[00:00:00] Intro: We’re saying goodbye to the rigid numbers and strict budgets, and putting relationships back at the heart of personal finance. This is more than a podcast, it’s an invitation to reimagine your money story and journey with us through a landscape of intuitive strategies and abundance. Join a community that nurtures transformative financial mindsets.

[00:00:25] Welcome to Intuitive Finance. I’m your host, Dylan Bain.

[00:00:36] Dylan Bain: It’s 2016, and my wife and I are working on getting our financial house in order. And I’ve just finished paying bills. And at the very end of all of those bills is a zero balance in my bank account. I’ve got no money left. But everything was paid. Everything was accounted for. Everything was paid, and we’re doing pretty good. And I tell my wife, honey, we did it. We did it! We made it through the end of the month with our bank account at zero. We didn’t go negative this month, aren’t you happy?

[00:01:04] And she’s not. She’s in fact sad and upset and forlorn over this entire situation because it’s stressful. And internally, I’m like freaking out because why isn’t she happy? Didn’t she see that I kept the wolves from the door? That with all the extra jobs that I had, I had successfully kept us afloat for just one more month. Why was she not seeing how much I was struggling and yet I was succeeding? How did she not realize that I’m the hero of this story?

[00:01:37] Ladies and gentlemen, the stories that we tell ourselves about money are huge. They are everything. We’re human beings. And one of the things that’s true for humans across time, across space, across cultures and geographies, is that we tell ourselves stories about everything. We are so ingrained with our stories, and our lore, and our myth, that at the end of the day, an argument can be made that our stories, our myths, our lore, is all that matters on a deep, emotional, and human level.

[00:02:13] Those stories, in effect, are social programming. This is what the original idea of having myths and oral traditions was. They had morals and lessons that went along with them. These are what helped people and societies stick together, to be able to form a cohesive group, to know the difference between right and wrong. And we have continued that because we’re still the same humans built on the same human platforms. Knowing our stories and understanding that these stories are social programming — and when I say social programming, understand that I’m not saying this in a negative context. It just is. This is not a positive or negative. Some social programming is very negative and some social programming is what keeps society functioning.

[00:02:59] But knowing where these stories — knowing what stories we’ve adopted, what stories we’ve carried through with us, where they come from and who they serve. And keep in mind that the stories that you’re carrying along with you might not be your stories and they might not be designed to serve you. But understanding this is a crucial step forward to being able to reimagine them in a way that will serve us.

[00:03:23] And I’m going to go through today a number of different types of financial stories that people have around their money. But understand, ladies and gentlemen, that we all have one or more of these and that’s okay. On a lot of levels, this is something — and a struggle that we have been dealing with since civilization started. I’m not convinced that it was present in a tribal sense, but I am convinced that it is present in a societal and civilization sense.

[00:03:49] And one thing to note, before we go through these stories that I really want to emphasize for each and every single one of you, is that these stories are rooted in experiences that are very real. Sometimes they’re not nearly as real as we want them to be, but they still come from a real experience that’s felt on an embodied level.

[00:04:09] Okay, so let’s just get right into it. Here are five stories that we carry around our money and how they shape our actions.

[00:04:14] Number one is the ever popular story of scarcity. There is never going to be enough money. I’m never going to have enough. I have to hoard and hold on to every single dollar and every single cent. And at the end of every month, it’s just never going to look good.

[00:04:31] This is a story I hear all the time in my financial coaching practice. And typically, when we dig into the core of these, these are poverty-based stories. For example, my grandparents came out of the Great Depression. They were born either in the Great Depression or partway through the Great Depression. Their parents, of course, endured that, educated them, who then educated my parents, who then educated me.

[00:04:53] And that idea of we’re always just one paycheck away from disaster, we’re one empty belly away from ruin, was something that was transmitted through. So it really didn’t matter for me growing up how successful my family was or how successful I was. I always viewed, they’re never to be enough. And this type of idea leads to a lot of fear-based thinking, because what you’re afraid of is that you’re not going to get your needs met. And so, when we talk about the scarcity mindset, the issue with that is the fear-based decisionmaking.

[00:05:24] Let me give an example. Sell everything! Oh my God, the stock market has gone down and we’re going to lose everything! Sell it all! Well, that’s a terrible advice on a mathematical level, on a logical level. When the stock market goes down, stocks are on sale. Why is it that stocks are the one thing we don’t want to buy when it’s on sale? Wouldn’t you want that buying opportunity, but instead people sell it all, and this undercuts their returns for their retirement.

[00:05:50] And if I look at my own life — and I’m a man of numbers, right? And my wife frequently likes to accuse me of not having emotions when it’s stressful. And there’s some truth to that, because when the stock market goes down, my attitude is, let’s buy more. And that’s served me very well. But other people have sold, and that’s actually undercut them. And I do have people in my life who are working well into their retirement because they sold everything in 2008 and then they bought it really high again.

[00:06:19] Another example are the people who say, buy gold! The U.S. dollar is going to crash. Buy crypto! It’s the only way to protect against inflation. These are scarcity ideas. These are coming from a scarcity story. The idea that it’s never enough and you’re just one step from poverty.

[00:06:33] This manifests either in one or two ways. On one extreme, it’s over-saving. So these are people who are saving, saving, saving, because it’s never going to be enough. I actually had a client who came through the coaching practice. He was 32 years old. I sit him down, I look at everything, and he’s amazing on paper. He’s got a house, but he paid off his mortgage. He’s got a car, but he paid off the car payment. He has no debt. And he’s sitting on $1.5 million in financial assets at age 32. And I said, dude, what’s going on? He’s like, I don’t have enough and it’s going to — it’s all going to go away someday, so I got to just keep saving now. And I asked him, when will it be enough? He said, well, when I get to 2 million. I said, well, if you didn’t save another thing and just let this ride for five years, you’ll be at 2 million. You don’t have to do anything. He said, no, I got to save it.

[00:07:19] Well, what’s going on here is that the scarcity story in his mind is encouraging him to save at the expense of his life. He’s not living his life, and that’s the issue. He’s got great habits, but he’s stuck in the scarcity story.

[00:07:34] The flip side of this particular situation are the people who spend every single cent because scarcity is their homeostasis. It’s the place where they’re comfortable. It’s their comfort zone. And this is in part what’s happening for me in the story at the top of the episode where I’m the hero of the story because the money is never going to be enough. If I can just get to the end of the month with zero in the bank account, and the wolves from the door and all the bills are paid, I’m the hero because it was never going to be enough. But I somehow made it enough. I’ve watched people take windfalls of cash and just blow it out the windows because they’re afraid of not being in that homeostasis state, which for them is scarcity. This is why sometimes I will tell you, you might not be bad with money, you might be addicted to scarcity.

[00:08:22] Okay, let’s go to talk about number two. The second story that I see a lot is this story of self-worth. My worth is determined by how much I earn or how much I have.

[00:08:32] You have linked your production to your sense of self. This is not a healthy relationship. Wealth and income in this idea, in this story, equate to who you are. And one phrase that is frequently said by people who are in this story is, I am my production. If I am not producing, then who am I? Or I’m not worthy of love until I’ve produced enough. Self-worth linked into the idea of wealth or income, sometimes both, not always.

[00:09:05] This leads to an obsession with the bottom line and a lack of an ability to say no. These people that are in this story, they’re going to be constantly looking at their metrics. Did I make it? Did I stay on budget? These are the absolute despots of the budgeting world where they’re like, no, like this is our earnings, we have to stay on this because if I don’t make my targets, if I don’t make my metrics, who am I — even am I as a person? They have linked their idea of self-worth into their money story. And they need to separate these things in order to be able to live free.

[00:09:39] In my case, this is also something that’s very pertinent for me personally. I grew up in a family where everybody was their production. The men in my family are expected to produce to their detriment at all times. And as a result, we never say no. Oh, there’s someone’s moving? Yes, I’m going to help. Oh, there’s an opportunity to make an extra hundred dollars? Yes, I’m going to do that.

[00:09:59] When I lived in Flagstaff, when my wife and I were still very much in poverty and very much not making enough to keep our life on track, so we were on welfare, I could never say no to a hundred dollars. Even if I wanted to go to the park with my daughter, because I’m the papa, I’m the guy in-charge, I’m the provider, my self-worth is what I produce for my wife. This is the top of the story why I was so upset when she’s not happy that I produced enough to get us to zero for the month, because didn’t she know that I was the hero of that story?

[00:10:32] Another way that this manifests and this story comes out is people who think, I just need one more. Just that one more thing, and then, then I’ll be happy. Then I’ll be complete. I just need to take that one job, get that one more promotion, earn that next hundred thousand dollars, stack it away. and then I will be complete. But I got to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, most of you are probably nodding along going, oh, I know this guy and it’s never going to be enough. It’s never going to actually hit into them enough, because once they have it, it becomes their normal. And they’re always striving, they’re always producing, they’re always looking for the next thing.

[00:11:07] And I’ve experienced this in my own life. You know, I lived in Taiwan for two years and that was an amazing experience. But to me now it’s normal and I don’t think it was special or amazing that I just picked up my whole life and moved overseas because everyone I met there had picked up their whole life and moved overseas.

[00:11:23] Alright, story number three is the money is evil story. Rich people are greedy and/or dishonest. And I’m not going to be dishonest, so I don’t need the money. And if I have money, money is a measure of dishonesty.

[00:11:37] This story, real common. A lot of it will come from this idea of money being the root of all evil. But that idea, that phrase, is a bastardization of what the Bible says about money, which is money is not the root of all evil, but the love of money is the root of all evil. When you value money over people, when you are focused on quarterly returns over employee wellbeing, when you are focused on your bottom line over the world that your company is starting to create, that is when it becomes evil.

[00:12:11] But you, my dear listener, working to establish yourself as a wealthy person, working to be able to increase yourself in this world to have more resources for your family, for your community, for your kids. That’s not evil. That, I would say, is an unalloyed good in this world. You deserve to be able to create abundance in your life. Now how you get there, that could be the place where we’re actually going to be having this conversation about whether or not it’s evil. When we have guilt around wealth and increasing our income and having our needs met, what we’re really thinking in our heads is, well, we’re not those selfish people.

[00:12:48] So kind of go back to the idea of, where did you get that story? Were you a little kid who was told, well, if you got what you wanted, then you were somehow bad and you had taken it from somebody else because of course it’s a zero sum game, isn’t it? And maybe it wasn’t those exact words, but deep inside, inside your body, you knew that that is what they were really saying. This idea leads to self-sabotage. Because our idea of we are good, my world is okay, and I am okay, is tied to the idea that I’m an honest, good person. And money only comes from greed and dishonesty, so I have to self-sabotage.

[00:13:25] And this is where people will screw up a promotion, this is where people will just give all their money away. This is when you ask somebody, if I handed you five million dollars right now, no strings attached, what would you do? Oh, I’d give it all to charity. Why? Because if you invested it and created your life, how much more impact could you have versus just funding something for maybe a quarter or two? It’s incredible what can change in your life once you shift one of these stories and you’re kind of starting to see the framework that’s here.

[00:13:53] Let’s get to story four, avoidance. Oh, money is too complicated. I’ll think about it later. I don’t like to look at it. It’s always fine. There’s money in the bank account at the end of every month, I must be doing something right.

[00:14:05] Avoidance. There’s stress in this. There’s intimidation in this. This is the people who are like, well, I was bad at math. So clearly I’m bad with money, because money’s math, right? No, ladies and gentlemen, money is emotional. Money is founded in our stories, and how we let those stories make decisions for us. And so if your story is you’re bad with money, again, you might not be bad with money, you might be addicted to scarcity — but you also might just be afraid of it. You might have a lot of stress around the arts and crafts of money. How do I budget? How do I have a conversation with my wife? How do I look at what I want? In my case, what does Dylan want? Paint me a picture, sing me a song that tells me about where you want to get to.

[00:14:48] But the avoidance story creates fear of making a mistake, and these are the people who are like, I need to have the right crypto strategy. Tell me, educate me. Be my guru and tell me what strategy I should be employing to maximize my return so I can retire in three years. I can’t tell you that. There’s no one simple answer. There’s no YouTube video you can go watch. There’s no firm you can hire or weekend retreat you can do because money is emotional and emotions are a process. But they’re so afraid of making a mistake that they fail to invest in themselves, whether financially, educationally, spiritually. They don’t do that because they’re afraid of making a mistake. They would rather sit right here because, and this is a phrase that I’ve heard a lot from the avoidance story, “If I do nothing, I can never be wrong.” Ladies and gentlemen, a do nothing strategy has a 100% failure rate.

[00:15:41] I’m just — I hate to say this, if you’re one of these people who is carrying around an avoidant story, I’m going to speak the truth to you. Your strategy has a 100% failure rate and that can be hard to deal with. I know that you don’t like feeling lost. I know you don’t like making mistakes. I know you don’t want to feel stupid. And I know that there’s a lot of shame and self-judgment that goes with an avoidance story.

[00:16:05] I can’t do it. I’m not good enough. I’m going to make a mistake. My brother- and sister-in-finance, you’re going to make a mistake and that’s okay. We all need to make mistakes because mistakes are how we learn.

[00:16:16] And then of course, there’s story number five. Control. It’s all up to fate, why bother? Oh, that guy got lucky. Well, he had family connections and I don’t have them. The control story is that money comes from external circumstances that do not apply to the person with the control story.

[00:16:36] They have this idea that all financial outcomes are based on luck or external factors that they don’t have, like nepotism. Oh, he got a promotion because he sucked up to the boss. Oh okay, that’s one way to look at it, sure. But what’s the difference between managing your manager and sucking up to your boss? I’ve talked about on the show before that if you’re a W2 employee, you need to work for yourself. And part of working for yourself is deciding that I’m going to manage in 360 degrees. Everyone below me, everyone on either side of me, and everyone above me. I’m going to manage them. I’m going to come with them with solutions because I want to be in control.

[00:17:09] So you might look at that and say, well, Dylan sucks up to the boss. Maybe. But I’m also very aware that they pay me to make my boss look good. So if they’re going to pay me to make my boss look good, then it’s in my best interest to figure out what makes him look good and then help him out.

[00:17:24] These are things that are within my control, but somebody who has the control story will say they don’t apply to them, or they could never do what I do, or any of these other things. And as a result, these people fail to plan, they fail to set goals, they fail to have strategies that are going to help move them forward, and they just find themselves resigned to their current state.

[00:17:46] People who have the control story will cling to their homeostasis like there’s no tomorrow. Because one of the things that they’re most afraid of is that they are powerful beyond measure and that they in fact could do it. These are the people who will be in a hole and go, there’s no way I could have avoided it and there’s no way out. This story is not serving them. None of these stories, scarcity, self-worth, evil, avoidance, control, none of these stories are going to serve you. You didn’t create these stories. They were either handed to you, or these stories came up from something that was observed from a real phenomenon.

[00:18:21] So the question that we have to answer before we call it a day on today’s episode is what do we do to rewrite these stories? How do we reimagine our money stories? Because what I’m building is a financial revolution that puts relationships back at the heart of personal finance because it’s time to reimagine our money story. So how do we do that?

[00:18:41] Well, I’ve got some tips.

[00:18:42] I’ve got five tips for you and how to rewrite your money stories.

[00:18:45] Number one, awareness and acknowledgement. I have a story, but it’s not me, and that’s okay. That money story has nothing to do with my self-worth as a person, my abilities as a father, my lovingness as a husband. My money stories are separate from me, but I have them. I carry them with me and they make decisions for me. And that’s okay, because they’re not me, and maybe they didn’t even come from me. Maybe I was given them too by somebody else.

[00:19:13] Which brings us to tip number two, you gotta trace the origin. These stories, where do they come from? Stories don’t just manifest into the world. Humans write them. We create them, and then we repeat them over and over and over again until we become completely convinced that that — that, ladies and gentlemen, is the truth. Well, where do these stories come from? Well, generally your family, but they also come from friends and society.

[00:19:37] Think about who’s actually served by the story that employees shouldn’t share their earnings with their other coworkers. Who’s served by that? Is it you? ‘Cause it’s not. It’s your employer. Your employer has told you, well, that’s private. You don’t share that. Well, yes, of course they don’t want you to share that because if everyone knew — well, you’d have a different negotiating position now, wouldn’t you? Who’s served by the idea that you should always be a team player and go above and beyond at work, and if they never reward you, well, you just got to be more patient?

[00:20:07] No, you should go above and beyond at work, but you should do it for you. And if you had an employer who refuses to recognize and remunerate you for that — that’s a fancy way for saying they pay you for it — then you should start getting ready to leave. Oh no, you gotta be — you gotta be loyal. Well, no, I don’t. Who helped out with that story? Who gave that story that I’m supposed to be loyal to my employer? Oh yeah, the employers. That’s not going to serve me. So where did it come from?

[00:20:32] You know for me, I’ve talked about on the show a number of different times, stories from my family around scarcity, particularly clothes. And I always have the example of shoes. I have a hard time buying shoes for myself because of money stories that were handed to me from my mother, who got them from her parents, who got them from someplace else.

[00:20:53] Okay. Number three, challenge and question. It is entirely okay for you to observe this story with inside of yourself and go, hold on a second. I’m going to stop for just one second and just observe that I’m actually having these thoughts and feelings. I am uncomfortable buying shoes. I’ll use my shoe story as an example.

[00:21:11] What had happened was, I was getting ready to buy a pair of shoes for a new job, and my hand would not function. I started sweating bullets. I’m terrified and I’m scared. And I had to stop for a second and go, breathe, Dylan. You’re okay. All right, let’s look at this. Let’s look at this story. Let’s actually challenge it. Is it true that you buying shoes is selfish? And of course it wasn’t, because I had budgeted for this, it was already — it was a line item in my budget, quite literally. The story wasn’t true, that I had been irresponsible with my shoes, and that’s why I needed a new pair. Or I somehow, you know, didn’t do what I was supposed to do. I was somehow bad, naughty, and wrong because I needed a new pair of shoes. No, I just needed a new pair of shoes, there was no emotional or judgmental call attached to it. I’d done that.

[00:21:56] So is this actually true? No, it wasn’t. And then the next question, who did it actually serve? Well, it would serve somebody back in the early 1930s who was caring for my grandparents, who really needed to like, squeeze every last penny out of everything they had because it was the middle of the Depression in rural Wisconsin. That’s who it’s serving. But that person died in the 1950s, and I’m sitting here in the 2020s. It’s time for me to buy a pair of shoes. So, I need to challenge that and question that story. Is this serving me? Is it for me? Is it from me? And if it doesn’t, it’s time to put it aside.

[00:22:37] Which brings us to number four, crafting a new narrative. What story would serve you? If that one won’t serve you, what story will? Tell me the story of your money. Tell me the story of how you interact with it. Tell me the story of how you look at it, how you deal with it. You know, what is your relationship to your bank account and to your investments? What is your investment strategy? What do you know from a self-knowledge standpoint about what you’re going to do when the market goes down?

[00:23:02] These are all things that you can craft into a narrative, but one that serves you, and quite frankly, serves the current circumstances of the economy, rather than, you know, in my case, something from the 1930s. It’s not the 1930s anymore. So if we look at this, we have the ability to write our stories however we would like to write them.

[00:23:23] And then number five, hire a coach. This is what I do. This podcast is a way for me to share knowledge, but if you wanted to go deeper and you’re looking for somebody to say, hey, I’m going to sit with you with your story, and we’re going to rewrite it together because you’re scared or you’ve tried, or it’s just time.

[00:23:41] Hire a coach. And that’s where I come in because that’s what I’m trained to do. That’s what I’m able to help my clients with. We always start off with financial vision. What is the money story that you have, and which is the one you want to get to? Where do we want to go?

[00:23:55] This is why I give so much information away for free. You can go to DylanBain.com and download my toolkit. So that little tab right at the top of the website. Download the toolkit and you can get my budgeting tools, my wealth building tools. They’re all free on the website. And if you want to talk to me, you can book an appointment and sign up for individual one-on-one coaching. We’ll all sit down and we will deep dive with you and your spouse and whoever else needs to be involved in that conversation.

[00:24:22] Rewriting your money stories can be hard, and I know exactly how that feels because that’s exactly what I had to do after the argument with my wife that she did not acknowledge me as the hero who kept the wolves from the door and the bank account at zero. I just separate myself from the bank account numbers and start looking at myself as the human, the relationship that was underlying all of it.

[00:24:44] And I can report today, ladies and gentlemen, that it’s not easy, it’s just worth it. Because you can create a holistic relationship with your money and with everyone else that that money interacts with.

[00:24:57] Outro: Thanks for listening. The conversation doesn’t end here. Please share the show with friends, and make sure you keep up with all the latest updates on Instagram and Threads @TheDylanBain. And dive deeper into the world of finance with me at DylanBain.com, where you’ll find insights, resources, and strategies to reimagine your money story.