Financial fear, often learned in childhood, is not necessarily inherently good or bad.

If fear about running out of money prevents you from blowing every dollar on fast casual dining and a rotating cast of Rent the Runway blouses, and instead urges you to save and invest for the future, that fear directly benefits Future You.

If fear about losing all your money prevents you from investing in the stock market because it feels too risky, well…now we’re letting misplaced, data-refuted concerns interfere with our ability to build wealth over time.

Understanding your own deeply held beliefs and fears about money can help unlock your next-best step, and as with rented St. Laurent blouses, it’s not one-size-fits-all.

Listen now on your favorite podcast player, or catch the episode on YouTube!

We so often hear from staunch FI/RE advocates about their spartan monthly budgets, Costco trips, and 10-day meal prep schedules, which allow them to spend less than $20,000 per year—but we rarely hear from a staunch FI/RE advocate-turned-aspiring-high-roller (hello, it’s me).

I’m acutely aware of my old, fiery takes floating around out there, most famously in bossy pieces like “You Need to Sell Your Car” and “Being a Hot Girl is Expensive,” wherein I saddle up my high horse to run average car payments and manicure costs through compound interest calculators and point to each with a big, fat, “SEE WHAT THIS COULD HAVE TURNED INTO?!”

And while I mostly stand by a lot of it and know it was coming from a good place (“This is not my opinion. This is math. You can have your Cayenne and eat compound interest, too.”), it’s important to remember that—when I wrote those articles—I made less than $60,000 per year before taxes and desperately wanted to escape Corporate America, and assumed most of my readers did, too. No expense was safe from my Excel spreadsheet and “delete” key, and I was weed-whacking through excess like a landscaper on speed.

It wasn’t until I started earning a relatively high income (but still agonized over $100 purchases) that I realized it’s possible to indulge sometimes without being a morally corrupt cupcake of a millennial. I remember scoffing at friends who would pay $12 for avocado toast and silently judging their financial indiscretion, calculating how many minutes of retirement they had just sacrificed. Now, I join them (and occasionally foot the bill). It’s called growth, people!

My 2021 spending was around $2,600/month. Our 2022 spending is around $8,000/month.

To see what’s changed (and why), read the full piece here.

Savvy Ladies. Reader Judy reached out to share this nonprofit that provides free financial education (from volunteer professionals!).

Maintenance Phase. This podcast from Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon has flayed my soul with hilarious banter. Special shout-out to the episodes on Rachel Hollis (“Girl, start apologizing!”) and Jordan Peterson for being particularly unhinged.

Dopesick on Hulu. Want to feel depressed about how Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family plunged America into an opioid crisis freefall by deliberately marketing OxyContin as “non-addictive”? Then boy, you will love this series!

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