Episode 163: Wealth is a Mindset

[00:00:00] Introduction and Guest Introduction

[00:00:00] Autumn Carter: This is episode 163.

[00:00:05] Welcome to Wellness In Every Season, the podcast where we explore the rich tapestry of wellness in all of its forms. I'm your host, autumn Carter, a certified life coach, turn wellness coach, as well as a certified parenting coach dedicated to empowering others to rediscover their identity in their current season of life.

[00:00:24] My goal is to help you thrive, both as an individual and as a parent.

[00:00:28] Today I have with me Shang Saavedra, and I'm excited for this one because I actually picked up her book at the library a couple weeks ago. As you can tell, it has the very shiny library jacket. I reached out to her. I did not even get all the way through this, before we scheduled because I had her schedule so soon I jumped her in the front of line because I can make the rules my own show.

[00:00:52] I love this book and I was just telling her before we hit record that what I like about this [00:01:00] book, and I have had two other people come on to talk about money. And finances, who are money coaches, they talk about budget and she does not even start there, which is amazing. It actually is about mindset in her book and she calls herself, and I even wrote it down 'cause I read it in here in the book today, a mental health focused finance coach and she called herself that all the way here in the book, in the middle of the book.

[00:01:26] And I like that because. And we'll get through this. I even have a bunch of questions that are different from the normal questions in the show, so I hope that you feel like this is a breath of fresh air. But let's start with, and we'll get to know her as we go through these questions. So the first one I really wanna ask her is, and this we'll, we'll uncover why wealth is a mindset, is why do so many budgets fail?

[00:01:51] Why Budgets Fail: A Deeper Look

[00:01:51] Shang Saavedra: Thank you so much, autumn, for having me on here. And budgets fail because we often think that it's just a [00:02:00] matter of getting your math right. I even thought that for my own budget. And then when my own budget failed, I was like, oh no, this is not a math problem, is it?

[00:02:08] Because I know my math, there's gotta be something else. And that's when I started digging a little bit deeper into understanding why is it that we struggle so much with sticking to a quote unquote budget. And I realized, I was like, wait, the way that we think about money. And the way that we spend is often reflective of like a lot of deeper issues in our lives.

[00:02:30] Psychological, trauma-based even more recent situational things. And most of us don't realize that all those things are directly related to the way that we think about money. We don't even think that that's a money problem. So we misidentify where our money problems are coming from and that's why a lot of people think they're quote unquote bad at money when that's actually not the case at all.

[00:02:57] Autumn Carter: That reminds me, I'm totally gonna relate [00:03:00] this, so sorry if the sugars anybody, but this relates to weight, how we look at people and we're like, oh, well you're just fat because of this. Or you're skinny because this, you just need to change this. And realizing there's so much more going on.

[00:03:12] You can't judge a book exactly. That cover except this book because you actually got the words right. And that's so true. So many of us have so many feelings when we think about honey.

[00:03:29] Shang Saavedra: Okay.

[00:03:30] Autumn Carter: So many people have different feelings if you even put in all of your money into a spreadsheet or opening up the spreadsheet or as soon as you get paid or when bills come.

[00:03:38] There's so many emotions that we attach to these things.

[00:03:42] Shang Saavedra: Yeah.

[00:03:42] Autumn Carter: And you talk about in your book.

[00:03:45] Childhood and Money: Healing Wounds

[00:03:45] Autumn Carter: Why healing childhood wounds is often the first part of where we should start. Yes.

[00:03:51] Shang Saavedra: Can you talk

[00:03:52] Autumn Carter: about that more? And I know that, added more of your story with this because what I really liked about your book is that you really started by [00:04:00] talking about yourself and your story, which helped me relate, even though I am not my family's not immigrants, but I can still relate with the generational trauma part.

[00:04:11] Shang Saavedra: Of course. And that's the intent of the book is that it's written so that everybody can relate. I have a childhood revenge story. I, was an immigrant. I came to the US when I was 10 years old and I was small, like physically small. But mentally I was. Above average. And that just attracted a lot of bullying in my life.

[00:04:32] When you can't fight back, you stew. Like I read my childhood diaries from my middle school and high school years, I was stewing and so angry at being bullied and in so much pain that the only thing I knew at that time being a child was, okay, I'm gonna. Put all this pain and hurt into just being successful.

[00:04:54] 'cause I was like if I, can't fight back, I'm just gonna show them, I'm gonna show all my [00:05:00] beliefs that I'm gonna be better than them one day. That I'm gonna make more money, that I'm gonna be quote unquote more successful. Which I mean, it's great as a motivational factor, but I would not say it's the healthiest way to go about life is to revenge, live a revenge story.

[00:05:14] 'cause now that I think about it, I'm like. I don't remember the names of my bullies. I literally don't remember. I don't remember what they look like. I don't even know how to get in touch with them. So what's the point of living your life for revenge? Right? It's actually not very healthy. But that drove much of my early, young adulthood, like the early twenties and the way that I thought about money, and I had to heal from all of that to get to a healthier, better place with money where I was no longer relating to my childhood self or relating to the opinions of others, and instead just living my life and acknowledging and celebrating my own unique aspects and dreams.

[00:05:56] Autumn Carter: You also talked in your book about how [00:06:00] your parents, the way that they handled money affected you as an adult and how you had to undo the learning that you had and redo relearn some of the things they were trying to teach you and your journey through that.

[00:06:13] Generational Trauma and Money Behavior

[00:06:13] Autumn Carter: So can you talk about how generational trauma relates to money?

[00:06:18] And I hope by the end of this you guys need to pick up her book, even if it's at a library like it's thing. And um, there are links in the show notes of how to work with her one-on-one as a coach and everything else. So just sit back and relax and know that you can have the links when we're done.

[00:06:18] Shang Saavedra: Yeah.

[00:06:18] Let's talk about the three root causes of quote unquote bad money behavior. 'cause that's from having coached hundreds of people. Those were the patterns that I started seeing because I was like, what makes one person have a healthier relationship with money than the other? If we take away. Their intelligence and we take away their income.

[00:06:39] 'cause I realized it was not correlated with your intelligence. It was not correlated with your salary. And I boiled it down to three root causes, and you can relate to one, two, or all three of these. I definitely relate to two of these, um, at most times in my life. One is called feast and famine. One is called adverse events and one is [00:07:00] called scarce Immigrant.

[00:07:01] The feast and famine is a root cause where you grew up in a paycheck to paycheck household. It can be a big paycheck or small paycheck, doesn't matter. Your parents live paycheck to paycheck and you learn from them that basically there's no planning, there's no budgeting when it comes to money. You just spend it when you have it, and you go into debt when you don't.

[00:07:19] And so as an adult, these children who grew up in Feast of Famine often act very impulsively in their spending 'cause they don't know any better. They didn't see any other evidence of it. Second root cause is adverse events, which is where your parents or guardians used money and resources.

[00:07:38] Or to show her love to you. So the difference between the first two is that in feast and famine, a parent might throw a lavish birthday party. 'cause they love the child. But in the second one, in adverse events, the parents might only throw the party if the child met a behavioral standard acted the way they wanted, dressed the way they wanted, did something well at school, like it's [00:08:00] conditional.

[00:08:00] Right? And that really screws you up. As an adult, you learn from your childhood that you don't matter. You don't have value unless somebody told you you did. As an adult, instead of being grounded and confident in yourself, just because you are a human being who's, deserving of love, you start looking for external signs of affirmation and you spending would look like identity seeking spending.

[00:08:25] If you were told that you don't look good as a kid. You might spend a lot on aesthetics, clothing, et cetera. If your parents pushed you as a child. You don't matter unless you had good grades, then as an adult you might spend most of your time chasing achievement through work.

[00:08:44] And other ways that people do identity seeking, spending behavior, like the most nefarious that I've had to work with would be substance abuse because again, like you don't have a strong sense of self that you've healed from. Then the third root cause, the, scarce immigrant. I [00:09:00] wrote this for an immigrant audience because my publisher, is Asian American, and they asked me to, incorporate Asian American thoughts into the book as well.

[00:09:08] You can be from any country, but you go from a lower income country to a higher income country. So that's basically the truth for most people coming to the us. Your parents took the bigger risks of their lives. They're like, we left behind our family, our village, our language, our food major for my parents.

[00:09:24] They left behind their food. We give up everything. To come to the United States so that you daughter or son, you can have a better life than we did. But if we took that big risk, we don't want you to take that same risk. And so children of immigrants often grow up being told, take the safe path, become the doctor, lawyer, engineer, computer scientist, whatever, you know, Devo careers today.

[00:09:47] Don't put yourself on the line, don't stick out. Don't don't take those big risks. Don't try to run your own business. So these children, while financially are pretty well off, they don't take, they don't often take [00:10:00] the risks necessary to set up retirement. I often find that they don't invest. So it's called risk avoidant behavior.

[00:10:07] And again, if you see yourself in any of these root causes, one, two, or three, you're like, wow, that probably explains why I'm behaving some of the way that I do today around money.

[00:10:20] Autumn Carter: That totally makes sense. And where I just left off this morning, reading is on, so we'll go here and then we'll go back to the questions that I wrote down.

[00:10:29] But the types of debt, and if so, thinking about somebody who is immigrant and or it comes from an immigrant family and then they go into a huge amount of debt from medical school, from law school, from. Whatever degree path that requires a lot of school and a huge amount of debt, usually a big name college.

[00:10:55] I need to find the page. [00:11:00] I feel like I'm right here. Maybe I'm not. I know, but talking about that, if they are. Not investing. They invested in their career, now have a huge amount of debt and then they are not investing past that. That can be absolutely catastrophic, especially if they have an adverse event, like a huge medical scare that racks up even more debt.

[00:11:33] A divorce or any of those other reasons why people can go into debt. And I really like how you talked about Dave Ramsey and I have never gravitated towards him because of how much. Shame is put around debt. And I really like how you speak to that. That really helps me love you more. That's why I say, I'm like, oh, she gets me.

[00:11:59] And [00:12:00] realizing that there are other people who feel the exact same way about that. I had a hard time, going back to school, staying in school because. I was taking on debt to go to school, but debt's a bad thing, but I also need to get my education to get myself mm-hmm. In their head. And there's this kind of guilt spiral.

[00:12:19] So I really loved that you talked about that.

[00:12:23] Shang Saavedra: Yeah. And I do often find that people who take on professional school debt, so we're talking six figures of debt at this point for like dental school, medical school, vet school, law school. Is that. The, first thing that they do is try to pay down the debt as rapidly as possible, which is, I mean, it's not a bad thing, but depending on the interest rate of their debts, and I know today we're in a high interest rate, so doesn't apply as much, but I, I had seen people with grad school loans with interest rates as low as three to 4%.

[00:12:56] And I was like, that's great. You're paying these off. But your investments could be [00:13:00] growing eight to 10% on the market. So the productivity of every extra dollar that you have, either you pay down a loan and you save three to 4% interest, or you invest that extra dollar and you make eight to 10% interest, which means from the profits of that like investment, you can also still pay down the debt and still have more money at the end of the day.

[00:13:20] And that's a huge switch. Mindset that yes, I can show it to you in math, but what I'm trying to overcome is really decades of information or behavior or learned behavior that these people had from their childhood that is like super difficult to unwind because it's so ingrained in your brain from childhood.

[00:13:43] Autumn Carter: It just makes me think about how there, there's this couple. And one wants to do this with money. Money's dirty and the other one wants to save it for a rainy day. And then they married me and my husband how I'm just like, money's dirty. I don't really [00:14:00] wanna keep it so that I've gotten to the point where I just ignore it so that he can save it.

[00:14:05] But I also wanna hurry up and pay off loans that we have without. Doing the investing. So it's like, oh, hey, you're talking to me. I'm one of those people and I wanna pay off our house and, pay off these bigger things. And he is like, or we could invest. Know that we don't plan on retiring into this house.

[00:14:27] We plan on downsizing. We have four children, so we are definitely gonna downsize once they're out of the house. We don't need this big house that we'll need all these repairs and everything else. We want a different lifestyle when we're done and we wanna be able to pass this house and especially this family friendly neighborhood off to somebody else and then move into.

[00:14:46] 55 plus, or you know, one of those types of communities where there's Yeah. Even less yard. A little, a lot less house, little less yard actually. 'cause we have dogs and all these amenities and chance to get to know other people who are [00:15:00] in our phase of life. Mm-hmm. So you're definitely speaking to both of us right there.

[00:15:07] Yeah. And it is funny because I'm sure you deal with a, you've had so many clients who are, like, my husband and I, were, they're polar opposites. With money

[00:15:13] Shang Saavedra: that's actually more common. I think it's more common for any married couple to have two very different point of views on money than it is for a married couple.

[00:15:23] To have identical views, like my husband and I are very similar, but I would consider that marriage dynamic to be in a minority.

[00:15:30] Autumn Carter: And it helps that we are really good at communicating so that we can come to that middle ground on so many things. And yeah, that's the reason why we're hitting 16 years.

[00:15:40] Yay. Congrats. Yeah, I'm excited. Let's see. We already hit some of my questions. Okay.

[00:15:49] Mental Health and Wealth: The Connection

[00:15:49] Autumn Carter: So this one, and I feel like this one will be a big one with this being a Wellness Pod podcast, is why do mental health and wealth correlate? Like, how does, how does that fit together here?

[00:16:01] Shang Saavedra: That's probably my favorite question.

[00:16:02] Seriously. Think about it this way. What are the skills that you need to manage money? You need some math skills. It's not none. You need to be able to think strategically ahead. Very importantly, yeah, you have to be able to take the emotion outta the situation, which is very hard,

[00:16:19] and you also have to weigh uncertainty. Like, it's not like, okay, if you make this decision, we know for sure that it's gonna happen. There's always uncertainty in life. The bulk of these decisions fall under the skillset called executive function and the part of our brain. Controls executive function is the prefrontal cortex.

[00:16:39] It's one of the last parts of our brain that matures, or, or most people, the prefrontal cortex doesn't mature until our mid-twenties. So it's also no surprise that oftentimes young adults graduating from high school and college have no idea what to do with money because they don't even have the brain skills to to, know that if they didn't learn it from their parents.

[00:16:59] And [00:17:00] also, it's the first part of our brain that goes. When we suffer from mental health issues, very broadly speaking, when you suffer from depression, anxiety, and even other things, mood disorders, a DHD, et cetera, anything that affects our brain, and I really think about our brain as an organ, not our personality.

[00:17:19] It's an organ like any other part of her body, and the organ can get sick. And when an organ gets sick, it's not functioning at its best. Right? And science has shown. When we have mental health symptoms, the brain has to conserve energy and then so it pulls back from the prefrontal cortex and puts more blood into other areas of the brain that are more emotional.

[00:17:47] So the limbic symptom is the emotional part of the brain, or even in worst case scenario, like when people are on an extreme duress, you're in survival mode. That's the quote unquote reptilian part of our brain. The stem of our brain. That's your fight. [00:18:00] And flight, all that stuff. When your brain is operating at those systems, it actually doesn't have the ability to engage with all the executive function skills and needs to build wealth.

[00:18:15] You're in survival mode, so literally your brain isn't firing in the right areas, and that was the breakthrough. I figured out in my coaching, 'cause I was like, I have clients who have advanced degrees who are making more than a hundred thousand dollars. How is it that they're cycling in and out of credit card debt over and over and struggling to stick to a budget?

[00:18:36] The ding, ding, ding moment was one client, one day just no. Like, oh yeah, I'm going to my therapist. I was like, oh, what for? She was like, oh, I have depression. And I was like, oh my gosh. It's clicking. I think it has to do with her depression. It doesn't have anything to do with her intellect. So I started, and I didn't use to ask this, but now at the beginning of when I work at anyone, I'm like.

[00:18:56] Tell me if you're comfortable, are there, you know, signs of [00:19:00] mental health that I should consider and I list out a bunch of symptoms and stuff and more than once I've been able to convince people to go to therapy or go to see a psychiatrist see what's going on, get some treatment and people come back transformed like, wow, like my brain just works a lot better.

[00:19:17] And they feel like they're in a better place to work on their finances. And that's why I'm mental health first. Budget second. 'cause you can't even budget if you're not healthy mentally.

[00:19:30] Autumn Carter: So here's my question that I've been wondering in this, and I don't know if you talk about this further on in the book.

[00:19:35] You started out being a money coach and what did you end up doing to get. You started grasping that there's mental health in here, what did you end up doing for yourself to better help them?

[00:19:46] Shang Saavedra: Yeah. Primarily was making sure that I was understanding how everything worked scientifically.

[00:19:52] So I actually read a lot of research on PubMed, tried to correlate one study to another, and it is [00:20:00] difficult because there just isn't funding and there aren't very. Good designs for doing longitudinal studies that involve mental health and financial wealth. Like people just haven't made that connection.

[00:20:11] And when people do, typically they do it in psych labs with like a trade off decision. Like okay, I give you, you know, $5, whatcha gonna do with it? That's, it's so micro it can't get the macro. So I've just had to pull from a lot of different resources to come up with. Almost like a framework that I think makes sense.

[00:20:31] Also tested it on myself. I was the Guinea pig. I have gone through mental health ups and downs as well throughout my life. And then I notice, for example, when things aren't going mentally well. My grip on my finances loosens as well. And then I'm like, okay, what do I do to get back to where I'd like to be?

[00:20:50] And then I incorporate some of that into, my teaching as well. And so it's been an evolving, methodology for sure.

[00:20:57] Autumn Carter: Yeah, because I, when you started [00:21:00] out saying in the book that you started with just spreadsheets, just here's the raw numbers. I want you to be checking in with me and working on this

[00:21:10] going that direction and finding out that hardly anybody was doing it. And then when you dug in, you really discovered this mental health piece and it totally makes sense. I noticed that there was an unraveling for you and then a raveling of, okay, I need to take all this apart and then come at it from this other angle.

[00:21:29] And it was just, it's been fascinating for me as a coach, but I did not pick up this book for that reason. I just picked it up for myself and I wanted to work more on my finances. Okay.

[00:21:41] Understanding Financial Triggers

[00:21:45] Autumn Carter: What was the next one? Oh, I really like this one. So I wanna show off, image for those that are watching over video.

[00:21:49] I wrote down the page number. 58, 59. Yes. On page 59, it might be easier on, she shows it a bunch of different ways, which was super helpful [00:22:00] with examples. But she has this circle and it is a pie graph with three parts and there's the trigger, that action and the reward. Can you talk about this because I felt like this was such a light bulb moment for me.

[00:22:15] Shang Saavedra: Yeah. So going back to our childhood, we establish most of our habits when we are children. Why? Because in our childhood, we're mostly developing the emotional part of our brain, right? And emotions are super, super strong. Emotions drive most of our decisions if we don't, you know, have control over our emotions, that prefrontal cortex, that doesn't happen until your mid twenties.

[00:22:40] Think back to, your first experience with someone saying no to you or your first experience with shame, your first experience with a broken heart, all of those things. What happens after that? What you choose to do or what you end up doing after that usually establishes the pattern.

[00:22:58] So what you did in your childhood ends up [00:23:00] becoming a pattern in adulthood, and that's called trigger action reward. It actually just talks about how our brain chemistry. Behavioral paths become loops. And this is discussed in other books like Atomic Habits by James Clear the Power of Habit by Charles Jo Hagg that I actually quote in my book as well.

[00:23:19] They discuss the neuroscience behind this. For any financial decision you make, it's often caused by a trigger. A trigger can be a really strong emotion or a really strong. Situation. Emotion can be anger, loneliness, sadness, stress. A situation could be divorce or breakup.

[00:23:42] Death of a loved one, chronic illness, like really, really stressful situations. That puts us into a panic mode, right? We're like, oh my God, I'm not feeling great. I need to get out of this. I need to feel better. That's the trigger. Our action is naturally, we don't wanna feel [00:24:00] bad. We don't want to be in this state of panic.

[00:24:01] We don't want to be unhappy or uncomfortable Naturally, our bodies and brains seek comfort and the action moves us to a comfort, usually a childhood comfort that we know works in the meantime to make us feel better. Speaking of, for example, people who are struggling with body weight, body image, oftentimes the binge eating or the.

[00:24:26] The, like, non-consistent eating patterns are because they're trying to self-soothe, like you're self-soothing. So the action is your self-soothing financially. And then the reward is that you temporarily feel better, but it doesn't address the underlying issue. So to give a very easy example for my own life, my trigger in my twenties is loneliness.

[00:24:49] Growing up, an only child growing up, being bullied, being alone. It just scares the crap out of me. I just hate it. I never wanna be alone. I never wanna be alone with my thoughts. I want to [00:25:00] have friends and community. So whenever I'm alone, I'm like, I gotta get with somebody. I gotta hang out. I have to have fun and in my twenties be merely due to the fact I lived in big cities.

[00:25:13] Hanging out to me always meant you go out and eat out. Preferably dinner. But if you think about it, if every time I'm lonely, I go and eat out with a friend, it adds up a lot, right? So yes, I go and eat out. I feel great. I saw a friend, but I'm out like 50, a hundred dollars now, depending on what, whatever you order, and if I really wanted to save money, this is not gonna be long-term sustainable.

[00:25:37] The trigger, the psychological need that I was trying to address loneliness. That doesn't change, by the way. We all have very legitimate psychological, emotional needs that need to be addressed, that need to be comforted, that need to be healed. But it's the action that I tell people. The action is what you can change, so your trigger's never gonna go away.

[00:25:57] I'm never gonna not feel lonely. You know, it's a [00:26:00] universal emotion. But instead of asking my friend to go out for a fancy dinner in Manhattan, I do, I can do a phone call, I can catch up with a dessert ice cream. I can invite them over to my house for tea, a lot less than the original budget. And the reward is, I still feel like it had community and friendship, but it also saved a lot of money.

[00:26:19] That's how we're gonna break your childhood cycles. Your childhood trigger action reward is we change the action and then the action allows you to get into long-term rewards and eventually it will lessen the impact of the trigger on your financial behavior.

[00:26:36] Autumn Carter: I feel like if anyone's on the fence about getting your book right there sells it.

[00:26:43] That part was the reason why I had to set it down for a week and a half, just because I had to really have those triggers and be like, oh, okay. Now I know. Because when I first was reading the book, I'm like, what are my triggers? I don't know. So I needed to have them happen. Yes. To be able [00:27:00] to say, okay, I'm seeing this now.

[00:27:01] It's very, very helpful.

[00:27:05] The Importance of Financial Education for Children

[00:27:05] Autumn Carter: So my next question, and this really goes along with the trigger action reward part is, and you talked about this and I was going yes, so true that children are not taught in school about money. We are taught about it in the weird, word problems.

[00:27:28] Shang Saavedra: Oh yes, that's about it. Sally has $5.

[00:27:30] Autumn Carter: Yes. And

[00:27:31] Shang Saavedra: Tommy has 10.

[00:27:32] Autumn Carter: But beyond that, we're not. And how do we make this a life skill for our children, especially knowing that we're healing our own trauma around money and we're trying not to pass it on to our children. So how,

[00:27:34] Teaching Children Healthy Money Habits

[00:27:34] Autumn Carter: what are your recommendations for teaching children healthy money habits?

[00:27:39] Shang Saavedra: Our children are watching us.

[00:27:41] Autumn Carter: They're watching us.

[00:27:42] Shang Saavedra: Yes. And, are they listening? No, not always. Our actions speak louder than our words. I found that to always be true because I think back to, okay, how is it that I was able to budget as an adult because I physically saw my parents budget using a.

[00:27:58] Paper notepad. They didn't [00:28:00] use Excel back then. They didn't know how to use Excel. They had a notepad where they wrote down their expenses every day and left it on the kitchen table so the two of them can take a look at it and balance their, bank account. And my parents lived a frugal life. Now I'm gonna be a mom of three.

[00:28:14] I'm gonna have my third child in in September. When your children don't have their prefrontal cortex developed as an adult.

[00:28:21] It's our responsibility as parents to teach our children emotional control. Impulse control. Because they won't be able to do it until kind of their mid twenties fully.

[00:28:32] And oftentimes people say, oh, that child grew up so spoiled. And how do children grow up? Spoiled oftentimes because their parents gave into every emotional impulse. That the child had. Now I know toddlers are a terror, so I don't start there. But once my children can add subtract, I start with teaching them the very basics of money, buy stuff and stuff has different prices attached to [00:29:00] it, so you need more or less over time.

[00:29:03] And with this I do give my five-year-old a very, very basic allowance where I teach him, I'm like, you have three choices with this money. Give, save, spend in that order. I made spend last so that he recognizes that money can take on different roles and he has three little jars. I make it all physical.

[00:29:22] It's just all dollar bills that he can divide into the three jars to give save. Actually the other day he's like, mommy, haven't spent from.

[00:29:40] Um, orange County is a very wealthy, um, community. Okay. My husband and I start over

[00:29:40] Autumn Carter: again. It's, I haven't spent, and then it freaked out again.

[00:29:42] Shang Saavedra: Okay. So my, my, my kid says he hasn't spent from his spend jar. I'm like, that's great. I'm very proud.

[00:29:50] Modeling Frugal Behavior for Kids

[00:29:50] Shang Saavedra: Then the next thing that my husband and I do, which is countercultural because we live in a very wealthy county, orange County's relatively wealthy to the rest of the country, is that we on purpose, despite having a lot of money, live a frugal life.

[00:30:04] Why? Because I don't think it's necessary for our children to know. At this point, how much money we have, but I think it's necessary for them to learn all the adulting skills that they're going to need to figure out their own situation. So we do chores. I cook, we all clean, we make the kids clean up. We don't have cleaners, we don't have, we don't order out all that much.

[00:30:27] Like they actually see that there's work that goes into maintaining a house. And. For, that reason. It's not that my husband, I cannot afford it, but instead of like, if our kids don't see this happen growing up, then how are they gonna know how to take care of a house when they're older?

[00:30:50] Allowance and Chores for Financial Education

[00:30:50] Shang Saavedra: So that, that's yes, there's the teaching involved with the allowance, and I think by the time.

[00:30:56] My child learns exponents. That's when I can also introduce [00:31:00] the concept of investing in debt. 'cause they, they use exponential math.

[00:31:04] The Importance of Financial Transparency

[00:31:04] Shang Saavedra: But yeah, it's it's, the kids watching you daily, are they seeing you incorporate financial behaviors as part of adulting? 'cause I think the biggest difference in the way my parents brought me up versus other parents.

[00:31:22] My parents never thought that money was taboo to talk about with their kids. They're just like, it's a subject that Sean's gonna learn about. She's gonna hear about it at the dinner table, and she's gonna learn it as a skill. And when we take away the emotions we have around money, like, oh, money's bad, or money's good.

[00:31:38] No money's, a resource. You either use it in a good way or use it in a bad way, but money is neutral as a subject to begin with, and you just have to learn about it. And because my parents took a very academic approach to it and then they modeled frugal behavior, I think that really impacted me growing up, regardless of how, you know, I ended up it just left a huge impression on me.[00:32:00] 

[00:32:01] Autumn Carter: You answered the question about allowance that I was gonna ask next, which I really love. And we are the same way. We can afford to have people come and clean our house. And I say afford, like we would need to take from somewhere else. We don't want to.

[00:32:16] We can afford to do all of these things. We can afford to have somebody come and take care of our lawn. The point is exactly what you made. We want our children to know, first of all, how to do those things for when they exit our house, because they are not going to have the financial resources we have when they first leave.

[00:32:32] Yep. And we took on debt because we tried to live the lifestyle that my husband grew up with right after or during college. Doesn't work that way. So we want our children to have a really good work ethic, know how to do these things, I have found that when our children are helping me clean up, they don't make as awful like big and deep of messes because they know they're gonna have to clean it up.

[00:32:57] And then one thing that we're starting to implement, because our [00:33:00] children are the perfect age for this, is they have their chores that they do, which are super minimal chores, but if they wanna earn money on top of that, they do extra chores. Yes. And there's monetary value associated with that.

[00:33:14] Shang Saavedra: I'm fully in alignment with that.

[00:33:15] I think. Everyone has chores, minimum that they don't get paid for, but there are extra chores that they can do to get more money and my kids are still a little bit too young to understand that, but that's also my expectation once they get to the right age.

[00:33:29] Autumn Carter: Yeah, and our oldest is starting to ask those questions and he's the only one who wants to do the extra chores for money.

[00:33:35] It's not our other kids. And he's 10, so it's been really fun. And he tried mowing the lawn for money and he's like, nevermind, that's too hard. The gas lawn mower. And it does have, the. Self repel or whatever that's called.

[00:33:51] Shang Saavedra: Heavy without it.

[00:33:52] Autumn Carter: Yeah. But it's still making those turns like it's even been a workout for me.

[00:33:56] When I have to manhandle it, well woman handle it. [00:34:00] And then there's times where I am putting it, I am backing up while still holding onto the self repel. So making it harder for myself, my goodness. There are so many skills that I did not know when I left home because I wasn't taught them. So we really try to have our kids involved with that stuff.

[00:34:16] The next thing is having them understand money because. We live a cushy enough lifestyle that they're like, oh, well we can just get another one. 'cause we broke it.

[00:34:27] Shang Saavedra: You have to.

[00:34:27] Autumn Carter: That's not the point.

[00:34:28] Shang Saavedra: Yeah. The point

[00:34:29] Autumn Carter: When you buy things, there is kind of that investment too, where you want it to last.

[00:34:33] You're not going to just mistreat things.

[00:34:36] Shang Saavedra: Yeah. A house needs maintenance, cars needs maintenance, and the better you take care of something, the less likely you're gonna have to keep replacing it.

[00:34:44] Autumn Carter: And even something as simple as the kitchen gadget, they're helping us, they're using while helping us in the kitchen.

[00:34:47] Save My Sense: The Journey Begins

[00:34:47] Autumn Carter: So, tell us about Save My Sense, you have this as your background and it sounds like from reading your book, this is where you really started out on social media with giving tips and tricks. So [00:35:00] tell us more about that.

[00:35:02] Shang Saavedra: Yeah. At first it was just literally me documenting my frugal expenses and. This was probably back in 2016 or 2017, a couple of people just asked me to help them come up with budgets to help them pay off debt. Like it was super, super basic at the time, and it wasn't until like 2018 when I started really having these epiphanies around mental health.

[00:35:27] And then I started making more content around that. And then also I shared, I did share that my husband and I, had the ability to. Basically be work optional in our thirties. And I guess that's like a very, very unheard of by most people. So the, the content and and stuff grew over time. Now these days there's a lot of people doing the same thing that I do.

[00:35:49] You know, it's not that I consider myself all that unique, but I think what makes me so happy to. To run Save. My sense is it is a business. I am the [00:36:00] boss. I don't report to any other bosses. And I was the, one of the two of us between me and my husband, I was the one that got too fed up with a corporate career and I walked away from it because I could.

[00:36:11] And that's just incredible that that that was what we eventually worked towards. And now I can be default parent. I can be there for all my children and basically. The safe. My sense work is always around my children's schedule, but I'm number one mom, which makes me just so happy that I can, I can do this for my kids, and not have to worry about the financial side.

[00:36:33] Autumn Carter: It is a big deal. I have that same blessing and it makes a huge difference. Sometimes it's stressful because I can't run away to work like my husband can. Not that he's doing it in that, that. With that mindset by any means, but just that idea of being able to just disconnect once in a while.

[00:36:52] Sounds great.

[00:36:57] Achieving Financial Independence

[00:36:57] Autumn Carter: So tell us more about you going work optional. That was actually going to be my next question

[00:37:00] Shang Saavedra: because both my husband and I. Already had frugal tendencies when we got married. He was actually, he's the brainchild behind all this, and I credit him in the book.

[00:37:10] He said, Chung, what do you think about the idea of us? Living off of one income and saving the other. I was like, for what reason? Because back then I still was living my, you know, revenge door. In my mind I'm like, okay, is it to get rich? 'cause I, yeah. That's cool. I'm cool with that.

[00:37:22] Autumn Carter: New York lifestyle

[00:37:23] Shang Saavedra: I was in New York and I just wanted to show off to everyone. Hey, I made it in New York. I'm like, you know, making six figures in a well-known company. My husband's like. It's not about getting rich, it's about giving us options, when we become parents. 'cause inevitably children will bring in more costs and also put a strain on our career ladders, especially if you need to take time off.

[00:37:44] He was speaking more to me with the expectation that I would need maternity leave and all of that. I was like, fine, okay, we'll do that. But it wasn't tangible because for many years we also struggled with infertility, so we had to much later than we would have liked, but [00:38:00] because. There were no kids in the picture and we just kept working and working.

[00:38:03] I, at some point, had two jobs and everything that we didn't spend into investments, and this was throughout the teens, the 20 teens where the market was pretty good throughout. At some point it's like, whoa, let me do the calculations. 'cause I got this little proprietary model that I had.

[00:38:24] I was like, we can live off of this forever. We actually don't need to work. And that was when I was age 31. My husband was age 36 and it just blew my mind. I was like, is anyone else doing this looking around? I was like, no. 'cause I recall being in so much shame at the time over how frugal we were.

[00:38:41] I was like, yes, we had this goal, but nobody else was doing this. Like my friends were living way more fabulous lives. They were traveling way more, eating out way more than we were. And I think I, at one point I must have written somewhere 'cause I recall it being so strong in my mind. I said I don't, I feel like I'm so poor [00:39:00] compared to my friends.

[00:39:01] Even I had that like false belief that somehow your spending is reflective of your wealth. When in fact it's the opposite. It's what you don't spend that ends up being your wealth. And nowadays, I realize, I was like, yeah, how many of my friends are able to exit the rat race because they can, not all them can.

[00:39:20] And that's what speaks to just how extraordinary early retirement is. Now I don't pressure anybody else. Who visits Save my sense.com to be like, you gotta do this. It's, not for everybody, but I was like, everything that I learned in the process, everything that I absorbed about my own mental health and also how far you can go if you put out, a really big, scary goal.

[00:39:43] This can be used to accelerate people's financial goals. One segment is I do coach a lot of people in their forties and fifties who feel like they need to catch up on retirement. So if you need to catch up, you have to save more rapidly. [00:40:00] Also, there are many people that I teach where it's not just about them.

[00:40:05] They need to care for kids, and they also need to take care of aging parents who themselves don't have a retirement. How you can afford caring for three generations at once. The sandwich generation. That's hard. So many of the skills that I gained can also be applied to situations that have nothing to do with early retirement, but have a lot to do with money.

[00:40:27] Challenges of Divorce and Financial Strain

[00:40:27] Autumn Carter: You even have several in your book where you, where they are divorced and specifically divorced females. And why do they get the shorter end of the stick?

[00:40:36] Shang Saavedra: Oh, God. Compared to men, it's the worst. It's the worst. First off, unless you're in a state that starts out with 50 50 custody, most of the time the female's granted more custody.

[00:40:46] That means you have to have the bigger house. Which dries up most of your costs. You're now no longer a two income household. You're one income household trying to live their lifestyle of a two income household. And child support is never enough to make up for that. You're housing your kids, you're [00:41:00] clothing them, you're feeding them.

[00:41:01] You're still the one getting them to school while you're also trying to work at the same time. And God forbid you're divorce bills with a lawyer probably cleaned out all your savings. A lot of people come to me with tens of thousands of lawyer bills on credit card 'cause they couldn't do it. And then.

[00:41:17] In many other times. The females in the relationship often took a career break to become, stay at home mom. Then you start from negative 'cause like you don't even have a job coming outta divorce and how are you gonna do that with a ton of credit card debt? So yeah, divorce is one of the most devastating financial events in anybody's lives, but in particular to women.

[00:41:38] And I have a huge spot where like I, I focus a lot of energy on helping people in those situations.

[00:41:45] Autumn Carter: Yeah, and that was in the debt portion that I'm reading right now.

[00:41:48] Shang Saavedra: Yeah,

[00:41:49] Autumn Carter: talking about that. That was the first one. And then if I remember right, the second one was then if there is a medical, anything that puts you into debt.

[00:41:58] And I have somebody [00:42:00] that I'm working with right now where she is exactly where you're talking about, she's going through the divorce, she thinks she's gonna keep her house and. I don't have the heart to tell her she's not going to because she just needs to get through the divorce right now because her ex is awful.

[00:42:18] Yeah. Capital letters narcissist. And it's just seeing what she's going through, knowing that when she gets to the other side, it's going to be easier because right now he is withholding all of the money. Their house is on the verge of foreclosure and everything else, and it's really can be catastrophic.

[00:42:40] And of course it's affecting her mental health. So it makes sense why this goes together. Here's one that I really liked is. And this is a topic that is important to me as a wellness coach.

[00:42:53] Balancing Career and Identity

[00:42:53] Autumn Carter: It's in chapter six of your book, and it is, your career is not your identity. Tell me more about that so that these listeners can just grasp it further.

[00:43:03] Because so many people that are struggling with wellness don't understand this bit.

[00:43:09] Shang Saavedra: Yeah. Well that was my own problem because I was on a high paying career, I started thinking that somehow. This just may be better than other people. This is my revenge story, right? But that's not true. If you think about it, oftentimes it's literally birth luck that allows some of us to get into higher paying jobs than others.

[00:43:27] Some of us just are born with. Better brains that suit to higher paying jobs. Is that fair? Absolutely not. Does that make the higher paid person a better person? Absolutely not. And when I realized that, I was like, okay, first of all, Sean, stop sounding so privileged. So that was one step, but also I realized that when you stop seeing your career as an extension of your own identity, it actually allows you to get wealthier faster.

[00:43:53] Why? Because I almost saw myself like a mercenary where I was like, if [00:44:00] who I am doesn't really matter when it comes to my career, I'm just gonna pick something that I'm really good at. That makes a lot of money because it's gonna help me reach my personal goals faster. So I was like, I don't care who I worked for, to some degree, I never did anything.

[00:44:15] I'm always above the books. But it also meant that I was like, look, if I didn't like a job. Or if I didn't like the boss or didn't like the culture of a company that has no bearing on how I view myself, just gotta get through it and then find the next opportunity. And that allowed me to job hop and not stay loyal to any company that was overly toxic or just a bad environment to be in, and continue to grow my career that way.

[00:44:40] Yeah, I challenge a lot of people where I'm like, if you put too much of your identity into your career, it can actually hurt you financially as well.

[00:44:49] Autumn Carter: I know that my dad had his own business growing up and that was his identity, and he should have parted ways with that. Decades before he did. He [00:45:00] waited until I was graduating high school.

[00:45:02] I was like. Seriously. It would've been nice to have you around all these years. And then he is like, Hey, I'm finally available, and I had my own life at that point. I wasn't even living at home. It still bothers me, obviously, for me to even be saying it. And I know that I have workaholic tendencies because of being raised.

[00:45:23] With my dad and I would have my employers telling me like, you need to chill. Like you need to take a break. You need to take a step back. Because I was doing the work of two or three people. And they were bosses that cared about me. It wasn't me as an employee, needed to chill. It was me as a person needed to chill work that I was providing, but.

[00:45:41] They knew that eventually I was gonna burn myself out with how much I was working. Yeah. And they could tell that it was affecting relationships. This was especially when I was dating before. Mm-hmm. Um, right around the time that I started dating my husband, one boss in particular, so he was somebody who had taken me under his wing and it was mentoring me and he is you really need to chill out.

[00:45:59] [00:46:00] And then I had others tell me that. So obviously it was a cycle that I needed to learn.

[00:46:05] Navigating Feast or Famine in Business

[00:46:05] Autumn Carter: And then this is for people who are either business owners or mm-hmm. Um, have a job like real estate agent where they earn commissions. Yeah. So they have this feast or famine. What do you recommend for people who have those cycles?

[00:46:21] Shang Saavedra: Well, it's good to know that you're going into a business where it's feast or famine. Myself included, owning a business is not for the faint of heart. My friends, like, if you want steady income, you go corporate you, become a W2 worker. But obviously the freedom of being your own boss is very enticing, as much as you can.

[00:46:39] I actually tell most business owners to also create a rainy day fund for their business. For example, if your business is very cyclical, when I used to be a wedding photographer, nobody got married in winter, in New England, god forbid, you freeze your toes off. So usually winter is the lowest amount of like money coming in.

[00:46:57] But if that money was your income [00:47:00] and you're trying to pay bills off of it, then what you have to do is in the summer when most of your revenue comes in, you gotta save some of that to get you through winter. Otherwise, I've seen so many wedding photographers do this where in the winter they put everything on credit card debt and then they pay it off in the summer.

[00:47:14] I'm like, you just paid unnecessary interest. For other businesses, and again, it depends on what you do. I'm a business owner who always thinks profits above growth. I was like, we get a lot of pressure. From social media, from business growth strategists, for example, where you're like, scale, scale. You gotta get through six figures, seven figures, eight figures in sales, but they, nobody talks about what do seven and eight figure sales translate to your bottom line?

[00:47:43] What does that actually mean? Does you have to have a team to get to seven and eight figures in sales? That means you're still paying out salaries to other people. And what's your goal? At the end of the day, if you want your income to be stable. You don't need to be a seven or eight figure entrepreneur to do that.

[00:47:59] You need to be [00:48:00] profitable. And being profitable oftentimes means working on your operations and lowering your cost of good sold and that, that's stuff that I learned back when I was in consulting you have to determine first and foremost.

[00:48:12] What's your goal? What's a level of earnings that would make you happy enough and then optimize towards that and then knowing that growth doesn't necessarily mean more profits.

[00:48:25] Time is Money: A Balanced Perspective

[00:48:25] Autumn Carter: So here's my question that's coming to mind that has to do with this. My dad always said this growing up and I took it to the extreme in the, well, he's very extreme in his thinking to begin with, but his was time is money.

[00:48:41] And taking that in a business sense and then applying that to somebody who doesn't have a business. So me at that time I, buy the quicker thing. Cool. Now, here's my credit card statement. So, [00:49:00] how does time work with money? Like how would you unpack this statement?

[00:49:06] Shang Saavedra: Time

[00:49:06] Autumn Carter: is money.

[00:49:07] Shang Saavedra: Well, you trade your time to make money.

[00:49:09] So that's income. I see my time as a resource that has to be spent. And where do I wanna spend most of my time? For me right now, it's with my family, my children, they're my number one. Where people get this wrong. I tell people, I'm like, the time that you save by hiring out is that time you're working.

[00:49:30] Like earning income to justify that expense or is it not Many people spend money during time when they're not making income, and that's the downside of hiring out.

[00:49:38] Autumn Carter: Totally makes sense. And the reason why this came up for me, and I remembered this, I have not remembered that for a long time. I've overcome that drama, but when you were talking about how feast or famine and.

[00:49:47] Just time came in there when you were talking about your family and how you chose this lifestyle to spend more time with your family. You're reiterating that again during this, this part, and it just made sense to me that there are different times where time is more important and where money is more important and it's that, [00:50:00] balance of both.

[00:50:01] Shang Saavedra: Yeah,

[00:50:02] Autumn Carter: absolutely.

[00:50:02] Final Thoughts and Encouragement

[00:50:13] Autumn Carter: And I really like how in the book you talk about how. You don't have everybody saved to like this specific number because it is so individual. Some people feel better with a bigger financial buffer. Some people really gravitate towards investing.

[00:50:21] And this is why just a spreadsheet doesn't work. You need to coach the person in really understanding what are their hopes, what are their fears, what, mental things come up around money. So I really appreciate you taking the time. Of course, I will make sure and have all these links in the show notes.

[00:50:39] So check those out. Is there anything that you wanna leave us with?

[00:50:43] Shang Saavedra: Do it scare but do it anyway?

[00:50:45] Autumn Carter: Oh, I love it and we'll talk to you soon. Thank you so much.

[00:50:50] Shang Saavedra: You're welcome. Bye bye.

[00:50:53] Autumn Carter: Thanks for tuning into this week's episode. I am your host, autumn Carter, a certified life coach dedicated to [00:51:00] empowering individuals to rediscover their identity, find balance, miss chaos, strengthen relationships, and pursue their dreams. My goal is to help people thrive in every aspect of their lives. I hope today's discussion inspired you and offered valuable insights.

[00:51:16] Stay engaged with our wellness community by signing up for my newsletter at wellness and every season.com/free resources. When you join, you'll have the option to receive a five day guide called Awaken and Unwind, five Days to Mastering Your Mornings and Evenings, along with Free Guides, special offers on my programs, practical tips, personal stories.

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[00:51:58] So please spread the word [00:52:00] about our podcast and about our newsletter. Thank you for being a part of our podcast community. I look forward to continuing our conversation, sharing stories and exploring wellness in all of this aspects. Take care until our next episode. You can also work with me one-on-one or on demand through one of my programs by visiting wellness in every season.com/programs.

[00:52:26] One last thing to cover the show legally, I'm a certified life coach giving general advice, so think of this, this more as a self-help book. This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. I am not a licensed therapist, so this podcast shouldn't be taken as a replacement for professional guidance from a doctor or therapist.

[00:52:46] If you want personal one-on-one coaching from a certified life and parenting coach, go to my website, wellness and every season.com. That's where you can get personalized coaching from me for you. See you in next week's episode.