How Not Okay People Are About Money

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there. Hey everyone, this is Julie, and today I want to talk about money. More importantly, I want to talk about how not okay everyone is and Maybe I'm making a sweeping generalization, but I don't think I am. And there is just a lot going on in the internet marketing world, in the technology world, in the economic world, and a lot of us are not doing okay. I want to kind of dive a little bit into why I think people are feeling stretched financially. And I did this sort of brain exercise with myself because I am feeling stressed about money these days. And I wrote a post on Facebook and I titled it, "The only reason I'm doing okay today is because of what I did 6 years ago." And I'm painfully aware that what's happening right now in my finances is unsustainable long-term. It is temporarily sustainable, and that's because of what I did 6 years ago. In my life, I am spending an exorbitant amount of money, like make your eyes bleed and your palms sweat level of spending. And I was trying to figure out what are the columns or the patterns that I'm seeing if I were to like put this in a spreadsheet and I were to look at my spending and I'd like put columns at the top and say like, what is happening here? These were the columns I came up with, and maybe this will help you as you're thinking about your for a particular financial situation. So column 1 is convenience, right? I'm spending more money these days because it's convenient to spend money, right? Uber rides, Dunkin', Apple Pay subscriptions, Amazon deliveries, Instacart. Things are just more convenient. The ability to pay on the phone with Apple Pay, with Amazon. I mean, we're at the point now where you can pretty much blink and spend money. You know, in the olden days, you actually had to have cash. You had to take a drive. You had to go to the store. There was some friction involved to spending money, and there's literally zero friction now. I mean, this is great for business owners. This is great for marketers who understand this. But to be a human, not so good. So some of this is convenience, and convenience has become more important in my life the more money I make, usually because the more money you make, I think that corresponds with the busier you are. And so then the busier you are, the more you rely on convenience. So that's the first column. Second column is necessary. I just write necessary. You know, these are things that have been necessary, you know, tale as old as time. Food, utilities, household necessities. And it's interesting because what is necessary is always up to debate. I'm living in a really big house. Probably don't need this house this size. However, when I think about the fact that my in-laws are living with me and I have grown kids that probably won't move out anytime soon, and I don't wanna be all up in each other's face if I actually wanna, you know, not be fighting with my kids, it starts to feel necessary. So that's the second column. The third, I, the third column are things like, economic uncertainty. So our economy, inflation, rising taxes, rising insurance. I did a story on Instagram the other day. If you follow me on Instagram, I have decided to talk more openly about money. If you find me, Julie C. Chenell, and you DM me and you ask to become one of my close friends, you'll see I'm doing some close friend stories now where I will actually tell you financial emotionally how I'm doing, but I need to monitor that audience. So I'm asking you to DM me and make me a close friend. But I got a bill that like my town taxes and my homeowner's insurance feel like they've just jumped by astronomical amounts. These are things I cannot control, right? So that's the third column. So column one is convenience. Column two is just necessary. Column three are things like economic uncertainty and rising prices. And by the way, there's no actual order to these columns. This is just kind of how my brain thought of it. Then the next column is act of God events. I use that with a little bit of hyperbole because act of God events usually are things like catastrophic, like hurricanes and those types of things. We could call them black swan events, you know, freak accidents that happen. The funny thing is though, it feels like I have some sort of act of God event every month, right? It's like, oh, I didn't plan for that tree to tip over. I didn't plan for that to spring a leak, but it just keeps happening. So I'm like, I don't know if I would call it an act of God, but these are things in my life like, oh, it is raining cats and dogs constantly this year. And so now things that never leaked before are starting to leak and it's a $3,000 repair here and a $2,000 repair there. And so that would be the next column. The column after that is medical, and I don't know, I'm gonna put both psychological and physical medical expenses. In my life currently, I'm aging, I'm in my 40s, so, you know, things are bound to break eventually. I'm actually one of the healthiest members of my family right now, which I'm really proud of. But the having lots of kids just, you know, it just like triples the medical expenses. And then there's also the psychological, which when you have teenagers and you have this climate and this kind of social group, and we're in the age of TikTok and Snapchat, there's a lot of psychological issues that start to pop up when you have teenagers. So medical column has gotten very chunky these days. Okay, the next column is my favorite. It's called consequences of your actions, and this those maybe dumb mistakes, or maybe really smart mistakes, but nonetheless mistakes that you're paying for. So bad investments, you know, anyone ride the crypto high and low and got squashed? For me, ah, probably the most financially expensive consequence I'm suffering from at the moment is divorce, right? This set me years back in my financial situation, and I've really worked through trying not to be bitter or resentful. It's hard. It's hard when someone, um, walks away and they really are left with just, hey, I have to look out for myself, and 50% of the time one child. And then me, I have all the children I already had, all the expenses of the home, all that stuff. So I'm dealing with 50% less capital, and I now have a very hefty monthly check. And while I understand why the law was created originally to protect stay-at-home moms who, you know, their husbands divorced them when they were in their 50s and then they were left with nothing. The law is really backwards in, in a lot of situations. That's the next column. So just to kind of recap, we've got the column of convenience, the column of necessity, the column of economic uncertainty, the column of act of God, the column of medical, The column of consequence. The next column is timing. And I think there are just spendy eras for people in their lives. Like, you know, when you're in your 50s or 60s and you're empty nesting, that's probably not a spendy era. Well, the era of college kids, emerging adults, I'm gonna call it a spendy era. I'm combining two spendy eras in my life right now. I'm combining the college, you know, license, cars, all that kind of stuff. And I'm also planning a wedding, right? So that's like another spendy era. And usually when you plan a wedding, you know, you're younger, maybe your parents pay for it. So I'm just, I'm just like mushing those two things together right now, you know. Um, the next column is desire, and there are things in my life that I desire that I have not done for many years. I spent my 20s nursing babies, I spent my 30s growing my business, and now I'm like in my 40s, I want to enjoy some of my adult life before I, you know, tip over to 50. So things like, you know, honeymooning in Hawaii and bucket list ideas. Some of it is just desire of this, like, I'm not getting any younger. And then the last column is the— I don't know what to call this column. It's the column that when you make money, it costs money to keep it. So maybe it's like wealth-driven. So once you have assets, now it costs money to keep them growing. It costs money to protect them. It costs money when people try to blackmail you, when people try to take advantage of you, when they try to sue you, all, all of those kinds of things. And my parents sometimes joke that I keep all the lawyers in Connecticut busy, which, haha, but it's true. I mean, I spent, you know, north of— oops, I don't know, it's got to be over $12,000 just for a prenuptial agreement. So, you know, these kinds of things, you put them all together, you put all these columns together, right? The wealth column, the desire, the consequence, the timing, the medical, the act of God, the economic uncertainty, the necessity, the convenience. If you look at all those columns, you can start to see, well, okay, it makes sense why I feel like money is flowing. And as I was kind of doing this exercise, I was like, well, if I hadn't lived the way I had lived 6 years ago, more importantly, if if I didn't think the way I thought and I didn't protect the money the way I did, or I didn't think about— I call it my one-half rule— I would be in so much trouble right now. Even if I could go through the convenience column and the timing column and the desire column and the wealth column, even if I could eliminate all the expenses just in those columns, I still would be in a crippling amount of debt. If it were not for my actions over the past 6 years. So my sort of call to action for you, if you're listening: number 1, I want to normalize that most of us are spending enormous amounts of money today, more than we ever thought possible, and we feel like, "What is wrong with me? What is wrong with me?" And it's a terrible thing to feel like you're this irresponsible person with money. And I'm not saying that people aren't irresponsible sometimes, but you are not weird or abnormal if you are struggling financially. Uh, if you have never been in debt before and now you're in debt, or you've always kind of been in debt but now you're in debt to a large degree, you are not weird or abnormal. You are the majority. Okay, so sometimes that makes me feel better when I know that I am in the majority, like I'm not some freak of nature here financially. The second kind of call to action is that humans, I think in general, we struggle with seeing how our actions today will impact the future, right? And so if I'm telling you that what I've done over the past 6 years is the reason that I'm not in crippling debt today, then The theory should hold that what I do today and over the next 6 years are going to impact me 6 years from now. That's probably why I'm so nervous, if I'm being really transparent with you right now, because the way that I think about money and the way that I protected money over the last 6 years created enough reserve for me to go through divorce, for me to go through all of these things and not be completely underwater, having to file bankruptcy and racking up credit cards and selling my house. I don't I don't have to do any of that even as money is flowing out of my hands. But it also is like, okay, Julie, what I'm doing today will probably drain reserve for 6 years from now. So it means that I'm not just getting comfortable. I'm not looking and going, okay, well, I have, you know, good thing I had this money and everything's hunky-dory. I'm continuing with that same mindset of I need to hustle, I need to grow, and I need to protect. And I really can't let my foot off the gas pedal. And the hope is that that mindset will continue to carry me and continue to create a buffer so that I can handle when these kinds of things happen. So the stuff that I'm still trying to do, despite the fact that if someone were to look at my balance sheet, they would say, well, that's not bad compared to what I'm doing. I'm still thinking, how do I make, keep, and protect money? How do I prioritize what's important for me to sell? What's priority for me to focus on and what I can and let go. Where do I spend where the gains will last? Really, really important because investing in yourself, investing in experts, investing in the things that are going to help shift your thinking long-term are worth it. But there are all kinds of things that we justify spending money on that may not be worth it in this time. And it's hard to tell when it's the right call or not. I'm not letting my foot off the gas, and I refuse to get comfortable. I know that comfort is where things start to break down. And even though I don't have to cut things like, you know, Dunkin' tea or date night, I still ask myself on other things that I look at, do I really need to spend that? You know, a perfect example would be I'm staring at my living room right now. It really hasn't been finished. And I could look at it and say, you know, this living room would be amazing if I refinished it. but I'm not gonna do that right now. Why? Because I'm getting ready to do a wedding. And so it's learning how to delay the things that make perfect sense. You could just, I could make all kinds of justifications for why redoing my living room would make better backdrops for Instagram. I'd host more, I'd do this. I could make all the excuses in the world, but learning how to prioritize what's worth spending on and what's not. And as far as you go, my followers, my clients, my colleagues, There's a lot of stuff I've learned the hard way, and I've been trying to kind of distill it down. But I wanna help you think about cash flow. I wanna help you prioritize where to spend. I want to help you decide when you need to pay attention to your finances and when you can ignore the money scaries, is what I call it, and just put your head down to work. 'Cause sometimes over-obsessing about what's not coming in has kind of an unintended consequence of crippling you, right? And when to switch from, "I want to win," to, "I want to outlast. I want to still be standing when this wave crashes on shore." How to dial in what's really important for your customers, how to get creative when creativity feels far away, and how to laugh at how absurd this world is. And you are not alone. So I hope this was helpful. As always, if you need a coach, if you need any help, hit me up, julie@juliechenell.com. And if you like this podcast, I really, really appreciate ratings, tags on Facebook or Instagram, and reviews. Talk to you soon. And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, Until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.