Sean Pyles

I'm glad you did that work because it sounds like now you're on the other side of it, or at least it works through it.

Pay me.

Give me my monies.

Pay me, this man.

Give Elizabeth all the money now.

I feel like I grew up with two kind of contradictory money stories.

One was that money was tight and we didn't have enough of it, so you better be frugal.

And then at the same time, I witnessed my parents spend kind of lavishly on things that in retrospect, I wonder if they could have comfortably afforded.

They probably weren't able to afford it all the time.

And so I've struggled with that in my own life of having this kind of scarcity mindset of thinking, oh, money is going to be tight.

I always better save for a rainy day, which, you know, isn't the worst thing.

But then having this impulse to.

to get the shiny nice expensive thing and those are kind of incompatible and it leads to a lot of indecisiveness and sometimes shame when i am spending or regret that i didn't actually enjoy my money or sometimes feeling like why am i saving so much when i could die tomorrow so i just i vacillate between these feelings even to this day so maybe i should pick up that book that you read elizabeth or chat with a money therapist

I don't think it was until I started working at NerdWallet and I understood the idea of what a money story is, because like I mentioned before, we go through life following these narratives that we're not even 100 percent aware of.

And it was when I was actually going to buy a car in 2020.

And I had this impulse to get like a really nice car because I grew up with a really crappy Honda Civic where the muffler was dragging on the road behind me.

And I really wanted a BMW or something similar.

And I was able to find a car that was affordable for me within my budget and was still nice.

So that process of car buying helped me find what is a comfortable middle ground between having a nice thing that I know I want and deserve, but doing it in a way that's not going to break the bank.

It strikes me that there are two sides to this conversation to work through these issues.