Shauna Game
Appearances
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
Such a good question, Elizabeth. I think that we live in this vacuum where we think that money is only about math. And it's really unfortunate because it is about so much more. It's about emotions and behaviors and habits and story and how we were raised. And all of that plays into how we save, spend, and even earn our money.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
So I think it's so critical that we bring this idea of relationship with money into the conversation about pools. And particularly for most of us, you described your relationship in December as toxic, right? A lot of people would probably borrow that word as well because they just feel stuck.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
There's something that you want to do or achieve and you cannot figure out why in the world can I not make this happen? And so usually when people get to that spot, I say, okay, this is the time where we need to explore this thing called relationship with money and figure out, you know, what's going on behind the scenes that's stopping your progress towards these goals.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
That's a very real scary feeling that a lot of people have because let's be honest, most of us do not like looking at our bank account. I often say like we need to tiptoe into this really exploration around relationship with money. And there's lots of different ideas and exercises and kind of tactics I can give you.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
But I think the first place is thinking about one word to describe your relationship with money. But then we got to dig deeper. So if it's toxic, I'm going to ask you, okay, Elizabeth, like why? Why is it toxic? And I don't know, maybe you would say, well, December is the holidays and oh my gosh, we all overspend. Okay, so tell me about that, right?
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
And so it's this exploration of just digging deeper and deeper with yourself until you get to some sort of foundation of like, okay. This is really what it is about. I work with so many people and their biggest fear is that there's just never enough money. And so my follow-up is, okay, well, what is enough? And why are we not in that place? And this just requires this kind of asking of ourselves.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
So I tell you that just to say, don't take it like I'm going to fix my whole relationship with money in one day. Let's just take it bite by bite.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
I think it's really important that if we were creating the equation for financial success, I would say the inner work comes first. Inner work is a lot of what we're talking about here. It's thinking about the words that describe your relationship with money. But something else that is really important is this idea of money story.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
And a lot of people might have heard that before, but not quite understand the context. I talk about this in the book that by age seven, we've really developed our sort of viewpoint on money, our habits, our behaviors, our beliefs. And it's kind of scary to think about that because I don't remember a lot from my childhood, like 37 years old. But to think that that time period was that impactful.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
So really going back and thinking about, okay, what was my childhood like around money? What did my parents talk about, not talk about? Were they fighting? Were they not? Were we having to go without? Was there excess? Like all of those messages and beliefs.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
And if it helps you, just go back to your earliest memories around money and kind of explore those and see if there's any patterns between those memories and those messages and how you're interacting with money today.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
Thank you for your transparency there. I wish that we all could have more conversations like this because I'm sure there's a listener that's like, oh my gosh, I have the same version of story that Elizabeth does. But I think that we really need to look at what's happening in our body. So...
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
Whenever you're looking at your bank account, right, or you're transferring money, or you're looking at your paycheck, or let's say that you're having a money discussion with your partner or your family members, I want you to become aware of what's happening in your body. So is your heart racing? Are your palms getting sweaty?
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
Do you feel like you would rather just run out of the room than deal with the situation? All of those are somatic bodily cues. that something is going on with your relationship with money. And when you notice one of those things happening, don't judge yourself. Just pause and say, okay, where is this coming from? Is this coming from a belief from my childhood?
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
Is this coming from something real where maybe there just isn't enough money? And that's bringing me back to this place of just this extreme fear around money. Maybe you grew up where money was really tight. So I think the body gives us so many clues when it comes to money, but we just don't tune into that. We're just purely looking at the numbers piece.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
So use your body as an indicator, a moment to pause and say, okay, what's going on and where does this come from?
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
There's so many different exercises you can use. It depends if you're somebody who loves to journal. I have an exercise called Hey Money, and I literally write money a letter. Sometimes it's a couple of words and it's not a very nice letter. Sometimes it's, oh, this great thing happened.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
But the process of doing something like that is helping me move past these places of fear that are stopping my ability to move forward with money. There's also financial therapy. But I think that what we need to do is when we notice... the feeling. We need to acknowledge it, go, okay, it's there. And then we need to think about what action step can I pair with this that might help this?
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
So if it's a feeling of there's never enough money, maybe I might look at like, okay, have I set up an emergency fund? Am I contributing to my 401k? Like, am I actually taking actions to help counteract this belief that I have?
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
The first pace that you have to start is obviously, what do I want? And I know this feels like a really big question. And some people don't even allow themselves to go there with money because it feels like, oh, this isn't possible. Or I've never seen this happen in my family. How dare I think about building, I don't know, generational wealth or a business that I could sell or...
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
or anything like that. So I think whether you like to brainstorm or draw or whatever, allow yourself some space where you can just have fun and think about, what do I want this future to look like? Then we've got to go down into your numbers. And one of the best ways to do this is by something I call a weekly money date. I literally set my timer on my phone for 15 minutes.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
And I'm looking at my spending from the week previous and I'm thinking about what's coming up. And what I'm doing is I'm looking at my spending and I'm saying, okay, is my spending aligning with that vision I have for my future? I think we tend to think that in order to reach our money goals, we need to get rid of everything excess. And I don't think that's the right way to approach this.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
If it's, you know, I love going out to eat once a week on a date night, or I love going to that gym workout class. Build that into your spending plan because that's part of this vision that you're creating.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
I would say like another piece of that is celebrating small wins. Having a weekly money date is a win. Looking at how you're spending your money is a win. Thinking about your future is a win. But also, for instance, if we're going to pay off debt, let's say every $100 that we pay off, let's go give ourselves a small little reward.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
I'm talking about something super tiny, but let's celebrate this along the way because that's an important piece of this too in the building the trust with ourselves and our relationship with money.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
The important thing to keep your relationship with money unraveled is to keep coming back to what is the story that I learned about money when I was little? How is that influencing the decisions, the behaviors, the actions I'm making now? If you just do that piece, you will be shocked at what you discover and how that can help you move forward with a different story.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
Ooh. Yeah, I love the truth or dare.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
I love the truth or dares. That was actually my most fun part to write in this book. The first dollar I ever earned, that actually came from the tooth fairy. I lost my first tooth on a milk dud watching a movie. And I remember waking up in the morning and I was like, oh my gosh, there's money under my pillow.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
And I think what I learned from that is that it doesn't have to be as difficult as you might believe. I remember watching my dad kind of struggle with money and I thought, this is crazy. Like I lost a tooth and I got a dollar. Like this doesn't have to be that difficult. Of course it is. And it's been a giant learning process. You had to grow that tooth.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
I had to grow that tooth, which I was not accounting for.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
You know, there was a kind of like a 7-Eleven-ish type store down the street from my house. I probably went down there and bought some version of an Icy.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How To Have a Better Relationship With Money and Maximize Every Dollar
Yes. But again, it took me many years to actually cement that lesson.