[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: I’m walking in the door to my apartment. I’ve come home early from work, and I cannot wait to see my wife and my daughter. It’s been a rough month. We’ve been trying desperately to stick to this budget that we created. It is creating a lot of hardships if I’m going to be entirely honest with myself, but none of that really matters right now because I’m home early, and I get to spend time with my wife and my daughter.

[00:01:01] And so I’m waiting patiently for them to arrive and the moment comes, they pull into their parking space, they get out of the car, they walk into the apartment, and my blood instantly runs cold because my wife is carrying a bunch of bags and my daughter has a box of chicken fingers.

[00:01:19] I’m struggling to put on a straight face because I am, on the outside, want to show them how excited I am to see them and how much I love them, and how much I’m looking forward to spending time with them. But in the inside, I am seething because we had promised that we were going to stick to this strict draconian budget.

[00:01:38] Ladies and gentlemen, I wasn’t fooling anybody. Everyone knew I was mad. Everyone knew that that moment that could have been so connecting for me and my family, I had ruined because of how upset I was. And the lesson my wife learned was that she needed to be more sneaky, and the lesson my daughter learned was that she didn’t deserve a snack.

[00:02:00] Ladies and gentlemen, I tell this story because it’s important to understand the emotion versus logic conflict when it comes to our financial lives. I’m gonna lay a little truth on you. Money is the foundation of our ability to continue to exist in a modern society. Money, therefore, is a survival need. When things are survival needs, they hit into what is called Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The very bottom one is your survival needs. That’s food, water, shelter, etc. And if those are threatened, the ability to create safety and security, have relationships, generate esteem, and self-actualize to your higher calling — those crumble and go away. And because it’s so core to our ability to exist in a modern society, this means that money is emotional.

[00:02:55] It’s been said a lot that personal finance is personal first, and everything else is a distant second. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is probably the truest statement when it comes to personal finance that you’re going to hear on a regular basis. Money is emotional. Personal finance is personal. Let me just give you a framework to kind of picture this idea, because we want to believe that somehow inside of our core as to who we are, we’re this hyper logical being that we’re able to just think, come up with a good solution, and then we’re going to execute that solution, because we’re going to have some good discipline, aren’t we? We’re going to have some good discipline.

[00:03:33] But unfortunately, the logic brain isn’t the one in charge. See, if life was a car, your emotions showed up first and claimed the driver’s seat. And this is because, when you were born, your number one goal was to survive, and you survived by attaching to your parents. And this means that you were in touch with your emotions. Your emotions developed. Because that’s why babies coo, and they fuss, and they make faces. Because they’re desperately trying to connect, to attach to their caregivers, because for them, it is quite literally a life and death situation.

[00:04:08] Because of this, it means that our emotions are more core to us than our logic. You know, even just think about how animals react. That part of the brain is a much older part of the brain. The forebrain that we have, that was where our logic, and our personality, and all this other stuff that’s up here in the front of the head — that stuff developed much, much later. And that means that it’s a younger part. It’s subordinate to the older pieces. And that means your logic is not in charge. So what did logic do?

[00:04:42] Emotion showed up to the car that is your life. First, claimed the driver’s seat, logic called shotgun. Great. So now you’re going forward in life. Logic is not driving the car, but we all want to believe that it is, and we are told in society that our logic should be in charge of this car, but it’s not. And so, we will tell people when they’re trying to improve their life, you just need some discipline, little extra discipline, thrown in there. You know, just force it in there, get real draconian. Squeeze extra hard. And that almost always fails.

[00:05:14] This is why so many people, when they’re trying to lose weight or get healthier, they start diets and then they fail. Because what they did is they tried to use the logic to force their emotions, to drive the car of life a certain way. And it’s never going to work because it was never going to work in the first place. We’re not set up this way. This isn’t how humans function. It will work for part of the time, but then what’s gonna happen and what’s happened every time you’ve tried this tactic? Just think back to it.

[00:05:49] And I know you have because we all have. When you’ve tried it, you were fine for a while. You had some victories, you felt really good about yourself, and then you kind of stumbled and this like, had this rebound effect that puts you in a far worse place than where you started.

[00:06:06] My money story is exactly this. My wife and I could really stick to this draconian budget for maybe a month. If we were really lucky, six weeks, if we were really eating our Wheaties at that point. But the reality here is, is that as soon as something happened — flat tire on the car, when the baby gets sick, we have unexpected payment of any sort, we would stumble. And then pretty soon we’re further into debt because we had the rebound effect.

[00:06:33] I did this with my weight for years, trying to get my weight under control and being able to learn how to eat and nourish myself in a very good way that’s going to satisfy me and satisfy my goals. But unfortunately, I would be good for a while and then I would panic because food It’s also one of those things in the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which means it’s a survival thing, which means that food, like money, is emotional.

[00:06:58] We have tons of these. It’s not just money. It’s not just food. Food, addictions, porn. All those things fall into this exact same pattern. Anything where you’ve had the thought where you’re like, you know what, I’m going to be real disciplined and it’s going to be fine. Anytime you’ve had that thought, congratulations, you found one of these places where your logic brain is trying to force your emotions to do something because you’re doing those things, those habits, because it’s emotionally satisfying to you. You’re creating safety for yourself with that. The emotions are driving, and if the emotions have poor attachment, all logic can do is sit in the passenger seat desperately attempting to reason with a madman who’s driving the car. And the madman may listen to logic for a brief period of time, but it will not last.

[00:07:49] Now, I just used a technical term. I said if the emotions have poor attachment — so what’s attachment? I’ve done podcasts on this before. In fact, I even had an interview with the man that I learned attachment from, Mr. Duey Freeman — link to that show in the show notes. 10 out of 10 would recommend that you go listen to it.

[00:08:06] But here’s how the attachment cycle works. Babies, when they’re born, are completely dependent on their caretakers. And the number one thing that babies need to know on an embodied level is, is the world okay? Am I going to be okay? Is this world safe for me to exist in? Because if it’s not, the baby’s in trouble, and they’re going to remember that on an embodied level.

[00:08:29] And so, they then, in part of the cycle, if you think about it like a circle, that’s the top of the circle, and you go all the way down to maybe 3 o’clock — right there is some sort of bid for attachment. They coo, they fuss, they cry. There’s all sorts of — if you’ve spent any time around kids, you know exactly what I’m talking about. This is how babies get attention. They’re making a bid to have a need met. Whether it’s nourishment, motion, touch. Those things are critical to a baby’s survival. And that’s what they’re wanting.

[00:08:58] This is why they’ll fuss and you pick them up, and they stop fussing and you put them down, and they start fussing again. Well, it’s because their need was of touch. And when you pick them up, you satisfied the need, but it wasn’t done. If the need is then satisfied, which would be the bottom called six o’clock on the circle, then the baby is going to be like, the world’s okay. That’s nine o’clock. And then it goes back to the top where I have a need.

[00:09:23] We all are still on this. We continue to do it. The problem is, is that in the bid in between where the bid for a need is, to be satisfied and it actually being satisfied, that’s where the disruption happens. And when that happens, It leaves a lasting impression upon us. Sometimes we will develop addictions, and those addictions are typically to something else that’s satisfying the need.

[00:09:47] In the case of food — for myself, which is actually something that I’ve actually had to deal with throughout my life — and money falls very neatly into this category, because how do you procure food, with money — it means that I attached to the food because my need was for nourishment, and I was just handed food. But I didn’t get any of the other things that go with that. The joy of cooking, breaking bread with humanity, all this other stuff. All I had was the food in front of me. And typically when I was feeling extremely emotional, it was, well okay, you can have some ice cream or you can have some candy. I attached to that. But we attach to all sorts of things, things that numb us out, things that help us forget about the world for a while.

[00:10:28] It’s an attachment issue. And that’s what we’ve done with our money, because we’re using that as a way to get to that attachment. The two other ways out, and when you have a disruption, is somebody can shut down, or they go into a rage event. And this is exactly, it’s a story at the top of the show, that’s what happened, right? I had this bid for attention, and then it was disappointed by the fact that my wife wasn’t sticking to her agreement. And instead of stopping for a second and being able to take a breath, and be able to meet her in that moment, I just went off the attachment cycle into the rage event. And I did my best to hold it on in the inside, but as I said at the top of the show, I was not successful.

[00:11:08] But that’s where we’re at. That’s what we’re dealing with when we say, oh, we’re bad at money. And I say, well, you might be addicted to scarcity. This is what I’m talking about. Somewhere in this attachment cycle, we’ve tied money into something else. And we’ve attached to that thing instead of the actual relationships that we want to bring into the heart of personal finance.

[00:11:26] So let’s talk about some case studies that go into this type of emotional financial spending. Okay. I sketched out three broad categories that we can talk about.

[00:11:37] And the first one is you spend to feel better. There’s a couple of different ways that this occurs, and there’s more than just what I’m going to talk about today on the show. But for right now, just understand, these are some examples.

[00:11:48] The first one is, of course, retail therapy. This is where people will come into the coaching practice, they’ll sit with me — and I hear this from husbands a lot. I’ll bring up the word Amazon, and they’ll look at their wife with this like, judgmental incriminating look like, HAHAHA! You’re about to get it now. Which is not at all what I do in a coaching practice. My job is to hold space in a container so that we can actually heal some of these wounds so that we can rewrite and reimagine our money stories. But that’s what happens with Amazon. People go in, the website is designed to help you get a dopaminergic hit from buying stuff. The goods of course show up later, right?

[00:12:26] So I did the thing that I feel good in it. I have this anticipation. Then the goods show up, and it’s like Christmas because it’s a package. And even if I know what’s inside, I can’t see what’s inside. So it’s a mystery, and there’s going to be this moment of opening it up and I get an emotional hit from it.

[00:12:40] What’s happening here is I’m buying goods to trigger an emotional response. And this can happen at Target, this can happen at Walmart, this can happen at a gun store, you name it. This type of stuff happens all the time. We feel very good. Typically, we want to go spend that money when we’re not feeling good about something because — now think about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs again. If we have the triangle, at the very bottom are our survival needs, right? They’re resources. Food, water, shelter, sex, all those things, they’re resources for us. And so when I go use my credit card to go buy a bunch of stuff and then it shows up, I’m telling myself on some level, the resources are abundant. Therefore I can relax, and therefore the world is okay.

[00:13:23] Think about the attachment cycle. The baby gets its needs met and it goes, ah, the world’s okay. That’s exactly what we’re doing with retail therapy, and retailers know this. Like this was actually in the 1980s, something they would say like, go out and spend a little bit because you feel better. This is a very common thing that I think everyone who’s listening to this probably has had at least one time in their life.

[00:13:47] Another example of spending to feel better is when you are buying entrance into a brand or lifestyle. This is kind of the FOMO or fear of missing out. You’re buying things that allow you to signal that you’re part of the in group, that you have a tribe or a culture or whatever. This is why pickup trucks are so popular, because they say something on some level, even if it is in the person who’s buying his own head about who these people are and what type of lifestyle they’re living.

[00:14:16] This is where bumper stickers, the Salt Life bumper stickers, truck nuts — these are all identifiers of being in an in group. But then again on the other side of the spectrum, you see things like the Prius or electric cars. Teslas are a status symbol and a lifestyle brand. Cars in general are a choice on a very cultural level of this exact same type of thing. So we’re not immune to this in any way, shape, or form.

[00:14:40] But it also applies to things like clothing. I mean, if you go to a particular clothing store and you’re buying all the branded clothing. When you see someone else out in public, you can be like, oh I might have nothing in common with that person, but we do have this.

[00:14:55] You feel attached to it. This is why brands like Supreme really push their brand name and their brand culture and sell it like it’s a lifestyle. In order to live this awesome life, you just got to buy my product. You just have to have this thing.

[00:15:10] And I’m totally guilty of this. I’m sitting here. I typically wear a black shirt when I’m recording. That’s part of the, you know, what I do in terms of preparing myself to put on these shows. But normally I’m wearing a cutoffs cheap shirt. I take the sleeves off the shirt, and a lot of them are for various groups that I’m a part of. And I am — what am I when I’m wearing those shirts? I am a walking billboard for that thing. I’m advertising that I’m part of this group, and perhaps more importantly, you’re not.

[00:15:38] When we do this, put on a new t-shirt. Oh, gotta have a new t-shirt. Put on a new pair of shoes. Oh, gotta have new shoes. iPhones. How often do we see this with the iPhone and the new Apple Watch? They’re coming out with a new one every year, and it’s every year it’s like a thousand dollar entrance fee into the Apple ecosystem and lifestyle.

[00:15:57] This isn’t necessarily or inherently bad, but it’s important for us to understand exactly what we’re doing. Because after all, we should be in charge of our own lives.

[00:16:05] The second type of spending on an emotional level is spending to numb out. And this can be very, very broad. Eating food of a particular type, eating out, going out to restaurants, right, because this is a status symbol. This is a social event. Booze, drinking, drugs, weed, pot, porn, OnlyFans. All of these things.

[00:16:25] What’s happening here is that you’re attached to the thing and you’re using it to bypass around the idea of getting the need met. So remember the attachment cycle. I have a need, I made a big for the need, the need gets met, the world’s okay, continue, I have a need.

[00:16:41] So if I’m not going to get the need met, I need to do something. And so I’m going to use something else to bypass back to having needs because I’m going to skip that part of getting the need actually met and the world being okay. And this is exactly what you do with food. I’m feeling bad. Okay. So I go to Chick-Fil-A and I buy a chicken sandwich. I’m feeling lonely, so I fire up the computer, drop my pants around my ankles, get on OnlyFans, and I do the thing.

[00:17:08] These are things we’re doing to numb out. They’re not actually helping us or serving us. They’re just pushing this away, but they cost us money. And I’ve had clients who’ve come in where it’s like, okay well, let’s take a look at your budget. It looks pretty good, but we seem to be missing 1,000. Where did it go? And this is where I have to have a long conversation about this gentleman, about his OnlyFans subscriptions that he didn’t put on his budget because he didn’t want me to see it, hoping that he could fool the accountant. It’s not going to work.

[00:17:36] And I’m totally guilty of spending to numb out as well. When I was in graduate school, I used fried chicken sandwiches as an emotional crutch. You know, I was getting to school at 6 AM. I was leaving at 11 PM, six days a week. I was studying for the CPA exam, trying to get into the Big Four accounting firms and doing all this networking stuff. I mean, it was under a horrendous amount of stress. And so rather than actually caring for myself, I just used fried chicken sandwiches as a way to make my emotions be quiet and bypass around.

[00:18:07] This of course was a huge bone of contention because on the one hand, I was completely out of integrity because I was expecting my wife to be able to hold the line against the budget, but I could sneakily have this thing on the side and she was doing the exact same thing. Why? Because we were both following the same pattern of spending to numb out.

[00:18:26] A third type of emotional spending is spending out of avoidance. This might seem weird, but where this — you can see this come up, is people who are spending money because they aren’t paying attention to what they’re doing.

[00:18:38] These are people who sign up for a bunch of subscriptions and they renew every year, and they have no idea why. Or they’re the ones who are swiping their credit cards, but they don’t look at the statements. They just, ooh, minimum payment? And they pay the minimum payment. They maybe put a little extra to it. They don’t pay attention to what they’re doing. They’re not acting with intentionality. They’re acting with impulse. But again, go back to who’s driving the car. Logically, you’re going to want to pay attention. But emotionally, you’re not. Because it’s really hard and confronting to see that.

[00:19:05] So they’re moving on this idea that if I can’t see it, it’s not there. And if I do nothing, nothing can go wrong. Now, both of those statements are 100% false. If you can’t see it, that doesn’t mean anything about its existence, or the danger it’s presenting, and the risk that you’re taking on to continue this behavior pattern.

[00:19:25] And if I do nothing, nothing can go wrong — like, doing nothing is a strategy with a 100% failure rate. So it’s not a great strategy for helping move your life forward, but yet it’s something that a lot of people do for a variety of different reasons. Because they don’t want to feel stupid. They’re afraid that they don’t know what’s going on. That they’re too far behind. The list goes on.

[00:19:48] But what’s happening here is their emotions are taking the easy way out, right? They’ve figured out a way to shut down. This is, again, on the attachment cycle. You make a bid for a need. If it’s disrupted, you can go to the addiction, you can numb out, get attached to something else.

[00:20:04] Or you can shut down. This is the shutdown part of it. These are the people who you’ll be like, hey, let’s talk about budgets! And they start like, getting drowsy. What they’re — what’s happening there is they are disassociating from it. And this is not a moral failing on their part. This is an emotional response designed to protect them and keep them safe. Shaming and judging them is a great way to push them further into shutdown. So pay attention to that, both for yourself and for your partners if you’re in a committed partnership.

[00:20:34] So then the question becomes, how do we build better financial habits?

[00:20:39] Well, number one, breathe. You’re going to be okay. We can figure this out. There are known solutions to whatever problems you are dealing with. No matter how far in the hole you are, no matter how dim it might seem right now, there’s a way out. And that way out is going to involve some effort. It’s going to be scary. It’s going to be a lot of things, but I will promise you: while it won’t be easy, it will be worth it. But I need you to breathe for right now.

[00:21:06] Number two is you need to bring awareness to your money story. Emotional awareness is the key to all of these things. If you want better fitness, you want to eat better, you want better friends, better family, better finances, better reproduction. This is the key. Your emotions are the one driving the car, so let’s bring awareness to that. And when you’re having these feelings, rather than pushing them down or shoving them away, or ignoring them and hoping that it’s all going to be over soon, stop for a second and get real curious and real empathetic for yourself. And ask yourself the simple question, what is this serving? Who is benefited by this feeling and this emotional response? Is this the path for my goals? Where did I learn this? What is the resistance to moving forward? These are all part of our money stories. But our money stories, if they don’t serve us, are serving someone or something else. But it doesn’t have to be that way. So we start by breathing. And then we bring awareness to our money stories.

[00:22:09] And then number three, we start a conversation. How do you start a money conversation? Here’s how you start a money conversation. You create a budget.

[00:22:17] Budgets are a four-letter word in the personal finance world because you have two variants of people. Strict draconian budgets, or nope, don’t ever look at budgets because you are the bank and you will make it in this world. Just think and you can grow rich. And both of those perspectives are, in my view, wrong. They’re opposite ends of the same crazy spectrum.

[00:22:38] When you look at a budget as a conversation, this is where you get to actually start defining, what are my values? What are the things that are important to me and to my family unit? And if you’re in a partnership, what’s important to my partner? Do I really know them on this foundational level? This money story level? What are our values and is the money we’re spending and the money we’re earning in line with those values? Or am I overspending and I’m underpaid? Both are probably true.

[00:23:09] What are our goals? Where are we going with this? What’s really important? And this is where you get into like the avocado toast, and the grande latte from that Seattle-based coffee chain. People say, well you got to get rid of that latte. And I would say, well, do we? First off, if it fits in the budget, why would you get rid of it? Secondly, if that latte is what is emotionally satisfying you and is making you a better human, a better husband, father, community leader, whatever it is, then it’s a necessity and it’s not an optional thing.

[00:23:39] But again, if you’re sitting there, well, I cannot function because I’m too tired. Well, okay. The conversation isn’t the latte then, the conversation is your sleeping habits. But we’re starting a conversation, and we’re using our budget to do so.

[00:23:51] And what’s our plan? When was the last time, if you’re in a committed partnership, that you sat down and had a business meeting with your spouse? And in my interview with Duey, he talked about this with two lawyers who together were bringing in a half million dollars. If you were running a half million dollar business, would you have business meetings to get on the same page with everyone else involved with that business? You’re damn right you would.

[00:24:13] When he said that in an interview, my mind was just blown because it was like, oh my God, that’s exactly what’s going on! When I look at my income and my wife’s income and our expenses, it looks just like the financial statements that I audit. It’s the same thing. So why are we not having a business meeting?

[00:24:29] Now, are those business meetings easy? No. Are they challenging and confronting? Yes. Are they worth it? 100%. But the budgets are a conversation. They’re a place where you start, and when you approach it with curiosity, empathy, and just leave the judgment on the table, you’d be shocked at how far you can get.

[00:24:49] And number four, and the last one that I want to talk about today, is embracing the path and the process. This is a process, this is an infinite game. This is not a finite game where there’s a goal. We get the goal, we get the trophy, we go home and we’re done, we never have to do it again. That’s not how this works.

[00:25:04] This is an infinite game where the goal is to continue playing. The path is long and you are going to stumble repeatedly. When I started budgeting, it took me nine months to even get close. And even to this day, there are times where it’s just like, well what happened this month? It happens.

[00:25:21] The important thing here is not to sit there and say, well yeah, you’re bad, right? And you put that judgment on it and kick off a shame spiral. No, that’s not going to get you anywhere. Instead, to sit there and be empathetic and to say, what happened here, my brother? Where did we go wrong? How can we help each other? How can we support you in a way that makes this less likely to happen in the future? It’s not about perfection. It’s about a positive trend line that’s going up.

[00:25:49] And ladies and gentlemen, those stumbles are 100 percent normal. When I have clients who come into the coaching practice and they’re like, oh my God, Dylan, I have all these things going on and I don’t know where spending is, I’m afraid of my money. I can’t have a conversation with my partner. I always say to them, congratulations. You’re normal. You’ve made it. Completely average. Now let’s make you extraordinary.

[00:26:12] And I understand exactly how this process goes because I had to go back and make amends with my wife and my daughter after I was upset at my wife spending and my daughter having a snack. I had to understand that my emotional state and their emotional states are key because money is emotional and it’s tied to our survival. That what I was experiencing was a feel of existential dread. But that wasn’t an indication of who my wife was as a woman, and as a mother, and as my partner. Or my daughter, her worth. It was an expression of where my attachment issues were in relation to money.

[00:26:54] And I’ve worked very hard at being able to create these emotional safety for my wife and my kids. And now today, we are looking at our budgets as a conversation we’re having business meetings for Bain Incorporated — you know, my fictitious company that runs my life, and we’re looking at what serves us, and how we can connect to that on an emotional level. And I want that for each and every single one of you, too.

[00:27:23] Thanks for listening. The conversation doesn’t end here. Please share this 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.