Farnoosh Torabi
speaker
72 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Farnoosh Torabi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, I've been a financial advisor for 20 years and people are like, what, you're writing a book about fear? Yes, because it is the emotional underpinning of so many of our financial questions. When people come to me and they say, should I buy a house? Should I get married, divorce, have kids, take the job, quit the job, start the business, file for bankruptcy?
There is advice there to be given that is tactical, but to really get to the root of the solution, you have to go deeper and usually address the fear. I want to first start by saying that fear can be... a tool in your life. Why are we all wrapped up in this idea of being fearless? I am a daughter of immigrants. I am a daughter of the 1980s in Worcester, Massachusetts. I grew up terrified.
And I say, you know, things worked out. And it wasn't because I abandoned fear. It was because I got to a point in my 20s when I was trying to be fearless and I would get into a make a mess of things. But I said, you know what? This fear is not going away. I am just that person that has this fervor all the time.
And I thought, let me like look at it and try to understand what it's trying to tell me. Perhaps fear is here with a message.
Imagine a world where you can make your own financial choices for yourself, by yourself. You have autonomy. You have agency. You can choose for yourself. Choose to stay in a job, not stay in a job. Stay in a marriage, not stay in a marriage. Start a business, not do it. And I'm not saying those things are easy, but with money and with financial independence comes so much confidence.
You can sleep better at night and... You know, the world's a scary place sometimes and with money helps. When you experience fear in your financial life, which for me sometimes is a lot of the time, I think that if you are able to apply some of these learnings, you will not experience fear as paralysis. You will experience it as opportunity.
to know that when fear arrives in your financial life, it doesn't want to create stasis or keep you stuck. It wants you to find a solution to help you. To engage with your fear is to engage with your values, to engage with what's important to you and what you want to protect. And you have to be clear on these things before you make any financial decision.
So when you're good with fear, you can be good with money. So I take it it's normal to be afraid of money? Yes. I mean, money is a limited resource, okay? Money inherently creates scarcity in our minds. And that is terrifying because you make a financial decision, you can't rewind, and now you're with less money than when you started potentially.
There is risk inherent to making certain financial decisions. And money is personal. So when we make a financial choice or decision, or we think about something financially related, we can't help but make it really personal and think about, well, what does it say about me? If I do this thing, how is it going to reflect on me? All the list of fears that you mentioned make 100% sense to me.
Because as humans, we want to protect our resources, right? And money, I mean, talk about an important resource.
It's a tool. It is an important tool. It's a tool that's going to give you access. It's going to help you create a bridge in your life when you need it most. I got into this space as a financial author, as a journalist, not because I had all the credentials, but because when I was young, I saw my parents argue about money constantly. I saw how it was weaponized.
Listen, money can be a tool for good and it can be a tool for evil, for bad. And In my parents' marriage, I saw as a result of my father being the breadwinner and the fact that he was a man and he associated his manhood with financial dominance. My mother also had her own issues in terms of not speaking the language. So she wasn't able to work right away in America as immigrants.
They came from Iran. And I watched them fight around money and money. On the one hand, I was grateful. I grew up in a household where we did talk about money freely as Middle Easterners, that culturally it's not as taboo. But often the topics around money were discussed with, I say, with fists banging on kitchen tables. It was a lot of crying. It was a lot of silent treatment.
And I quickly saw, I mean, this was it. This is my origin story. I saw how, especially as a woman, if you don't have access to your own money and feel empowered around your finances, then someone will make the decisions for you. And they're not always decisions that you want. They're not always in your best interest. So money, you need it. It's not a nice to have.
Everybody needs money, particularly women. We don't think that it's our domain. because we've been told it's not, he'll take care of it. You know, I've been to restaurants where they give me a menu and my menu doesn't have any prices on it. This is not in America, by the way. This was when my husband and I went on a trip to the Caribbean. And I go, what's going on? Is it a prefix?
Like, did we miss the sign in the front? This is going to be like a, you know, and the waitress will say, no, no, madam, you should not have to worry about such things. And I said, it can't escape me. This follows me everywhere. And I make more in my relationship. So I had to have a good laugh about that because it's like, really, I don't have to worry about money? It's all I do.
I think that this is important for women to believe that it is not just a nice to have, that being financially independent is your right. I'm really glad that you're saying that.
Yes, I agree with you. Money is power. The complexity arrives when you're in a relationship and you think that my power means I have power over you as opposed to I have power to heal, to support. There's a difference. There's a difference in how you wield that power. And I want every woman to have power and to use money as a tool for power. And men too.
But when you're in the context of a relationship, it's about how to sort of dance with money, you know, and not be sizing each other up based on what you earn. This happens all the time. Imagine a world where you can roam freely and choose for yourself, by yourself. You can afford yourself options. You can say, you know what, this doesn't suit me anymore and I can leave.
And I know there are some risks and I know there's uncertainty down the road, but I have money. I have not just money, but I have financial autonomy. This is what being truly wealthy is. It's being able to Understand that the world's a scary place. Yes, money does not solve all of the problems, but money does give us a runway. It gives us resources.
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