In this episode of the Million Dollar Grit podcast, host Julie Chenell answers a client’s question about how money can create real safety—not just success or status. She begins by describing the cultural and religious backdrop that often casts money as evil, citing scriptural warnings and personal experiences of financial trauma. Julie then shares her own journey from a spiritually‑restricted view of wealth to a lived understanding that money can provide physical, emotional, psychological, and generational safety. She illustrates each type of safety with concrete examples: buying a home in a safe neighborhood, paying for therapy and insurance without worrying about coverage, having surplus to cover unexpected expenses, investing in whole‑life insurance and college funds, and being able to act independently in emergencies. Julie also addresses the role of privilege, acknowledging that having resources changes the nervous‑system baseline and that it’s unfair to blame the poor for lack of success. She validates listeners who are struggling with money trauma, urging them to re‑program their subconscious beliefs through repeated rehearsal of these safety narratives. The episode closes with a call to embrace grit, recognize one’s current deck of resources, and extend grace to oneself while working toward financial security.
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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, it's Julie. Welcome back to another episode of Million Dollar Grit. I am continuing this series where my private clients ask me me questions and I say, "Hey, this is a really good question. So good, in fact, that I want to turn it into a podcast." And the question that was posed to me earlier this week was, "Can you share how money has created safety in your life? Not success, not status, but actual safety." And I realized that this is a conversation a lot of people are not having about money. So to set this episode up, I think that if you're listening and you're kind of turning your head going, safety, like, what are you talking about? The context behind this question is that this person grew up in a, a family and a religion where money is often cast as evil, corrupting, dangerous. Now, there is a scriptural, scriptural sort of understanding that the love of money is the root of all evil. Also, Jesus said it is easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a needle than it is for him to enter the kingdom of heaven. So there are these scriptures that talk about how wealth is dangerous, or it can lead to you not being able to to be spiritually okay. And so what happens is that that can get twisted in our heads, and we can start to think that money is inherently dangerous. And this also can happen if you grew up around any sort of financial trauma or addiction or scarcity. So for example, let's say maybe you didn't grow up in a religious background, but you grew up with a parent who came into a lot of money, and then squandered that money away, or, you know, they had a gambling addiction or something like that. And so for you, money, even though on the surface it looks like, okay, now my needs are going to be taken care of, what it is is actually a vehicle for more destruction, right? And that is, I think, kind of what the biblical meaning, the intent, the spirit of the law, if you will, is that like money amplifies what you already are. So if you are struggling with addiction, more money actually just creates more addiction, which can in turn lead to more destruction. And so this gets sort of baked into our DNA, and then we start to see money as, you know, evil, corrupt, dangerous, and then we sabotage and we struggle with being successful and we struggle with understanding how to health helpfully manage money. And so that is the backdrop or the context with which I'm answering this question, because this particular client is recognizing this and saying, "Okay, I want to flip the script. Like, I want to finally convince my nervous system, my subconscious, my default mode network that money is not inherently dangerous or evil or corrupt, that I can hold wealth and success." And so she's looking for evidence that money has created safety, which is a strong value for certain personality types, but I would say for all of us. So I, I definitely grew up in an environment where I don't think money was like completely cast as evil and corrupt, but I definitely had that spiritual upbringing. So, you know, wealth was not like something that you really pursued, right? And so when I came into money through a lot of hard work, I really did not know how to hold it or manage it. And I've managed it, and I found that I was still worrying about money even when more poured in. So like the 2015 Julie, if you had said, okay, you know, in 2018, your bank account, you're gonna get $50,000 a month, I would've been like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. But when that happened, the goalpost had moved, right? And part of that is just the nature of more money in business actually requires more expenses and more responsibility, but I wasn't able to enjoy it, right? So it took a long time for my nervous system and my subconscious to really understand that money inherently is not evil, and yes, it can create real security. And so I want to give some some before and after contrast, which may seem obvious, but I think this is something that you can rehearse over and over if this is your particular hangup around money. So first, I am going to talk about emotional safety and physical safety. So money has created an ability for me to feel more physically safe and emotionally safe. So here are a couple, a couple ways. Number 1, I was able to buy a home in a safe neighborhood where my children can play outside and they can go to school. And I felt this pretty strongly when I got divorced in 2014 and I actually had to move to a town that wasn't safe because that was the only place that I could afford, which is why I did not bring my children with me. I did not take full custody. And that sort of awakening of, wow, money provides that security and I don't have it right now. And then contrast to 3 years later when I was able to purchase a home in Cheshire, Connecticut, because I had money and it was a safe neighborhood. It was a yellow farmhouse with a front porch like you see, you know, in the Disney ride, and the kids could play outside and they could go to good schools. The second thing, emotional safety. I was able to pay for therapy, not just for me but for my children when they needed it, and I didn't have to wonder, oh my goodness, like, I can't get them the emotional help they need because I can't afford the therapy bills. And not only that, but I also noticed that, uh, I didn't have to worry about whether or not my insurance took that therapist, right? So you see that happen a lot, and I was able to just choose the therapist that was best for myself or my child and then pay out of pocket if needed. So those are like two examples of like physical and emotional safety that money provided me. Um, I think money also provided a lot of psychological safety. And how that showed up was that I was not on the edge all the time with unexpected expenses. So when you're, when you live in a world where things feel like unpredictable, like the dishwasher could break, the roof could leak, you know, the price of eggs is going to go up, the car broke down on the side of the road, I didn't have to panic when those things happened anymore because I had surplus, right? And so that created a lot of psychological safety because money gave me options. And so I did not have to freak out, you know, in my nervous system quite so much. Now I did, you know, it's, it's interesting because we, we don't like paying for stuff like dishwashers and roof leaks, you know. So it— I'm not suggesting that it was like all roses because You know, nobody wants to drop $5,000 on, you know, a new porch roof, and that's what I had to do. So it's annoying, but there is a difference between I'm annoyed I have to spend this $5,000, but I'm going to do it versus, oh my gosh, I can't do it and my house is going to fall into disrepair. And so in that regard, money does provide a psychological safety that, you know, is really important. So another way that I would say money provided safety was kind of generational, and these are things like being able to invest in whole life insurance and being able to make investments and these things, you know, a college fund where I can draw from when my kids, if they want to go to college, and not feeling like I have to be resentful or I have strings attached. You know, this idea of like, well, if you're, you know, I'm scraping at the end of the barrel to pay for your college, and if you don't maintain a 4.0 GPA, then I'm wasting my money, right? Like, there's a lot of pressure that can get installed in parent-child relationships when you are spending what you don't have, right? And so that that pressure and that panic starts to get transferred onto the child. And so the, the, you know, beautiful part about the sort of generational safety that money provides is that that does not happen because I'm not operating out of a mindset of scarcity. And so, and, you know, I just, I have things protected. If something were to happen to me, they would be okay. And so, um, it's sort of breaking that cycle of like money as control versus money as care, you know? And, you know, I think practically speaking, like there's just some practical safety that comes with having money, right? So when an emergency happens, let's say, you know, you're on vacation and you have to go to an urgent care clinic or you have to, you know, your flight gets canceled and you need to get home and you, instead of having to wait for the airline to rebook you on a, you know, less optimal flight, flight, you can just pay in cash for a different flight home. I don't have to depend on other people to make major life decisions. It creates a lot of just independence. And also, if someone is in crisis that I love, I can help and not just hope, right? You know. And so I think that while money doesn't necessarily make life easier in all ways, because I've, I've spent plenty of time talking about how money introduces more problems, and it does, I wanted to really focus this episode on some of the benefits, the positive benefits about how money has made things more— it's easier to navigate, right? And so what I wanna say about this, if you're listening and you are coming from the same place that my client came from, you may have to sort of rehearse and repeat a lot of this stuff in order to break the cycle of self-sabotage and playing small because you inherently have, you know, absorbed some belief that money is dangerous. If you're listening to this though and you're like, well, no crap, like I already knew all of this and this is exactly why I want money, and thanks for rubbing it in, Julie, I want to speak to you as well because I think that there is a really toxic, uh, privileged take out there that suggests that the reason why people are poor is because they're just not working hard enough and they're just not, you know, in the right mindset. And if they had the right mindset and they just worked harder, they would make more. And I want to just call total crap on that theory because if you grew up with money or you have money, you have an edge that other people don't have. And recognizing that privilege is really, really important because I am very aware that I am able to function from a different place in my nervous system and in my head and in my heart than people who don't. And so it's not fair for me to assume that it should be as easy for everyone else as it has become for myself. Yes, did I have to like climb that hard ladder? Yes. Was I born without money? Yes. Like I did have to take that journey. So, you know, I wasn't born with privilege, but I have it now and I see the difference. And so I see you and if things have been hard. Like, it's not an excuse to say, okay, poor me, woe is me, victim me. But there is a level of validation that I want to provide that says, yes, you are operating on a harder level, right? If we were, if we were sitting down to a game of Mario Brothers, which was my favorite, you would be playing on level 8 and I would be playing on level 2, just because I have more resources available. And so it's really hard to break out of that. And so I'm just wanting to provide some validation that you're not more lazy or less talented or less intelligent. You're working with a smaller deck. And my story is a story that says that you can, you can get out of that scenario. It is hard and it takes work, but you can. But for someone who has money to look at you and say, well, why haven't you made more? Or, you know, just change your mindset. They don't understand that a lot of what you're holding is a dysregulated nervous system, fear of safety, and a lot of uncertainty that makes it just much, much harder. So have grace for yourself if you're in that season right now. Anyway, thanks so much for asking the question, and I'll 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, 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.
