Episode 357: Self-Reflection About Money with Amanda Clayman

Summary

Forever35 Podcast - Episode 357: Self-Reflection About Money with Amanda Clayman

Release Date: June 16, 2025

Hosts: Doree Shafrir & Elise Hu
Guest: Amanda Clayman, Financial Therapist

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Introduction

In Episode 357 of Forever35, hosts Doree Shafrir and Elise Hu delve into the nuanced relationship many have with money, featuring expert insights from Amanda Clayman, a renowned financial therapist. This episode, part of their ongoing "Money Month," explores how our internal perceptions and societal changes influence our financial behaviors and decisions.

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Guest Introduction

Amanda Clayman reappears on the show after her initial appearance in 2018. Recognized for her groundbreaking work in financial therapy, Amanda helps individuals decode the emotional and psychological factors that shape their financial choices. She is also the author of The $19,000 Haircut and hosts the podcast Emotional Investment.

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Self-Care and Financial Wellness

The conversation begins with Amanda sharing her current self-care practices, emphasizing the importance of somatic therapies. She mentions a technique she’s recently adopted:

"I'm literally just learning how to shake my body. It looks super weird, but boy, let me tell you, it is effective for a kind of physiological reset. Just 30 seconds." [14:20]

Amanda highlights how physical movements can help reset the body's stress responses, a crucial aspect of maintaining overall financial wellness.

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Impact of Societal Changes on Financial Attitudes

Amanda reflects on the societal shifts intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced many to reassess their financial priorities and security measures:

"A lot of people are evaluating the trade-offs they've made in the name of security and safety... What is the system? Helps us develop and change and refine these systems." [19:22]

She discusses how the unpredictability revealed by the pandemic has led individuals to question long-held financial strategies and seek more meaningful and secure financial practices.

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Trends in Financial Management: Loud Budgeting vs. Budget-Free Approaches

The hosts and Amanda explore emerging trends in financial management, particularly among younger generations:

Loud Budgeting

Amanda explains "loud budgeting," a trend where individuals publicly share their budgeting practices to increase accountability and visibility:

"Loud budgeting is a way of really bringing visibility and accountability to our financial choices and making that public." [23:48]

While Amanda appreciates the motivational aspects of this trend, she cautions against the potential for financial practices to become mere performances for social media recognition.

Budget-Free Financial Management

Contrastingly, Amanda discusses the philosophy advocated by financial writer Dana Miranda, which promotes a budget-free approach:

"I really like the ethos of that. We cannot be paying attention to money sometimes." [26:32]

Amanda supports this approach for individuals who experience anxiety around constant financial monitoring, emphasizing the importance of aligning financial management with personal well-being.

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Understanding Money Dysmorphia

A significant portion of the episode addresses "money dysmorphia," a concept Amanda describes as a distorted perception of one's financial status:

"Money dysmorphia is about a fundamental misreading of a situation that from the outside looks one way and from your own personal experience feels very different." [28:05]

She compares it to body dysmorphia, where individuals have an inaccurate perception of their body image. Amanda explains that money dysmorphia involves intense emotional responses to one’s financial situation, which may not align with actual financial data. Her approach focuses on addressing the emotional roots of these perceptions rather than the financial figures themselves.

"It's solving an emotional problem, not a financial problem." [28:28]

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Listener Questions

1. Teaching Kids About Money:

A listener named Emily from Nashville inquires about best practices for teaching children financial responsibility. Amanda recommends Ron Lieber's The Opposite of Spoiled, highlighting its effective strategies for instilling good financial values in children.

"Ron is a great writer... The purpose of allowance is so that they learn how to make decisions with money." [37:24]

She discusses different models of allowance—whether it's tied to chores or given as a means for children to manage their own money—and emphasizes the importance of aligning the approach with family values and financial goals.

2. Prioritizing Financial Goals:

Another listener question addresses the dilemma of choosing between aggressively paying off a mortgage before retirement versus saving for a child’s college education. Amanda advises:

"It's something that would be outside of my training and licensure to answer as a financial question... it's about priorities in terms of what is the most important outcome that we want to prepare for." [41:27]

She suggests creating models to visualize the long-term impacts of each choice, facilitating informed decisions that balance both immediate and future financial needs.

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Conclusion

Amanda Clayman's insights in this episode offer a profound exploration of the emotional dimensions of financial decision-making. By understanding concepts like money dysmorphia and evaluating contemporary financial trends, listeners are better equipped to cultivate a healthier relationship with money.

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Connect with Amanda Clayman

For those interested in learning more about Amanda’s work in financial therapy and emotional investment:

• Website: amandaclayman.com
• Podcast: Emotional Investment
• Courses: Available on LinkedIn Learning

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Stay Connected with Forever35:

• Website: forever35podcast.com
• Instagram: @forever35podcast
• Patreon: patreon.com/forever35
• Email: [e-mail]
• Phone: [phone]

Tune in next week for more insightful discussions on self-care and personal growth.

Transcript

[Dory Shafrir]

Hey listeners and fellow beauty lovers. It's Dory Shafrier and Elise Hu from Forever 35. And on our show we spend a lot of time talking about beauty news, products and treatments. But we also know that one of the real secrets to beauty is feeling as good on the inside as you do on the outside.

[Elise Hu]

Absolutely.

[Dory Shafrir]

And that's why we're excited to tell you about a new podcast from Jonathan Van Ness. You probably know them best as the beauty and grooming expert from Queer Eye, but on their podcast, Getting Better, they're exploring ways we can all become more confident, happy, productive and invigorated. In other words, just a little bit better. Jonathan has been publishing their podcast Getting Curious for years, but this past March, their podcast relaunched as Getting Better. Now the show is focusing more on personal growth and wellness, and they're speaking to guests like Dan Harris, Gretchen Rubin, and Dr. Wendy Suzuki. So, you know, just a few of the greats. Getting Better is available now. Wherever you get your podcasts, give it a listen. You know, I love linen in the summer, but I don't always love linen prices, except when I'm shopping at quint. They have 100% European linen shorts and dresses from just $30. And they also have amazing summery organic cotton items. I got my hands on their 100% organic cotton poplin pintuck maxi skirt. That is amazing. I'm going to be living in this skirt all summer. It is super high quality. It feels just like some much more expensive, very similar skirts. But in general, their clothes are just timeless, lightweight and far more elevated than anything else at this price. And it finally feels like my wardrobe matches my standards. Speaking of standards, Quince does doesn't sacrifice safety or ethics for price. They only work with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes. By working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middlemen, Quince gives you luxury without the markup. Give your summer closet an upgrade with quince. Go to quince.com forever35 for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U I-N-C dashe.com Quint SL Forever 35 to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quint.com Forever35 hello and welcome to Forever35, a podcast about the things we do to take care of ourselves. I'm Dory Shafrir.

[Elise Hu]

And I'm Elise Hu and we are two friends who like to talk a lot about serums.

[Dory Shafrir]

And we're still doing money month we're still in it.

[Elise Hu]

I've learned a lot from Money Month because as it turns out I didn't know much.

[Amanda Clayman]

Yeah.

[Elise Hu]

Why might. Well my finances would indicate. Good.

[Dory Shafrir]

I feel like you're so good with money. Like you, you have like a plan and stuff.

[Elise Hu]

Well, I have somebody who helps manage like my retirement funds.

[Dory Shafrir]

Right.

[Elise Hu]

But I don't have a budget. But as it turns out from Dana Miranda, you don't need a budget.

[Dory Shafrir]

You don't need a budget. That's true.

[Elise Hu]

I do a lot of intuitive spending. I just didn't know that's what it was called. So now I can be like, I just do intuitive spending, folks. It's not that I just wait until I run out of money. I just, I'm spending intuitively.

[Dory Shafrir]

That's really funny. I mean fair.

[Elise Hu]

I did, I did do some things early on in my career that my mother insisted on because my mother is pretty good like with money and just planning in general. And she's just a long term thinker and I'm not as much of a long term thinker. And she, she was like, oh, your companies, your, your companies do retirement match. You must maximize your retirement match. So what? So whatever it was, even when I was making $14,900 a year, I would do my like 6% or whatever retirement so that it could be matched. And that, that has grown over time. So that's helped. That's helpful though these days it's like, will we ever be able to retire? I don't know.

[Dory Shafrir]

I mean, right. What is retirement? You know, I will say my, my parents are like long past retirement age and my dad has been like semi retired. He's now full but he has, he has been semi retired for quite some time. But my mom who just turned 75 still works and she doesn't show any signs of like slowing down. She teaches, she teaches at the college level. Like she teaches like intro writing classes and like public speaking and stuff like that. And so she is an adjunct at two different schools in Boston. And like last semester she taught five classes. I'm like like mom, what are you doing? She's like, well I, I'm at this school from 8 to 9:30, then I get on the T and I go to the other school from noon to three. That and I'm like what? Like oh my God. And you know, I like, I don't know the ins and outs of my parents finances. I'm sure it is nice that it is. I'm sure it is helpful that she's working I think she just like needs to be kept busy.

[Elise Hu]

So she enjoys it. She's not. Yeah, she's not working because.

[Amanda Clayman]

Right.

[Dory Shafrir]

Yes. And I am like, okay, that's, that's inspiring. But also I feel like when I'm 75, I will be working because I have to work. Like, not because I feel like it.

[Elise Hu]

I have an aunt who's kind of in that situation because like she divorces can really bankrupt you or they can be kind of value destroying. And then so she got divorced I think later in life and as a result is now in her 70s and like working at a Menards. Menards is the store that Tim Walls made famous because it's in the Midwest. It's kind of like a hardware store. And yeah, she's like, she has to though. And so it's unfortunate but good for her, you know. So it's very apt that we're doing money month, of course, and we are going to have two more guests. So we'll have this week we're going to have Amanda Clayman, who we will introduce more formally. Coming. Amanda Klayman is a financial therapist who has been on forever 35, like back when this show started.

[Dory Shafrir]

Yes.

[Elise Hu]

And then next week we have the host of Yokiro Dinero who's going to take a lot of yalls questions. You have sent in a lot of questions about money and finances and we're really excited to have her. So my big life update is that all the kids are home because school is out. Yes. And for this week, this week we're doing, I guess it now has a name, but it's what we did as kids all summer previously when we weren't at camp, which was kid rotting. You were just at home and like figured it out for yourself. And then we're bored and so that's what my kids are doing. And yesterday Rob and Luna made this elaborate fort under the piano. So I have this parlor grand piano. So it's enough space for Luna to like cover it up, put couch cushions all around it. They took some boogie boards to make other walls. So there's boogie boards and couch cushions all around and then a giant sheet over the piano. And so she slept last night under the piano and she brought in snacks. She brought in a little reading lamp and I think she's going to try and sleep under there again.

[Dory Shafrir]

That's really cute.

[Elise Hu]

Well, Rob thought so too. But I came in, I was gone all day and Rob was with Luna after school because it was the last day of school on Tuesday and I was gone because of the other kids. And I come home, and the living room looks like a tornado just went through it. And everything is all over the place except the fort. And I have no idea what happened. And I was, like, going to react unfavorably, but Rob comes out, and he was like, check out our fort. Be positive. Be positive. He's like, she's really excited to show you. She's really excited. Be positive. Because he knew I was going to be like, what happened? But she was. She came. She, like, gave me the whole tour, and she said that it was gonna be comfortable because they put two yoga mats underneath the sheet that she was gonna sleep on under the piano, so it wouldn't be. It would be soft enough to sleep comfortably. And then my other update is that I have to prepare myself before I. Before I share this. I wanted to text you, but I figured I would just save it.

[Dory Shafrir]

Oh, my God. Okay.

[Amanda Clayman]

I.

[Elise Hu]

Yesterday morning, I. I awoke to Issa coming upstairs. So I'm the only bedroom that's upstairs, and Issa comes upstairs, and she usually doesn't. Usually I go downstairs in the morning first, and she's in her room getting ready or whatever, but she came upstairs, and she's like, mommy. And we're all asleep, and she's holding her. She's holding her laundry hamper that has handles on both sides. So this is, like, where she throws her dirty clothes. And it's kind of soft. It's like a basket, basically. So she's. She's holding it, and she was like, abe brought me a bird. She's like, I think it's dead in there. Can you look?

[Dory Shafrir]

Oh, no.

[Elise Hu]

I started screaming, and then I put, like. Tears are running down my face. I'm screaming. I put the pillow over my head, and Rob is like, she doesn't like birds. She doesn't like birds. He's like, I'm getting up. Let me take care of it. And they go downstairs. And then she comes back to me because Rob's now dealing with this bird that may or may not be dead. Not sure. And he said. Was like. Well, at first he brought it in his mouth, and I thought it was a piece of tree bark or something. And so then I got really close to it, and it was flapping.

[Dory Shafrir]

Oh, no.

[Elise Hu]

This is twice in what, a week? Twice in two weeks. This is too much. So I have been Googling about this, and I really need a collar with a bell, because that way.

[Dory Shafrir]

Because that'll scare away the birds.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah.

[Dory Shafrir]

Or that'll tell the birds that he's coming.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, because he's getting too good at this. What if he's trying to bring in a bird for each member of the family?

[Dory Shafrir]

I mean, it sounds like that's what he's doing. He's going through each of you. He's like, okay, check that one off. He's got his little checklist. I mean, the thing that's so, like, sweet and funny is, like, he really does think he's, like, bringing you gifts. Like, he's like, they'll love this one.

[Elise Hu]

So that wraps up my update, and let's get on with the show.

[Dory Shafrir]

Wow. Okay. Should we. Should we introduce our guest?

[Elise Hu]

Yeah.

[Dory Shafrir]

Amanda is widely recognized as a leader in the field of financial therapy, and her. Her approach as a clinician is to decode how thoughts, feelings, and associations shape our financial choices and identify how those patterns both serve and limit us. And she really gets into a lot of that on this episode. And her passion for financial wellness began with a dramatic styling mishap, which she writes about in the $19,000 haircut. And she also hosts a podcast called Emotional Investment. Okay, so before we get to her, just a reminder that Our website is forever35podcast.com. We have links to everything we and our guests mention on the show. And we're on Instagram at february35podcast. Our patreon is at patreon.com forever35. Our favorite products are at shopmy us, slash forever35. And our newsletter is at forever35podcast.com Also, if you want to reach us, we have a voicemail and a text number at 781-591-0390. And our email is forever35podcastmail.com and here is Amanda. Amanda Clayman. Welcome back to Forever 35. It's so great to see you again.

[Amanda Clayman]

Thank you for having me. I am excited to be here.

[Dory Shafrir]

Yeah, we were just chatting before we started recording about how you were last on the show in 2018, which I cannot believe it's been that long. So. Yeah. So welcome back.

[Amanda Clayman]

Thank you. Luckily, we're all cured. Money is not an issue for any of us.

[Elise Hu]

Totally.

[Dory Shafrir]

Well, as I think you know, we start off by asking our guests, even guests, for our theme months, about a self care practice that they have. So is there anything that you're doing right now that you would consider kind of taking care of yourself?

[Amanda Clayman]

Yes, I'm getting really, really into somatic therapies and starting to incorporate that more in my work. But as we say in the clinical field, like, every therapist is their own. First patient. And my technique that I've been really into lately is literally shaking, like vigorously shaking out my arms and legs to kind of complete an adrenaline cycle. Like I'm in that fight orf flight mode. Our, our body sends kind of blood flow to our limbs and stuff. So we get all the energy in our body. And literally just learning how to like shake my body. It looks super weird, but boy, let me tell you, it is effective for a kind of physiological reset. Just 30 seconds.

[Elise Hu]

That's great. Okay, let's take a break and we will be right back.

[Dory Shafrir]

You know, I love linen in the summer, but I don't always love linen prices, except when I'm shopping at Quints. They have a hundred percent European linen shorts and dresses from just $30. And they also have amazing summery organic cotton items. I got my hands on their 100 organic cotton poplin pintuck maxi skirt. That is amazing. I'm going to be living in this skirt all summer. It is super high quality. It feels just like some much more expensive, very similar skirts. But in general, their clothes are just timeless, lightweight and far more elevated than anything else at this price. And it finally feels like my wardrobe matches my standards. Speaking of standards, Quince doesn't sacrifice safety or ethics for price. They only work with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes. By working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middlemen, Quince gives you luxury without the markup. Give your summer closet an upgrade with quince. Go to quince.com forever35 for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com forever35 to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com forever35. You know, I always say that aging is a privilege, because it is. But you know, I also want to support my skin as best as I can. And one skin does this at a scientifically quantifiable level because their proprietary OS1 peptide is the first ingredient proven to switch off the damaged senescent cells that cause lines, wrinkles and thin crepey skin. So I start with their Prep facial cleanser, which I really like. It's. It's not drying. I find a lot of facial cleansers to be drying. It's not drying, but it also like gets makeup off. It's really nice. Another one of their products that I've been loving is their OS one eye topical supplement. I feel like a lot of eye creams are sort of dubious, but this one is not. Like you can see results from this eye cream. It's very smoothing and yeah, it's just, it's like a really nice product. And I will say the other product that I'm really liking is their spf. It's really great and I feel like it's better than a lot of other sunscreens at actually like blocking sun. So I'm a fan.

[Elise Hu]

Great. Yeah.

[Dory Shafrir]

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[Amanda Clayman]

It's been a really interesting ride in that I feel like I have a front row seat to kind of like changes in society in many ways. I think that a lot of people are, are reviewing the trade offs that they have made in the name of security and safety because I think what we're finding is that the world is a little, the world is maybe less predictable and stable than we thought it would be just a tad. And so some of us who are, who really who have a deep need for that feeling of safety, predictability, control, we might have been willing to make some pretty deep sacrifices maybe for creative freedom or you know, pursuing our passion in the name of something that was a little bit more of kind of guaranteed stability. And when people discovered, as so many of us did in Covid, that stable is not necessarily as stable as you think it is, that there was a real soul searching that happened after that about what of my life, what of my time? Am I sacrificing out of a craving for safety that may or may not be true. How do I want to reckon with that in terms of what I choose to do with this, this one precious life?

[Elise Hu]

So much of our economic precarity or precariousness has to do with a social safety net that isn't there anymore or is deteriorating. So how do you all reckon with that? Because you Know, as a therapist, I'm sure you're not wanting to give individuals like more responsibility, but then yet they should feel, I'm, I'm assuming you're wanting them to feel a certain amount of agency as well.

[Amanda Clayman]

Yes. And it's, it's an interesting, like it's a dilemma that, that shows up in my client's life. Obviously it's, it's a dilemma that really shows up in my life too. Like the people that I was working with really changed when it went from me having an employer to me having a self pay based practice.

[Elise Hu]

Interesting.

[Amanda Clayman]

And there was a point where I started to go like, oh, am I just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic? Like this is starting to feel like I'm. Maybe we're operating in a different part of the system than I had been before. And that led to a certain amount of kind of like soul searching and am I doing what it is that I want to do? And I think that that's part of a general consciousness raising that's happening for a lot of us now where there is no easy answer of is this a systemic problem, is this a personal problem or challenge. I find myself doing a lot of like, meditating on complexity and just kind of like situating myself in what we can describe as a complex adaptive system where all of these pieces are kind of moving with each other and our society is evolving at this really fast rate. I think that the most honest thing that we can do is sit in that inquiry. So I think asking ourselves like, what is the system? Helps us develop and change and refine these systems. But, but we also, I think, need to give ourselves some grace and give each other some grace in terms of really how, how limited we are in our ability to enact, you know, real leverage in some of these big systems. We want things to be different, but we don't know how to get there. And whether or not we can figure out how to get there. The fact of the matter is to not be there right now is a painful experience. And it's important to tell ourselves the truth about just when we're in a painful part of the experience. I hope that makes sense. It felt like a really long answer.

[Elise Hu]

I like that.

[Dory Shafrir]

I'm wondering what you saw or what you are seeing in your clients in terms of how the pandemic changed the way that they were approaching and thinking about money. And you know, were there changes that they made in their financial lives during the pandemic and has that sort of stuck or was the pandemic like this just moment in time that existed in and of itself.

[Amanda Clayman]

No, I. I think that. I think that the pandemic really surfaced a lot of things and kind of intensified for many of us. What may have been a simmering trend suddenly what might have been a kind of irritation that was like, at a 4 or 5, became like, we don't have to do this. We could make a different choice. And it's just like revealing how many things that we thought were fixed and unchangeable about life. To see those shifts so radically in our environment, I think just really opened up a lot of possibility for people. So where maybe they had been in kind of an enduring. I just put my head down, I deal with it. Life is, um, either that became no longer a 4 or 5 and it became an 8 or 9 in terms of, like, the pain that it was causing us, or we just saw like, I don't have to live with this four or five. I can make a different choice. And that was, you know, it got a lot of people, I think, out of what had been some. Some embedded patterns in their lives.

[Elise Hu]

Amanda, there's a few schools of thought or various trends in thinking about finances these days. One of them is a Gen Z kind of tik trend called loud budgeting. So what is it and should people do it?

[Amanda Clayman]

So I'm. I like this. Everything is like, on a spectrum, right? So there are things that I like about it and things that make me go. Loud budgeting is a way of really like, like taking this part of our lives that has been quiet, private. We make a lot of these decisions internally and we never share them with even our most intimate partners. So when we are. This loud budgeting trend is a way of really bringing visibility and accountability to our financial choices and making that public talking about it. If we have something that we are, you know, that's maybe a harder behavior, like maybe we're trying to curb spending on a certain area of our lifestyle. We. We put that out in front of people so that if we go back on our intention, we have to deal with the, the disson of, like, I said that I want this thing, and then I behaved in a different way, and I'm kind of paying a little bit of a shame penalty. Like, we can. We can engage in these new practices as a way of shifting our behavior, as a way of shifting our society. And I think that's amazing. Where I worry about it is like anything that we do authentically and share with. With the world. And this is just kind of like the world of social media. I think anything that, that we share authentically with an audience has the tendency to become a performance for attention. And I see that. I would even say in just personal finance news and content, there's a lot of really important personal finance news, but there are also a lot of folks who need to create personal finance content. Some of that content is going to be really helpful news, but some of it is just content for the sake of content. And so when you're a content creator, anytime there's a piece where it's, you know, it's supposed to be about healthy money. One of the things about healthy money is that we shouldn't be paying attention to it all the time.

[Elise Hu]

So just to jump off on that idea of how we pay attention to money, maybe too much. So on the flip side, we interviewed Dana Miranda, who is a personal finance writer, but kind of an anti personal finance writer because she advocates for a budget free approach because she would argue that financial education, a lot of the personal finance bros out there are failing to meet the needs of marginalized folks and wants to shift the conversation away from kind of that diet culture mindset or scarcity mindset that we are now mapping onto budgeting and our finances. What do you think about that?

[Amanda Clayman]

I'm a big fan of not thinking about money. In fact, my, my biggest pitch to people a lot of times in terms of like why it's important to pay attention to money is like we need to pay attention to money sometimes so that we cannot be paying attention to money sometimes. So, so I really like the, the ethos of that. I, I tend to think of all of these different like actions and tools as they have a domain where they work. And sometimes that domain is like a certain kind of personality. There are people who love to look at their, their numbers who find that very soothing, that is their, their temperament. There are other people who have such an anxious conditioned response to money that it's always going to set off that, that sympathetic nervous system, that fight or flight response. So I'm, I'm hesitant to kind of say that there's, there's one way that's going to work for all of us, but it is like it's one of the things that I, I really try to teach people as part of the financial wellness work is that like we want to be paying attention to money or managing money in service of something embedded in our life or embedded in our value system. Money. Money isn't valuable just in and of itself. So coming, coming to that place of why Also helps us know when we've gotten there, but we also can sort of leave that structure behind when it's no longer serving us.

[Dory Shafrir]

I also want to talk about money dysmorphia, which I, I had heard as a term and then there have been some articles about it recently. And a friend texted me an article about it recently and said, I think I have this. Can you talk a little bit about money dysmorphia and how you kind of help your clients navigate it and work through it?

[Amanda Clayman]

Money dysmorphia, just like the term body dysmorphia, which we may be a little bit more familiar, it's about a fundamental misreading of a situation that from the outside kind of looks one way and from your own personal experience feels very different. So with body dysmorphia, you know, we feel bigger or smaller than our body appears, maybe to others. And with money dysmorphia, similarly, it's like we have a felt experience of what our money is, the state of our money. Whether that is, I am living in abundance. I don't have to be careful about my resources because I have so many to. Oh my gosh, I am living in such profound scarcity. I need to hold on to every dollar so tightly. These are coming from attitudinal positions. And when we are behaving with money, whether it's like sending money out into the universe, woo hoo, yolo, or whether we're grasp every dollar, the, the financial behavior, and this is the important piece is solving an emotional problem, not a financial problem. Does that make sense? Similarly, you know, when we see disordered eating, that is a way of, of, of managing our mood state when we are, are so dysregulated. And it's, it's clearly like, you know, we, we get. I'll go back to the complexity again. We live in a super complex world. We have very kind of like beautiful internal systems, human, you know, our human biology for managing this life. But like it's not calibrated to the year 2025 where advanced monkeys living on a rock, hurling through space at a million miles an hour. So it's in some ways it's not that serious. Although, you know, obviously we want to, we want to live a meaningful life.

[Elise Hu]

But going back to what we were talking about earlier, I think just awareness and even knowing about this concept is helpful. It's a start.

[Amanda Clayman]

And that's the piece too where if you're reading an article or you're hearing the term money dysmorphia, and it really resonates. That is an opportunity then to do some reality testing where we go and look at our money. We want to be able to have a balance between being able to look at, understand and evaluate the data, the information relevant to our personal financial situation and to balance that then and to ask ourselves to engage in that inquiry of like, huh? I'm noticing that my reaction seems to be really intense around this and I feel like there's a problem. But I've been looking at my numbers for an hour now and like, if I'm being honest, I'm not. Not everything's perfect, but like, I'm not seeing any big red flags the way that I was supposed to. What let me be curious about what it is in my relationship with money that tends to really just go like an arrow to the heart. We tap into the opportunity that comes when money surfaces. This personal stuff to be able to say, oh, let me understand myself better. Let me take this as a way to be curious about what's going in and we can find opportunities to heal and grow.

[Dory Shafrir]

So we're just going to take a short break and we will be right back.

[Elise Hu]

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[Dory Shafrir]

We meet patients wherever they live. During a house call, she found Jack had an issue. Jack's blood pressure was dangerously high.

[Elise Hu]

It was 217 over 110. So they got Jack to the hospital and got him the help he needed. He had had a stent placed in.

[Dory Shafrir]

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[Elise Hu]

If it wasn't for my guardian angel.

[Dory Shafrir]

I wouldn't be here.

[Elise Hu]

Hear more stories like Jack's at unitedhealthcare.com benefits, features and or devices vary by plan, area limitation and exclusions apply. So we can have messy relationships with money individually and then we enter into relationships, whether it's business relationships, work relationship, romantic relationships, and then things get even more complicated and complex. So I know everybody's situation is individual and we're about to get to some questions from our listeners, but are there frameworks that you recommend relying upon or a set of kind of, or a heuristic or anything that you go back to when coaching folks through their relationships with each other. When finances end up being kind of a central conflict point.

[Amanda Clayman]

Yeah. With couples in particular, it's really helpful to think of ourselves not as an individual agent who is correct or incorrect when it comes to money, but rather to think like each and every single one of us is kind of looking through a lens. And that lens is the way that money makes sense to us. And when we go into a relationship with another person, they have a different lens that, you know, was, was developed and refined through their early experience with money, the messages that they heard, the emotional climate in their house, et cetera. And it's really fascinating. There's a saying that our unconscious picks our partner. So like all of y' all out there, like writing lists of who your, your preferred person's gonna be or checking or unchecking the, the search criteria and your dating apps, like your unconscious is very much in charge of who, who you end up with. And a lot of times they, what we are drawn to is a person who has something in their perspective that we don't do as naturally. Well, I'm going to do some air quotes around. Well, because. Well doesn't necessarily mean it ends up with like, you know, a bunch of zeros in the bank account. Well, can just mean that a person has an easier time doing something than we do. So we get the person who's saying, you know, we need to think about the future, we need to save, we need to be prepared. But one can save their way right out of a happy life. Right. If we're always deferring the yes to some future date and we never get there, then have we ever really lived? So it's important in many ways to have that person who might be a little bit more optimistic, who might be more comfortable with risk, who might be just able to get through their permission structure to say yes to something that their partner would never be able to get that yes to. But they recognize unconsciously that they are going to need that or they want to recruit that in their life. So a big part of what I'm doing when I'm working with a couple or working with a family is sort of looking at who naturally takes what roles in the system to try to sometimes where we can define and develop systems of trust to develop boundaries. So like a spender can't just like spend willy nilly. There are always going to be boundaries on that so, like, part of the work of. Part of the couple's work would be articulating sort of what's behind these values to be able to get really specific about. Like, I love the feeling of freedom that spending gives me, or I love the feeling of procuring that what our family needs. I love that feeling. Okay. But in order. And I want to empower you to be in that role. I need safety over here. I need to make sure that these other goals are being attended to. And that is, that is the integrative work of making sure that both of those perspectives are valued and recognized and brought together into a full system that can then do many things and handle the beautiful complexity that is. That is a life cycle.

[Elise Hu]

Amanda, we have a couple questions now from our listeners because we have been soliciting them for this month. So we'll play a voicemail first and then have a second question by email. Hey, this is Emily from Nashville. I think you guys were looking for financial questions.

[Amanda Clayman]

I actually have a question about allowance and getting started with kids.

[Elise Hu]

Do you have any recommendations on books or, I don't know, even like a.

[Amanda Clayman]

Blog post or a podcast or something about getting started teaching your kids about.

[Dory Shafrir]

Money.

[Amanda Clayman]

Especially from a young age, like, what works? What are some best practices? Any suggestions for these parents to read to get started? Thanks, bye. The allowance question. I love the allowance question. We all really, really desperately, those of us who are parents want to raise children with good financial values. And that is a big, scary thing. So one resource that I really love is Ron Lieber's the Opposite of Spoiled. It's funny, non traditional title. Right. But it works because it's exactly what like. Yes, that's what I would like. Please. The opposite of spoiling this down. Yes. Ron is a great writer. He writes for the New York Times finance section. He's also a great resource on college for when your kids are older and you're thinking about paying for college. The research on allowance, I would say, kind of goes in two camps. There are people who, for whom allowance. The purpose of allowance is about teaching your children to manage money. And there are, there's a family culture and there are people for whom allowance is about compensation for labor. And these are two very different models of allowance. And I would say that, that in some ways they, they fall along class lines too, besides just kind of the way that you were. Most of us are just going to repeat some version of, of how we were raised. But there are real class differences, I think, in this one too. So when we are Thinking of money management as separate from labor because a lot of us are doing unpaid labor in the house is kind of the thinking there. Like, I don't get paid for loading the dishwasher after dinner. Why should my child get paid for making their bed? This is just an, like, all family members contribute to household labor is the thinking. And when we're giving money to the child, the purpose of that allowance is so that they learn how to make decisions with money. So we might be looking at spend, save and give as buckets. A lot of parents do that. Another sort of common rubric is that you give the child their age in dollars each week. So like a 7 year old is getting $7 in allowance. And if, if the most important thing, and I think if, if all of us as parents were being honest, like the thing that we really want is for our kid not to be the weird one or the one who has kind of such a different rule or practice in their house that it, it makes them different from their peers. So I will say that like the, the one that we've heard of, the one that is very commonly out there, the one that I feel like is a safe lane for parents who don't want their child to have a different allowance. Go the dollars and age per week. But do understand that when you, when it, it seems like there's a lack of consensus about the right way to do allowance, that usually what you're seeing is the division between the camps of people who say this is money for labor. And that's what I'm teaching my child versus this is money for them to develop a sense of agency, discernment, decision making. But it's not about labor.

[Elise Hu]

Okay, great answer. Thank you. And then. Love that book recommendation. Opposite of spoiled.

[Amanda Clayman]

Opposite of spoiled.

[Elise Hu]

Okay.

[Dory Shafrir]

All right, second question. This came in via text. My husband wants to aggressively start paying off our house by retirement before then. We have a kid going to college and very little is saved for him, especially if he goes out of state. What's the priority?

[Amanda Clayman]

So that would be something that would be obviously outside of my training and licensure to answer as a financial question. And I'm sure a financial person would also really want to model that based on the specifics. It is though, I think fundamentally a question about priorities in terms of what is our, what is the most important outcome that we want to prepare for. I think that modeling is really helpful in these scenarios to say, like, well, what would it look like financially if we, if we said 100% our priority is reducing our Overhead, because that's usually part of the plan for paying off the mortgage before retirement is like, we think that our income's going to go down in retirement. We don't want to have this huge house payment. So if we pay off the mortgage, then all we have to worry about really is taxes and maintenance when we're older. So it'll be easier to live on a fixed income or reduced income versus our priority is to really maximize our child's chance of not having a burdensome student loan situation that they're bringing forward into their life. So we'll figure out our deal. And we just want to take whatever our resources are and really prioritize the kid. We can't. I've seen many couples get lost perpetually in that argument of which one is correct, and neither one is really correct. It's just a choice. But we want to be able to make an informed choice. So looking at this information and being able to say, like, this is what it looks like if we go 100% in this direction, this is what it looks like if we go 100% in the other direction. Is there some kind of melding or compromise that allows us to be efficient in pursuing both of those? Maybe not. We might not get the house 100% paid off. We may not be able to fully fund our child's education the way that we would like to. But we. We take a value. That's an abstract kind of argument. We. We really take the. The wonderful property of money, which is that we can quantify it. You know, this doesn't have to be an abstract argument forever. We can. We can look at the numbers of these things, and then we come back to our feelings, we come back to the relationship, and we try to find a useful compromise.

[Dory Shafrir]

Okay, Love that. Very good. Thank you.

[Elise Hu]

Expert advice from Amanda Clayman. Amanda, before we let you go, how can folks find you to learn more?

[Amanda Clayman]

You can easily find me at my website. My name is Amanda clayman and I'm amandaclaiman.com I am also on all the socials. I have a podcast, an Audible original podcast called Emotional Investment, and also a bunch of great financial wellness courses on LinkedIn. Learning.

[Elise Hu]

Fantastic. Thank you so much.

[Amanda Clayman]

Thanks, guys.

[Dory Shafrir]

Well, she was a delight as always. And I cannot believe that she was last on the show seven years ago.

[Amanda Clayman]

What?

[Dory Shafrir]

Because I also remember her kids as being like, like, not like tiny, but like, you know, little kids, like, like 10 or something. And now her kid is going to college. I'm like, oh, right. Time.

[Elise Hu]

Life comes at you fast.

[Amanda Clayman]

Yeah, life comes at you fast.

[Dory Shafrir]

Really, really does. Anyway, Elise, how did decluttering go? Did you get started on it?

[Elise Hu]

I have decluttered so many stuffed animals. So I have two giant trash bags of stuffed animals that have, that are now cluttering my car because I forgot to take them anywhere.

[Dory Shafrir]

Oh my God.

[Elise Hu]

So I just moved. I don't know that I decluttered. I transferred clutter, so I moved it from my home to my vehicle. But that is going. And then the girls did a good job. Ava found so many clothes that don't fit her anymore from last summer.

[Dory Shafrir]

And.

[Elise Hu]

She is now depopping them on that site. Depop to resell. So that's how she's going to make some summer money for all of the random in and out and stuff that she's going to walk to with her friends. So she's depopping, she's decluttering. And then Ling Ling, our helper, she helped Luna and Issa kind of clean out all their closets as well. And so we have some hand me downs that will go to Rachel's daughter who is kind of our go to hand me down friend because she's a few years younger than my youngest. So everybody needs a go to hand me down friend like to receive.

[Dory Shafrir]

And I have a few friends who have boys who are like two to five years older than Henry. And I am their. I am their go to hand me down for like boy leaning clothing. And it's great. It's the best. What about this week?

[Elise Hu]

This week, it's my first week without school to take the kids to. So I am going to enjoy sleeping in. That's my intention. My intention is to sleep one hour later each morning because that is what is stolen from me. During the school year. Yes, during the school year. Ava's in that zero period or zero hour. And so I have to set up six something instead of seven something. So I want to sleep until at least like 7:30 or 8. That's my dream. What about you? How are you doing with your intentions?

[Dory Shafrir]

So my intention last week was to transition to summer and I was really thinking about Henry in this regard. And so far it seems to be going well. He's having a blast at sports camp. I mean, who knows, maybe he'll come home today and be like, I hate it. But so far it seems to be going great. And now that we've like fixed the sunscreen situation, which we talked about in the casual chat, I think that was when we talked about it, right? Yeah. He has this roll on copper tone kids mineral sunscreen. That has been working great. So hopefully that will continue. Yeah. And next week he goes, he'll, he'll do a different camp and we're excited about that. So seems like it's going well. Intention this week is. Speaking of money month, Matt and I are, we're gonna try to come up with like a road map to dig out from this, this deep hole that we have found ourselves in.

[Elise Hu]

Deep financial holes. Oh, financial hole. Okay. Yes.

[Dory Shafrir]

Yeah. So we're gonna try to tackle that. At least get started.

[Elise Hu]

This is, this is a Matt Dory summit thing. You're not on your own. You have your partner. Yes, correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the reasons, one of the reasons why I'm sort of not wanting to get married again is because I want to like manage my own stuff. Because, because like that was the thing. Like my spending habits and my ex husband's spending habits were totally different. But then we were locked together on our credit cards and things like that, so.

[Dory Shafrir]

Totally.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah. In some ways it's helpful because you can help each other. Like your funds are pooled together and then in others it's like, well, we spend differently.

[Dory Shafrir]

Totally. Totally.

[Elise Hu]

All right, well. Sending you good vibes for your.

[Dory Shafrir]

Thank you so much for your intention this week. Thank you so much. Well, Forever 35 is hosted and produced by me, Dori Shafrier and Elise Hu and produced and edited by Sam Hunio. Sammy Reed is our project manager and our network partner is acast. Thanks everyone for listening. We'll talk to you soon.

[Elise Hu]

Talk to you next time.

[Dory Shafrir]

Bye.

[Elise Hu]

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[Dory Shafrir]

Yeah.

[Elise Hu]

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