Latest / Marci talks money (and life) / Financial Therapy: Breaking Free from Debt and Money Stress with Dr. Erika Rasure
Transcript
- Marci (00:16) Hello, I am MoneyMarci. Welcome. I am thrilled to welcome today's guest, Dr. Erika Rasure. Erika is a former financial advisor and university professor, turned financial therapist, who has helped thousands of people approach their finances in more intentional, healthy ways. She serves as Chief Financial Wellness Advisor at Beyond Finance, where she meets weekly with hundreds of clients working their way out of debt and towards financial freedom. In addition to her work at Beyond Finance, Erika serves as chair of the research board for the Financial Therapy Clinical Institute. She is a member of the Financial Review Boards for Investopedia, The Balance, Very Well Family, and Very Well Parents. Her insight and interviews have been featured in prestigious national outlets such as Barron's, CNN, Forbes, Fox Business, Market Watch, NBC News Now, USA Today, and Yahoo. Erika holds a doctorate in Personal Financial Planning from Kansas State University and is a certified Deep Transformational Coach an accreditation that surrounds changing patterns in actions and behaviors. She addresses holistic wellness in her treatment, incorporating the practice of yoga (she's also a registered yoga teacher) into her comprehensive approach to financial therapy. Welcome, Erika. Dr. Erika Rasure (01:49) Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the time. This is gonna be a fun fun chat, I'm sure. Marci (01:55) You've done a lot of things. so tell me, how did you get here into all these aspects? Dr. Erika Rasure (02:01) Yeah, so it's kind of a long story, but I'll give you the short version. One of the things that got me into this train of thought, this career path of mine, is my dad died when I was thirteen. He had multiple sclerosis and you know, kind of growing up in a household where you knew that your parent was going to die eventually, and then going through all of that, for me it was very much I want to be able to help people with end of life transitions or end of life planning, help making sure that families are taken care of when it comes to their money. Both of my parents were insurance agents. My dad had spent some time in the military. And because he had, you know, had his military experience, family did have some financial advantages while, you know, he was sick, the care was really good. but you know, things like life insurance and things like that, those were limited by his illness from a guaranteed insurability standpoint. So I was like, you know, when I when I grow up, I wanna I want to help people kind of plan for all of these aspects. Well, it turns out I decided to go to get my undergraduate degree. I was pre-law and decided at some point, you know, I don't love the law as much as I love people. So for me that required a pivot saying, you know, I'm not gonna go to law school, but I want to find a graduate program that still helps me meet my means to an end where I can help people with their money and that's where I found consumer economics at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, Mizzou ⁓ I Z for anybody listening. And after that, you know, I went on to pursue my PhD at K-State in personal financial planning. And that trajectory for me, you know, this is something I've been doing now for 21 years is helping people with their money. And it has been such an honor and such a gift to be able to have that trust, granted to me, if you will, by all the people I've worked with. To help me to help them work through their emotional relationship with their money. Marci (03:53) So you get into tree pose and then talk about, money doesn't grow on trees? Dr. Erika Rasure (03:59) That is so great. But you know, speaking of tree pose, you I think there's a certain strength in tree pose anyway, and in the sense that it does make us feel strong, it makes us feel anchored and rooted. And that is one of those things I think that is and of course balance is a perspective there we could add. But I think, those are the types of things I really do focus on when it comes to money is making sure that you feel grounded, you feel rooted, you feel centered in your practice, in your relationship with your money. Marci (04:27) And it makes sense because when people have trouble with finances, they get stressed out and working out, doing yoga, doing, any kind of physical activity, but yoga certainly with its focus and stuff and being very accessible no matter your age and your physical situation, can help manage that stress and help you clear your head to be able to move forward and hopefully find better resolutions. Dr. Erika Rasure (04:53) Absolutely. And when we think about you know, the mindful movement and connection to breath that the yoga offers. And yoga is so much more than just the movements itself. It's the breathing, it's the way we live our lives, you know, the yamas and the niyamas. There's all these beautiful limbs of yoga. it's a wonderful philosophy to integrate. But especially when it comes to money, yoga or from a non-yoga perspective, it depends on what you like in your life. But understanding your financial nervous system and being able to identify your survival mode patterns and understanding what your stress signals are, that's so important and necessary and foundational in helping you be able to clear your mind to center your body so you can make decisions from a place of centeredness, from a place of calm, from a place of peace. Because as we know, when you make decisions and you are emotionally dysregulated and you don't know which way is up and which way is down, and you feel like you are all over the place, whatever decision you often make after that is often not the right one. Marci (05:55) That is for sure. And the deep transformational coach, you use that with your money therapies as well. Dr. Erika Rasure (06:05) Yeah, yeah. I'm very I draw from so many different, you know, traditions and practices and all of those things and in my work with money with people. You know, I'm very much a person that believes that working with your money and your experience with your money as a whole body initiative. It's not something we just get to separate as an, you know, money is a math problem over here. Money is all encompassing. And that's what you know financial wellness truly is in the sense of it's not only understanding, you know, being somewhat financial literate with money, knowing what to do or at least who to ask for help if you feel like you need to shore up an area. But it's also being able to get into that space where you can feel the joy of your money, where you can feel what it means for it to work for you and to be in alignment with all of that. And where my transformational coaching comes in is I really seek to help people move from that space from doing to being. You've got to be before you do. And when you're trying to make these beautiful changes in your life, it's you know anybody who's been through a transformation process or a growth process knows that it is not glitter and rainbows most of the time. It can be right, it's very painful sometimes. And I have a big big thing with butterflies and I used to love the butterfly analogy a ton. I use it all the time. You can probably see my butterfly wings back over here. But that's really you know when I think of the transformation process, I think of you know what it means to be that caterpillar who enters that cocoon and that cocoon is all of those things you shore yourself up with, all the structures, all the simplification, all the streamlining you do that way as you are transforming from you know one identity to another, you have time to cook in there. You have time to really lean into the changes the shift in identity the shift in being is underway and if you come out of that cocoon too early you're not going to be a butterfly and you're not going to be a caterpillar either you're going to be primordial goo. And I want I want to be I want to make sure people get through whole transformation they don't leave that spot too early because that growth is different. That growth can be painful and it takes time and patience, but at the end it's worth it because you're still who you are at the core. You're still that caterpillar, right? But you've taken a different shape. Your DNA has is remained the same, but you are able to do so many more beautiful, amazing things like fly around, you know. Marci (08:31) Right, right. Well and because we all go into that cocoon in different places, personal money story, that history, what we saw growing up, what we learned from it. And of course our perspective of it is not the same as our parents' perspective because they didn't sit down and explain to us, well, we're doing this because XYZ. They may have told us some of it, they may have told us none of it, and then we've got to witness it, interpret it, it now becomes part of our story and becomes part of of those decisions that we make moving forward. So how do you help people understand that and be able to move forward with that baggage and those habits that are ingrained? Dr. Erika Rasure (09:13) Absolutely. You know, that is such an important part of this process too, because that, you know, really comes down to this important examination of all of those things that make us who we are when it comes to our money. And something so fascinating about that piece and our money stories and our history and our experience. It's the accumulation of other people's experiences that ultimately give us ours. And you know, there's some research out there that says by the time you're nine years old, nine years old, you've already gotten a really good foundation of, you know, what your money values are, your beliefs, what you feel think to be true about money happens by the time you're nine. You know, they say kids are sponges, but they're not, they're not joking, right? It's all of these things. And so helping people identify what their inherited beliefs are, their emotional patterns, and what those money triggers that shape their financial behavior today really comes with that understanding that hey, these are emotional patterns that have been inherited by our family, by our culture and our society, rather than actively making conscious and rational choices with, you know, our own autonomous beings as as adults. And where we start to examine that, that's where we start to... I call it the great unlearning is what I often refer to it. It's where we stop being run by our old money story and we're able to write a new one. Because and I love what you said. Our you know parents, their money beliefs, their patterns, their values were shaped not only by their experiences, but the experience of those who came before them. And so we have to be consciously aware, and this and this doesn't mean that we hate our parents or we wish our parents could have done better, you know, we blame them for everything that's gone wrong in our money lives. That's not that's not what we're about here, but what we are about is understanding our parents' experience and the experience of those who came before them in allowing that space to show that, hey, they did the best they can with what they knew at the time. And that's what they were able to share with me in their capacity. And you can take those things, you can take those learnings, you can take the learnings you like, the ones you want to keep, those values, those beliefs that you feel are solid, that serve you well, but you also have the autonomy to say, this one doesn't work for me so well because my experience has been different. I encountered something they never encountered, and so their advice or guidance or value or their judgment cannot be applied here because it's not apples for apples. Marci (12:33) People may have grown up in debt and seeing their parents struggle or they may have not had any issues with that growing up and somehow along the way they got a credit card and they got happy with the things a credit card could do for them and found themselves getting behind. How do you help them break that cycle? Dr. Erika Rasure (12:56) I always like to start this conversation with people as really identifying being in debt as a financial condition. It is a state of temporary time lock. Debt is not something you are, it's something you have. That is something you have, it is not who you are. And this is something I repeat ad nauseum because with debt comes so much shame. For the majority of people I've ever worked with, the financial condition of being in debt feels absolutely emotionally terrible to people. It's not only a financial weight, but it's also an emotional and psychological weight on somebody's, entire being. And the reason that is, the being in debt in general is very much looked upon as not being good. We have a lot of financial advice out there, right? And there's the spectrum of good and there's the spectrum of not so good. And over here we have, you know, you've got three to six months in an emergency savings. You've got, you know, at least ten percent of your income. All these, you know, rules of thumb that are the good things. But if you are in debt, you are automatically just kind of placed over here. Now are there some good debts and bad debts and how we separate that? Yes, for the most part. But if you're in consumer or credit card debt, that's generally considered the bad kind of debt. And that takes an emotional toll on people. And not only does it take an emotional toll on people, a lot of the times what I see it's less of the interestingly enough, in my 21 years of doing this, it's less of the I got a credit card and I just didn't know how to use it. Sometimes it's that case. But when people find themselves in a lot of debt, it's usually, at least from my observations, precipitated by some sort of major life event. So it's losing a job or, you know, a loss of a partner due to death or divorce in some way. The loss of your health. It's being scammed, whether that's a romance scam or an investment scam or an employment scam. There's all kinds of scams out there as we know. And they're only getting more sophisticated as time goes on. So there's all of these things that often create the perfect storm, perfect conditions for people to, you know I worked with one client who was, you know, recovering from breast cancer and during her treatment she was putting a lot of food, a lot of house cleaning, a lot of other, you know, things to help her survive because all of her money was going on and towards treatment and she fortunately survived her breast cancer battle, but she was left with this tremendous amount of debt just to stay alive. And so there's the there's two things here. There's that debt that's kind of left in the ruin or the wake of whatever you experience, but there's also the guilt, the heartbreak, the recovery that comes with the life condition that brought you to the financial condition of debt. And those two things together, they have to be healed in tandem. Marci (15:47) That's an important thing to consider, is that sometimes there's multiple things going on that you have to, you have to work on all of them at once, that they're related. Dr. Erika Rasure (15:59) Yeah, they are. And often you just can't separate the two. There's a lot of of guilt, you know, and I think that the distinction between guilt and shame is always important to make. You know, feeling guilty over something is like, okay, I made a financial mistake that maybe was out of alignment with my values and maybe isn't really who I want to be or who I want to show up as for myself. And so I regret that. I feel bad about that. But the shame part is 'I am bad'. 'Because I made this decision, I am a bad person'. And I want to emphasize to everybody, you know, when it comes to debt, you're certainly not alone at all. And that's something really important to remember. But we all at the end of the day, we do the best we can with what we've got. You know, like as I was talking about our parents, right? We do the best we can with the information we have at the time we've got it. And are we always going to make the right, most perfect decision? No, we're not. And especially when the conditions include, you know, life circumstances like a job loss or a a cancer scare or or any of those things that really rock your identity. And that's again going back to the transformation piece, the identity piece here is something huge. You know, we all hold so many different identities. We wear a lot of different masks, don't we? Yeah. Yeah. And so as you're, maybe, undergoing a a major, health crisis or health battle, Marci (17:17) yeah. Dr. Erika Rasure (17:25) that identity you held as a a healthy, strong person, that gets shattered or cracked, depending on the severity of it. The money situation related to that also gets rumbled. And you see this breakdown of your identity all around you. And that's where that stress and that anxiety and that uncertainty and the questioning of who am I and what am I even doing here. That really starts to emerge. Marci (17:57) Right. So then you have not only the condition that caused you to get into this debt, but then you've got this is now hitting into your mental health, which you then have to work at this from from all the different areas. Dr. Erika Rasure (18:13) Yeah. You do. And it's, (sigh) if I let out this big sigh because I see this it gets reduced so often to it just being a a money math problem. Like, okay. Well, at the end of the day it's just no dollars in and dollars out and you know, it doesn't matter what happened over here, now you're over here, so now you have to deal with, you know, getting out of debt. Well, it's not that simple. It is money intersects with every dimension of our life, whether we like it or not. It's there. It affects our relationship with ourselves. It affects our relationship with other people. It influences how we show up to work. It influences how we show up for our families, our children, how we show up for ourselves, you know, spiritually, physically. If you are feeling a tremendous amount of stress related to your money you often find yourself in what I call the tunnel vision. You get very myopic because you aren't able to see all of the other things that are happening around you because you are so focused on the emotional, mental, psychological weight of what that financial stress actually means for you in your life. And so you start neglecting all of those other things. You start neglecting your health. You start neglecting your relationship with yourself, with other people. And you lose yourself in this tunnel a little bit. And so many people, the further they get down the tunnel, the worse they feel. It's like it kinda just the shame sucks you down that tunnel a little bit more. And how do you get out of Marci (19:45) Well I think this is a perfect time to bring up loud budgeting. I'm a big fan of loud budgeting so I was I was glad to see it as one of your talking points that you like because we don't talk about it often enough. Dr. Erika Rasure (19:58) No. We don't. And I love loud budgeting for so many reasons. And you know, one of the things you hear me say and you or just heard me say is you know, you're not alone in this. Everybody has a money struggle. Everybody's got things with money. And if they don't they're lying to you, you know Marci (20:16) Can you explain to my listeners what loud budgeting is? Dr. Erika Rasure (20:20) Yeah, so loud budgeting is this concept of where we actually talk about our money with each other. That we show up for each other in this spot where you are no longer afraid or ashamed or fearful that if you talk about money that you are going to be made to feel, you know, like an outcast, if you will. Loud budgeting is I think the gateway to an entire movement of a generation of people, maybe across generations, but that are comfortable with talking about their money, that are comfortable making their progress around money, that are comfortable saying, you know what, I am really focused on my budget right now. And no, I don't want to go out, you know, on this girls trip, this brunch where I'm gonna spend a hundred dollars if it means that I'm not going to meet my savings goal for this week. But also talking about instead of making an excuse and being like I'm sick, I can't go to brunch. It's actually telling your girlfriends, like, hey, this is what I'm doing. And what I love about this concept of loud budgeting is it gets people to talk about loud budgeting in the most important groups in our lives, which is our peer groups, it's our family groups, it is the support structure of our daily lives in our relationships. And when you are able to to take that conversation around money and bring it to the people you love and you care about, that's where the aloneness starts to go away and that strength and community and conversation around money starts to build. And I really do hope that people consider loud budgeting as a way for themselves to not only publicly say, you know, this is what I'm doing and I'm proud of what I'm doing. It's okay to be proud and talk about money, but it's also a way for people to bring other people into that fold and say, Hey, we can do this together, we can bounce ideas off of each other and we don't have to harbor that shame or that taboo that exists around talking about money any longer. Marci (22:21) Right, because sometimes it's not even intended as peer pressure, but everyone is going to this concert and it's like, you know what? A hundred dollar concert tickets or more just isn't in my budget this month. You know what? I'd love to meet you guys for dinner before or get together afterwards, but you know, the concert isn't my thing right now. Dr. Erika Rasure (22:44) Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Marci (22:49) Do you see a lot of financial differences, age, gender, in the work you do with your clients? Dr. Erika Rasure (22:57) Yeah, I do. You know, I'd be remiss if I said I didn't, but I do. What I often see, especially when it comes to women, is that women are just so great at running the household expenses. They are they're on it, they know where the dollars and cents are going, they run whole households. Just like, you know these CEOs, you know, it's incredible, which is wonderful. Where I see that kind of diverge though is in the confidence of women when it comes to things like investing or really being like, okay, I want to do something different with my money. Who do I go to ask for that? Because I'm afraid of being treated differently. I'm afraid that my opinions will be dismissed. I'm afraid of not knowing what I think I should know at this point. And so there's I see quite a bit of that, you know, across genders is the okay, like I'm really good at doing the day to day stuff, but when it comes to this other stuff financially, I don't feel as confident. And so much of my work is also dedicated to making sure that the women feel supported in what they do. There's so much pressure, just in general, to feel like you need to know more than what you do about pretty much any topic. But when it comes to money especially, there's this pressure there that you know, you shouldn't be able to and whether it's right or wrong or whether it's true or not, it's something I've seen. Is there's almost this hesitation because I don't know enough about investing that I'm just not going to ask about it. I'm not gonna ask for help because I feel like I should know more about it. And so it kinda becomes this self fulfilling prophecy of I can't build my confidence because I'm not confident enough to ask somebody about it, but I'm also I don't feel confident in my skills and so it becomes this vicious cycle. Marci (24:43) What about with age related also or just really the gender? Dr. Erika Rasure (24:47) Yeah, so, you know, different generations they have, different priorities, different life experiences and, things that make them who they are. You know, our older generations, our boomer generation, they still very much value, doing I would say doing things the right way. and I don't mean it like in a disparaging way, but it's very methodical. Like you do this, you do this, you do this. They're very step heavy in what they what they like to do, which I love because it gets very type A energy and it's a formula, right? ⁓ and then in our younger generations, you know, whether that's Gen X to a degree or even, you know, our millennials or our Generation Z, there has been that shift to where we are a little bit more flexible in the way we experience our money. So there is a little bit more emphasis with the younger generations on, you know, having a little bit more experience to round out our lives rather than just saving our money for retirement. We want to have those experiences now where we're still young enough to enjoy it. So that shows up quite a bit. Marci (25:53) Okay. And is that something you have to kind of maybe tweak from both sides? You guys need to relax a little and you guys need to think about the retirement a little. Dr. Erika Rasure (26:03) I you know, I I do like point that out. It's like, you know, we're just not promised the gift of tomorrow. We're just not. And that's something I do like to with everybody. You know, there you could and I always think of my I had this wonderful, wonderful, wonderful English teacher growing up and her name was Mrs. Hogan and you know, she retired and it wasn't very long after she retired that she died. And that really stuck with me 'cause I mean she was young. I mean she probably what mid fifties, like maybe early sixties. I mean, it was probably very it was very young. And I just remember thinking that is so tragic, you know, that you work your whole life and especially as a teacher, and you don't get to enjoy the fruits of of your labor in retirement. And so I want people who are, you know, saving for retirement to also look at, you know, what they can do today to balance that out. We're going back to Tree Pose here. We want the balance, right? We want that very full experience of life. But we also can't just, you know, not save some money either. Because you could end up living a very, very long time. And since we don't know that factor out there, I think creating any sort of financial plan where you can do both is a really impactful thing. Marci (27:24) So are you still a financial advisor now or you're more of the coach and the therapy side of things? Dr. Erika Rasure (27:31) I'm very much on the coach and therapy side of things. I don't deal with people's money directly any longer. Marci (27:37) Okay, so are you able to see how your clients end up afterwards that their finances and their relationship with money have improved from that? Dr. Erika Rasure (27:46) Absolutely. Absolutely. There's a very clear trajectory where, you know, after working with clients for, you know, whatever amount of time we end up working together that they are doing far better. And I don't attribute that to me so much. I attribute that to the work they do. The you know, I'm a guide, I'm an educator I'm somebody who is there to help, you know provide some structure to that cocoon they've decided to put in place for themselves. And there's very, very various structures that go into that support structure for a cocoon. But yeah, you know, it's really wonderful to see how over a client's journey that they are able to bring awareness to those situations, to those patterns, to those values and start living a little bit differently and align with the identity of the person they are becoming and I very much consider the financial journey a process of becoming because there are mistakes, there's unlearning that has to happen along the way. But there are moments where you have to look for the empowerment that happens where you can see the evidence of all of that work that you're doing. Because a lot of that work is slow work. It's consistent, it's sustainable, and it's little tiny actions that add up over time and it's not something you necessarily see right in front of you from day one. It's the stuff you see six months from now or a year from now where you show up and you're like, I did that and I didn't even think about it. And I'm so proud of myself because me six months ago wouldn't have done that. Marci (29:18) Right, right. So it's becoming aware of of how their personal money story impacts their decisions, which then impacts their finances. And that awareness lets them start to make better decisions, different decisions. Dr. Erika Rasure (29:29) Absolutely. It does. Yeah, and that and those different decisions, you know, are the ones that build that financial self trust. It's the accumulation of those small, repeated and captured and noticeable financial actions that become far too substantial for the ⁓ I'm bad with money narrative to be able to stick around for too long. Because when you've got enough evidence that says, Hey, you know, I'm actually not bad with money. Look at all of these things I've accomplished. That tells a different story. And you have to be willing to embark on that journey to be able to see that story for yourself one day. Because you know, most people financially, I mean, they who struggle financially, it's they're not lacking in knowledge, if that makes sense there. They're lacking in self trust. They don't know how to inventory and analyze, like, I keep telling myself I'm bad with money, but I'm actually not. Marci (30:33) It's kind of a nice surprise when they realize they're not bad with money once they get a little bit of that confidence in there. Dr. Erika Rasure (30:35) Yeah. That's exactly right. Marci (30:40) Well, Erika, before we wrap up, do you have anything else you'd like to mention that maybe we haven't covered? Dr. Erika Rasure (30:47) You know, I just want to mention that when it comes to any kind of behavior change, ⁓ behavior change without identity change is very fragile. And transformation is where that fragility, you know, eventually manifests and shows up as strength. And so if you are finding yourself on a financial journey right now and you're not sure how this is gonna turn out, know that. You know, you can in fact articulate a financial identity that you can name and live from and build on deliberately and intentionally and beautifully. You just have to take the steps that get there. So make sure that, you know, as you're going through this process that you're taking the time to take inventory of, you know, how grounded you are, what your nervous system is doing, examine those money stories, you know, simplify your financial life, you know, do all the things to streamline so you can get to the place of clarity where you can start taking inventory of all the thing, all the ways you are good with money, all the ways you can pivot, and let yourself, you know, feel a little bit empowered and more confident along the way. And that's where that identity shift ultimately ends up. Marci (32:01) That's great. Erika, thank you so much for being my guest today. We appreciate it, you taking the time to join us here. Dr. Erika Rasure (32:07) It was my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. Marci (32:10) And to my listeners, I will be sharing a link to Erika's information in the show notes. Please check her out. She has a lot of interesting information. And don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review, and stay tuned. I'll see you next time. This has been MoneyMarci on Marci Talks Money (and Life). You got this.