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The Money Story You Never Questioned · After the Rush Podcast

0:03
SPEAKER_00: I want to tell you about a woman I worked with years ago.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: She had been a school administrator for almost 30 years.
0:12
Good salary,
0:13
pension coming,
0:15
she had done everything right by most measures.
0:18
And she sat across from me in a financial literacy workshop
0:23
looking like she was
0:24
SPEAKER_00: about to take a final exam she hadn't studied for.
0:29
I asked her to tell me one thing she believed about money not a
0:33
fact a belief she
0:37
was quiet for a moment and then said money is something other
0:41
people understand she
0:43
was 61 years old she had managed a school district budget for a
0:48
decade she believed
0:51
underneath all of that confidence that money was something
0:55
other people understood
0:57
SPEAKER_00: That belief was not hers.
0:59
SPEAKER_00: She had inherited it and it had been making decisions for her quietly,
1:05
SPEAKER_00: persistently,
1:06
SPEAKER_00: behind every number she had ever run for as long as she could remember.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: That's what today's discussion is about.
1:26
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to After the Rush.
1:28
SPEAKER_00: I'm Katherine McDowell.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: This is a podcast for people in or approaching the 55 plus chapter.
1:36
SPEAKER_00: People who have built something real and are now asking what comes next.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: Not in a crisis.
1:42
SPEAKER_00: Not lost.
1:44
Just standing at a threshold where the old maps don't quite fit
1:47
the new territory.
1:49
SPEAKER_00: I spent decades as a clinician,
1:52
SPEAKER_00: a non-profit founder,
1:54
SPEAKER_00: a grant writer,
1:56
SPEAKER_00: a financial educator,
1:58
SPEAKER_00: and a program developer for people navigating exactly this chapter.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: I also started with nothing.
2:07
SPEAKER_00: I mean that precisely.
2:09
Which means the financial conversation I find most interesting
2:13
is not the one about
2:14
SPEAKER_00: instruments and vehicles.
2:16
It is the one about what you actually believe money is for and
2:21
where that belief came from.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: That is what we're talking about today.
2:27
SPEAKER_00: If you're new here, welcome.
2:29
If you've been here from the start,
2:31
you know this is an episode I've been building toward.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: Let's get into it.
2:38
Here is something I have noticed after years of sitting with
2:41
people and financial conversations.
2:44
When you ask someone to tell you about their retirement plan,
2:48
they can usually do it.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: They know their approximate account balance.
2:53
They know roughly when they want to stop working or what
2:57
they're aiming for.
2:59
SPEAKER_00: They have a number even if it's a vague one.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: When you ask them to tell you what they believe about money,
3:06
SPEAKER_00: not the facts,
3:08
SPEAKER_00: the beliefs,
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SPEAKER_00: it gets much quieter.
3:12
And in that quiet is where most of the actual financial
3:15
decision-making lives Let
3:18
me give you a few of the beliefs I have heard most often Not
3:23
from people who are
3:24
SPEAKER_00: struggling From people who,
3:27
SPEAKER_00: by all external measure,
3:29
have managed money well People who are sitting in this chapter
3:34
with real resources
3:37
SPEAKER_00: I hear,
3:39
SPEAKER_00: I don't deserve to spend it
3:41
SPEAKER_00: If I enjoy it too much, something bad will happen.
3:45
SPEAKER_00: I need to leave it all to my children.
3:49
SPEAKER_00: Rich people are not good people and I don't want to be like that.
3:55
SPEAKER_00: There will never be enough no matter how much there is.
4:01
SPEAKER_00: None of these are financial strategies.
4:03
SPEAKER_00: They are stories and they're running the show.
4:07
SPEAKER_00: The woman I told you about at the top of this episode
4:11
The one who believed money was something other people
4:14
understood She was not bad at
4:16
math She was responding to a story she had absorbed so early in
4:22
conditions so
4:24
charged that she never once stopped to look at it directly Her
4:29
parents had argued
4:30
about money constantly behind closed doors at first and then
4:35
not behind closed
4:36
SPEAKER_00: doors at all
4:38
SPEAKER_00: Money in her house meant conflict.
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SPEAKER_00: It meant fear.
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SPEAKER_00: It meant one of her parents leaving the room.
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SPEAKER_00: By the time she was 10 years old,
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SPEAKER_00: she had decided,
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SPEAKER_00: without consciously deciding anything,
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SPEAKER_00: that money was a territory she did not want to enter.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: And then she spent 50 years not entering it.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: She earned it, yes.
5:01
SPEAKER_00: She managed it, technically.
5:04
SPEAKER_00: But she never fully engaged with it.
5:07
She outsourced every financial decision she could to someone
5:11
else and called that humility.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: It was not humility.
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It was a 10 year old's response to a frightening situation
5:22
preserved perfectly for five decades.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: Still running every time she sat down to look at her own finances.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: I'm not telling you this to be dramatic.
5:34
SPEAKER_00: I'm telling you this because it is almost certainly happening to you too,
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SPEAKER_00: in some version,
5:41
SPEAKER_00: with some story that you have probably never met directly.
5:47
SPEAKER_00: Where does the story come from?
5:51
SPEAKER_00: Financial therapists,
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SPEAKER_00: and yes,
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SPEAKER_00: that is a real specialty and a useful one,
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SPEAKER_00: talk about what they call money scripts.
6:00
SPEAKER_00: the automatic,
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often unconscious beliefs about money that we form in childhood
6:06
and carry into
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SPEAKER_00: adulthood.
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SPEAKER_00: I'm not a financial therapist.
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SPEAKER_00: I want to be clear about that.
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SPEAKER_00: And I am not a licensed financial planner either.
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What I am is someone who has lived the financial conversation
6:21
at every economic
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SPEAKER_00: level,
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SPEAKER_00: from genuine scarcity to organizational budgets to personal wealth.
6:30
and who has spent a significant portion of her career watching
6:33
the gap between what
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SPEAKER_00: people know and what they do.
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SPEAKER_00: The gap is almost always a story.
6:42
SPEAKER_00: The story came from a few places.
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SPEAKER_00: The first is direct observation.
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SPEAKER_00: What did money look like in your house growing up?
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SPEAKER_00: Was it a source of security or anxiety?
6:57
SPEAKER_00: of conflict or silence?
7:00
SPEAKER_00: Was it talked about openly or kept behind closed doors?
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Did your parents fight about it,
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hide from it,
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celebrate it,
7:08
or treat it like a dirty subject?
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SPEAKER_00: Wherever the emotional register of money was in your house,
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SPEAKER_00: you absorbed it before you had a language for it.
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SPEAKER_00: That register is still with you.
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SPEAKER_00: The second is explicit teaching.
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SPEAKER_00: What were you actually told about money?
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SPEAKER_00: Money doesn't grow on trees.
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SPEAKER_00: We can't afford that.
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SPEAKER_00: Rich people are greedy.
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SPEAKER_00: Save for a rainy day.
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SPEAKER_00: You have to work hard for every dollar.
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SPEAKER_00: These phrases are not neutral.
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SPEAKER_00: They carry entire philosophies of life about scarcity,
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SPEAKER_00: about worthiness,
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SPEAKER_00: about what kind of a person you were supposed to be.
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The phrases you heard most often are the ones most likely to be
8:03
running silently in
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SPEAKER_00: the background of every financial decision you make today.
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SPEAKER_00: The third is identity.
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SPEAKER_00: Money and class are tangled up with who we believe we are.
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SPEAKER_00: For people who grew up with very little,
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SPEAKER_00: and I include myself here,
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SPEAKER_00: there's often a complicated relationship with having more.
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SPEAKER_00: Moving from scarcity to stability
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SPEAKER_00: is not a purely mathematical event.
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SPEAKER_00: It is an identity event.
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And a lot of people who make that move never fully resolve the
8:38
tension between the
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SPEAKER_00: person who had nothing and the person who now has something.
8:45
SPEAKER_00: They stay in a kind of financial limbo,
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SPEAKER_00: earning and accumulating,
8:50
SPEAKER_00: but never quite allowing themselves to inhabit the life they built.
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SPEAKER_00: still waiting at some level for the other shoe to drop.
9:01
For people who grew up with comfort,
9:03
the story can run in the other direction.
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SPEAKER_00: A belief that money will always be there,
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SPEAKER_00: an underdeveloped instinct around what things actually cost,
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a sense of entitlement that they may not recognize as
9:18
entitlement because it has
9:20
SPEAKER_00: always just been the water they swim in.
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SPEAKER_00: Neither story is a moral failing.
9:26
SPEAKER_00: Both are just the weather of wherever you grew up.
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SPEAKER_00: The question is whether the weather is serving you now.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: There is a question underneath the financial plan.
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Here's the thing about having a financial plan that I find most
9:46
interesting.
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SPEAKER_00: The plan asks you what you will spend.
9:52
It asks you what you will earn,
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what you will draw down,
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what you will leave behind.
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It asks you to make projections and run numbers and think about
10:03
timelines.
10:05
SPEAKER_00: It almost never asks you what the money is for.
10:11
SPEAKER_00: Not in a practical sense.
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SPEAKER_00: Housing, healthcare, travel.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: In an existential sense.
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SPEAKER_00: What is the money for?
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I have been asking that question to people in financial
10:24
conversations for years.
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SPEAKER_00: It is consistently the one that produces the most silence.
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Not because people don't have an answer,
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but because they have never said the answer out loud.
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And saying it out loud makes it real in a way that staying
10:41
vague does not.
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SPEAKER_00: Here are the few of the real answers I have heard.
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So I never have to feel like I did when I was 22 and couldn't
10:53
pay the rent.
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SPEAKER_00: So my kids are okay after I'm gone.
11:01
SPEAKER_00: So I can keep proving myself and finally rest.
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SPEAKER_00: So I have options.
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SPEAKER_00: I don't even have to use them.
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SPEAKER_00: I just need to know they're there.
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SPEAKER_00: Honestly, I don't know.
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SPEAKER_00: I saved because saving is what you do.
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SPEAKER_00: I don't know what I saved it for.
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SPEAKER_00: That last one?
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SPEAKER_00: I have heard that one more times than I can count.
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People in this chapter who spent 40 years building financial
11:29
security and now have
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SPEAKER_00: it and don't quite know what to do with it?
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SPEAKER_00: Not because they lack options,
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But because they were so focused on accumulating that they have
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never developed a
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SPEAKER_00: relationship with what comes after,
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SPEAKER_00: with actually living from what they built.
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SPEAKER_00: Spending feels dangerous.
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SPEAKER_00: Enjoyment feels irresponsible.
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SPEAKER_00: Rest feels like a trap.
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SPEAKER_00: That is not a financial problem.
12:00
SPEAKER_00: That is a story problem.
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SPEAKER_00: And no financial advisor in the world can fix it.
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SPEAKER_00: because it's not in their job description.
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SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna walk you through a few questions,
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SPEAKER_00: not as an exercise with a right answer,
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SPEAKER_00: but as a way of starting to locate your own story.
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SPEAKER_00: You can think through them now or you can come back to them or both.
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SPEAKER_00: Here's the first one.
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SPEAKER_00: What is your earliest memory involving money?
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Not your first job Not your first big purchase Your earliest
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memory The first time
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you understood that money was a thing and that it mattered For
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a lot of people,
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this memory has an emotional charge Something was happening
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that made money
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SPEAKER_00: suddenly visible Scarcity or abundance or conflict or a moment of relief
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That moment is the beginning of your story It does not
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determine everything But it
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sets the register The second question What was the dominant
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emotion around money in
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SPEAKER_00: your house growing up?
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Again,
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anxiety,
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stability,
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scarcity,
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generosity,
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pride,
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shame You do not have to pick just one
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But if you had to name the one that lives most in your body
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when you think about
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SPEAKER_00: money,
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SPEAKER_00: what is it?
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SPEAKER_00: The third question, what do you believe you deserve?
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This one is harder because most of us have been taught not to
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think in terms of what we deserve.
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We think in terms of what we've earned,
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what's practical and what's responsible.
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But underneath all of that is a quieter belief about what we
14:01
are actually entitled
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SPEAKER_00: to have,
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SPEAKER_00: to enjoy,
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SPEAKER_00: to spend,
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SPEAKER_00: to keep.
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SPEAKER_00: What does that number feel like?
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Not the account balance,
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the internal one,
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the number underneath the number.
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SPEAKER_00: Here's the fourth question.
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What would you do differently with your money right now if you
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were not afraid?
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SPEAKER_00: I want you to sit with that one.
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Not for the answer,
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although the answer is useful,
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but for what the fear is.
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SPEAKER_00: Because the fear is the story.
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It is telling you exactly what you believe is at risk if you
14:44
stop behaving the way
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SPEAKER_00: you have always behaved.
14:48
That information is worth more than most financial planning
14:53
documents I have ever seen.
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SPEAKER_00: So what do you do with what you find?
15:01
SPEAKER_00: I want to be honest with you about something.
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SPEAKER_00: Locating your money story does not immediately fix anything.
15:08
SPEAKER_00: Does not automatically transform your financial behavior.
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SPEAKER_00: Understanding why you do something is not the same as changing it.
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SPEAKER_00: What it does do is give you a choice.
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SPEAKER_00: Before you can choose, you have to see.
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Most people are acting from their money story without knowing
15:32
it as a story.
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SPEAKER_00: They think they are responding to facts.
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SPEAKER_00: They are responding to a narrative,
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SPEAKER_00: one that was written for them in conditions that no longer exist,
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SPEAKER_00: by people who were doing the best they could with what they had.
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SPEAKER_00: You can choose to keep the story.
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SPEAKER_00: Some of what you inherited is actually serving you.
15:57
the person who grew up with nothing and learned early that debt
16:02
costs more than
16:03
it's worth that lesson has real value not all inherited beliefs
16:08
are problems some
16:10
of them are wisdom but you get to decide that's the point you
16:16
get to look at what
16:18
you are given and decide deliberately what you are keeping what
16:23
you are releasing
16:24
SPEAKER_00: and what you're building in its place
16:27
SPEAKER_00: and the ones that are not serving you,
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SPEAKER_00: the beliefs that are keeping you from spending what you earned,
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SPEAKER_00: or from resting without guilt,
16:39
SPEAKER_00: or from letting you enjoy the resources you spent decades accumulating,
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SPEAKER_00: or by burning through it with retail therapy,
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SPEAKER_00: those deserve some honest attention,
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SPEAKER_00: not from a financial advisor.
16:57
SPEAKER_00: from you,
16:59
SPEAKER_00: possibly with a therapist,
17:01
SPEAKER_00: a financial therapist,
17:03
SPEAKER_00: a trusted friend,
17:05
SPEAKER_00: or just some uninterrupted time,
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SPEAKER_00: a pen,
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SPEAKER_00: and a journal.
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SPEAKER_00: The money is the easy part, actually.
17:13
SPEAKER_00: 50 years of experience has taught me that.
17:17
SPEAKER_00: The math is almost never the problem.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: The story is the problem.
17:22
And the story is also the place where you have the most power
17:26
to make change.
17:29
the woman I told you about at the beginning the one who
17:33
believed money was
17:34
something other people understood she finished the workshop she
17:39
came back the
17:40
following week she started meeting with a financial counselor
17:45
she started talking
17:46
to her husband really talking about what their retirement
17:50
looked like in actual
17:52
SPEAKER_00: specific terms not hypothetically concretely
17:58
What she told me afterward was that the hardest part was not
18:01
learning anything new about money.
18:04
SPEAKER_00: She had learned plenty of new information over the years.
18:08
SPEAKER_00: She had attended workshops.
18:10
SPEAKER_00: She had read books.
18:12
The hardest part was admitting that a 10 year old's decision
18:16
had been making
18:17
SPEAKER_00: financial choices for a 61 year old woman.
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SPEAKER_00: And then deciding that the 10 year old had done her best.
18:26
that she had protected herself in the only way available to her
18:30
at the time and
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SPEAKER_00: that it was all right to let her rest now.
18:36
SPEAKER_00: That is the work.
18:37
SPEAKER_00: It's not glamorous.
18:38
SPEAKER_00: It does not come with a spreadsheet.
18:41
But it is the thing underneath every financial decision you
18:45
will make in this chapter.
18:47
SPEAKER_00: Find your story.
18:49
SPEAKER_00: Name it.
18:50
SPEAKER_00: Decide what you want to do with it.
18:53
SPEAKER_00: The numbers can follow from there.
18:57
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for being here.
18:59
SPEAKER_00: I'm Catherine McDowell.
19:01
SPEAKER_00: This is After the Rush.
19:03
If today's episode landed for you,
19:06
share it with someone who would recognize themselves in it.
19:10
You can find the newsletter,
19:11
the workbook,
19:13
and more at After the Rush on Substack.
19:17
SPEAKER_00: If you want to keep thinking about this,
19:19
There's a growing number of pieces in the newsletter that go
19:22
deeper on financial
19:24
SPEAKER_00: identity and what I call the money underneath the money.
19:29
SPEAKER_00: The link is in the show notes.
19:31
SPEAKER_00: I'll see you next time.