Breaking Down Your Financial Habits

That's the World Cup after all, I would do the same. Thank you to you both. Well, when it comes to your money, your habits may reveal more than just your budget. From impulsive spending to people-pleasing purchases, experts say we all have a financial personality type. Money mindset expert Tiffany Carter joins us now, host of the Top 5 Money Podcast, Project Me. Tiffany, it's so good to have you here. When we talk about these personality types, they really center on myths we tell ourselves about money. Exactly, we all tell ourselves a story over and over again, and they can be inherited from generations, culturally, from the people we spend time around, and then those stories become beliefs, because in psychology it's called confirmation bias. We keep stacking the evidence that it's true, that rich people only get richer, that wanting more money is greedy. In order for me to make more money, I have to work harder, but I don't have any more time or energy to work harder, and then it keeps people stuck. I used to be one of those people. You just mentioned, I guess, one of the myths there, wanting more money makes you greedy, or you have to work harder in order to earn more. How do you dispel those in terms of what we all can do action-wise? So when it comes to being greedy, ask yourself the question, am I a selfish and greedy person? When you put money and resources, and let's say visibility and fame, onto a good person, they do good things with it. There's a lot of evidence of that. So what I say to people is, and you have to make yourself do it, it's not on autopilot, to look for contrary evidence. Look for the evidence that supports a belief that'll actually support your life and to grow. So when it comes to working harder, and that's the only way I'm gonna get ahead, but how am I gonna get ahead, because I don't have any time, but is that really true? Let's look at evidence of what other skills that I can learn in order to increase my value and to make more money with even the same amount of time. What we focus on grows, and so we need to tell ourselves a different story and stack new evidence. I call it an evidence bank, and that's the stuff that has changed my entire financial life around and many of my clients is by doing it, but you have to be disciplined mentally to do that, but it pays off. Yeah, you gotta have a money mindset, if you will. We also often hear and we express that money is emotional. You say not so much. Well, money comes from stuff typically from childhood. Money has a lot of stuff around it, as we've all seen, especially right now with the ups and downs of the economy. The fear makes us act irrationally. We go into an automatic stress response, a fight, flight, fear, or fawn around people, around places, around things, and around money, so we really have to learn how do we react when we get an unexpected bill? How do we react when we wanna go in and negotiate for a raise? How do we react when someone buys us something that we weren't expecting? And really looking at your responses to money, so it's more about that. Feelings aren't facts, but they can feel that way. It's our reactions that we need to address and start shifting if we want our money story to change. Finally here, let's address the theory that successful people or people who have a lot of money don't struggle with money. I love this one. Truly that saying of it's lonely at the top. There's truth in a lot of these sayings, whether it's someone who's rich in fame or they're rich in money, whatever it is, you just have a different story. For me personally and a lot of the clients I work with, when you end up making more money, you can become afraid to lose it because maybe you saw that growing up. You had a household where a parent would have money and then not have money, and so you have this disorganized attachment style to money and maybe you finally made it and you worked your butt off to finally get there and now you're so afraid to lose it. So now we've got the emotion and fear back in there. We've gotta work on something different. So that expression like different levels, a new devil or whatever it is. New levels, new devils, yes. Exactly, that is absolutely true. We're constantly growing and evolving and as your money increases, your emotional response to money and how you tend to that and how you manage that is so important because you'll lose it. And also the great late philosopher, Biggie Smalls, mo' money, mo' problems. We've heard that. And that could also be a myth too because people can be afraid to make more money because they don't want problems. I wouldn't say it's problems, but it creates different circumstances that have to be managed. And let me tell you, I'd rather have more money problems than not. Exactly, when people say, well, money doesn't buy happiness. I say, you know what? I never heard a poor person say, I like being poor to find my joy. I've never seen it on the opposite end. So Tiffany, I wish we had more time. Thank you for joining us and settling some of those myths and debates. We appreciate it. Thank you.