,
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: from not having enough to eat to managing budgets in the millions,
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: and who understands that money is never only about money.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Keep that in your pocket for the next 20 minutes.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: We are going to talk about dollars, but the dollars are not really the subject.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Here is where I come from, briefly, because it matters for what I am about to say.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: I was a teenage mother with no home and no cushion.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: I learned to save the way you learn to swim when someone drops you in the water.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: There was a rule I made for myself, and I have repeated it so many times it has worn smooth.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: If I could not buy a thing with cash that day,
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: I could not have afforded it, plus interest later.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: So, I did not buy the debt.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: I went without.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: I saved what I could, which was almost nothing.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I protected that almost nothing.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like it was the last warm thing in a cold house.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: That discipline built everything I have.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be clear about that.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: I am not standing here about to tell you that saving was a mistake.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Saving saved me.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: It put me through college.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: It funded a nonprofit.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: It bought me, eventually, options I could not have dreamed of when I was 20.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: But a discipline that saves your life in one chapter can quietly run your life in the next one.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: And nobody hands you the new instructions when the chapter turns.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Let me describe the trap because it is more specific than people think.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: The saver's trap is not about being cheap.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Cheap people enjoy not spending.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: That is a different animal, and frankly, a simpler one.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: The saver's trap catches the people who are genuinely good with money.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: The careful ones.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: The ones who did everything right.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: You spend 30 or 40 years training a single muscle.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: The muscle that says, not yet, not this, save it.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: The muscle that delays,
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: that protects,
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: that looks at a want and runs it through a filter and usually says no.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: And you get good at it.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: You get so good at it that it stops feeling like a choice.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: It becomes who you are.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: The careful one.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: The responsible one.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: The one who will be fine.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because you planned.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then one day the math changes.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: The mortgage is paid.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Or nearly.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: The kids are grown.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: The accounts are, against all the odds you faced at the start, actually enough.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: The whole point of all that saving has finally arrived.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: And you cannot spend it.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Not because you are anxious about a number on a statement, although that is part of it.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot spend it because the not yet muscle is the only muscle you trained.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the muscle that would let you enjoy what you built,
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: the muscle of receiving,
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: of permission, of this is what it was for, was never developed at all.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: It is weak from disuse.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: You reach for it, and it is not there.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: I have watched this happen to people who have far more than they will ever need.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: I have watched a man in his 70s,
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: a man who could comfortably buy almost anything within reason,
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: agonize over a restaurant bill the way I once agonized over whether I could afford
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: the bus.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: The number on his bank statement said one thing, the muscle said another, and the muscle won.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because the muscle always wins when it is the only one you have got.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: I want to talk about my husband for a minute,
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: because he is 10 years ahead of me in this chapter,
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: and I have a front row seat to it that I did not look for and would not trade.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: He is a good saver, better than I am in some ways, more even-tempered about it, less haunted.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: And when he stopped working, I watched something happen that I did not expect.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: The saving did not stop.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: The reason for it did.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: But the saving did not.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: He kept reaching past the good beans.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: We had a conversation, more than one, that went something like, what are we waiting for?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: Not in anger, in real curiosity.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: What specifically is the morning we are saving for?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because if it is a someday with no date on it, then someday is just a polite word for never.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: And we are going to leave this life with a shelf full of good beans and
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: a cellar full of ordinary Thursdays.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: That conversation was uncomfortable.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be honest about that.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: It is uncomfortable to look at a lifelong virtue and ask whether it has curdled
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: into something else.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody wants to hear that the very thing that saved them might,
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: past a certain point, be the thing keeping them small.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: But the gap between the life you planned and the life you are actually living is
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: where the real work is.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And for the good saver, that gap is often exactly this.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now here is the turn, and it is the part I most want you to hear.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because the easy version of this episode is the wrong one.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: The easy version says, you saved enough.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now go spend it.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Treat yourself.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: You earned it.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: That is the bucket list version.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: The one that shows up in the brochures with the sailboat and
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: the silver-haired couple toasting at sunset.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it is not wrong exactly.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: But it is shallow,
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: and it does not actually help because it is just the same muscle flipped over.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: It says, stop saying no, start saying yes to everything.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: It treats spending as the cure when spending is not the cure.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: The cure is not learning to spend.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: The cure is learning to decide.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because the saver's trap was never really about money.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: It was about handing the decision to a habit so you did not have to make it.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Not yet was easy.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Not yet meant you never had to look at the actual question,
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: which is, what is this money for and what is this life for?
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: And have I been so busy protecting the answer that I forgot to ask it?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: That is not a reinvention.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be careful with that word.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because the world is full of people who will tell you
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: that this chapter is your chance to become someone new,
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: to tear it all down and rebuild,
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: to reinvent yourself at 65 into some better, freer version.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: I do not believe that.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: You are not unfinished.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: You do not need to become someone else.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: You need to take the person you already are.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: The careful one.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: The one who built all of this through 40 years of disciplined know and put
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: that same care to a different use.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: The discipline that knew how to save is the exact discipline that knows how to choose.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: It is the same muscle.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: You are just pointing it somewhere new.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Design, not reinvention.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: The saver does not need to become a spender.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: The saver needs to become a decider.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Those are not the same thing, and the difference is the whole episode.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: So here is where I will leave you, and it is small, because the small thing is the real thing.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Go and find your jar.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone has one.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: The good beans,
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: The nice bottle you are saving,
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: the cashmere still in the tissue paper,
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: the trip that is always next year,
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: the china your mother gave you that has never once held a meal.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know exactly what yours is.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: You thought of it three minutes ago, and you have been pretending you did not.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Tonight,
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: take it down off the shelf,
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: not because you have earned it, not as a reward, not as a treat.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Take it down because a Thursday is not a lesser morning.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: A Thursday is the morning you actually have.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Grind the good beans.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Let the steam come up off a cup of coffee.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: That is a little nicer than it needed to be on an ordinary day for no reason
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: at all except that the day is here and you are in it.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: The special morning was never coming.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: This is it.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: It was always going to be a Thursday.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: That is the show.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: If something in it landed,
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: the kindest thing you can do is send it to one person who needs
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: to take something down off a shelf.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: You can subscribe wherever you are listening and you can find the written companion
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: to this episode,
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: along with the workbooks and guides I have built for exactly this chapter over
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: at aftertherush.store.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: I will see you next time.