← How to Money
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This is an iHeart podcast.
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Guaranteed Human.
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Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-IHeart.
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C
Welcome to how to Money. I'm Joel and today I'm talking about spending life wisely with Vicki Robin. Going to talk about money, meaning and time. Okay, so the quality of your life pretty much exists outside of the realm of money. That is a quote from my guest today. Here at how to Money. We talk regularly about how money is a tool. It's an important one, of course, but kind of like the adage about dying with the most toys, it's really easy to see how taking the approach of maximizing your wealth accumulation would leave you wanting. And so Vicki Robin, she's all about helping folks change their relationship to money. She has been for many decades. She's doing a lot of other stuff now, which I'm excited to talk to her about as well. But she helped start a movement back in 1992 with her co author Joe Dominguez when they released the book youk Money or your Life. And I have so much respect for the work that she's done and for her thoughtfulness. So, Vicki, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast.
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B
Thank you so much for having me.
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C
Of course. What do you like to splurge on? My co host Matt and I, we splurge on fancy craft beer. We talk about that regularly. But it gives us an insight into who you are while you're doing smart things with your money. What maybe do you let loose on a little bit?
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B
Well, I just splurged on three Broadway shows in three nights in New York City by buying last min tickets for a pittance compared to what they usually cost. But I would say my total splurge is thrift stores.
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C
Oh, that's a frugal splurge.
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B
Absolutely. I mean I can get out of there for like five or ten dollars and, and fancy up. And just when I was in New York, I, I passed quickly through Macy's and it's just like astonishing how much things cost. So I, and I, it's not only that I, I have the thing, but I feel smart because I outsmarted the people who bought it. New.
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C
Tell me. Oh, I think you briefly mentioned going to three Broadway shows, which I think is amazing. I'm jealous and you mentioned getting last minute tickets for cheap. Do you want to let my listeners know how you did that?
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B
I just looked up online last minute tickets and I got to a site I think called Today Ticks or something like that, and I was able to score tickets, you know, and it's, it's not as cheap as going to a show at my local theater, but I think I spent. For three Broadway shows, I think I spent under $200, which when you come right down to it, is a bargain.
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C
It's pretty good for top notch theater.
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Yeah.
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And also I just, I spotted some seats down in the orchestra that were empty. And so in intermission I went down. So that's also frugality. It's just keeping an eye out for bargains.
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C
That's what I used to do at the baseball games. I would buy the cheap seats and make friends with the ushers in the better sections. I still remember Joyce, one of my favorite ushers, and she would always let us sit, or most of the time if they had availability would let us sit down there.
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B
Exactly.
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C
Joyce was awesome. Okay, talking about frugality, you grew up hyper frugal. You want to talk to me about maybe how you were taught about money as a child?
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B
Well, it was complex because my father's family sailed through the Depression because my grandfather was the personal physician to Irene dupont, like a DuPont corporation. So they made out. But my mother's family lost all their money. The only thing they didn't lose in the Depression is their pretentiousness. So I had a strange combination of a household where my mother just took us to bargain basement clothes. I mean, you know, she was. People who lived through the Depression in that way never achieved relaxation with wealth, even if they married into it. That's what I think. But anyway, so, yeah, but I learned to be frugal. And then that came in good stead because my junior year, I took the money from my junior year and I spent a year and a half in Europe and did my junior year in Spain and came back fluent. And, you know, and I completed my major. But, you know, it's just, it was a simple lesson. It's like the less I spend, the further it goes. And so like I had a little Volkswagen Bug and I would pack my car with five people and baguettes and oranges and we would go to every corner of Spain. So, you know, you add another person to the car and it's less expensive. I mean, I learned all the tricks by that desire to continue the adventure. And that's pretty much my personality.
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C
Did any part of you want to rebel against frugality at any point in time? Were you like. I mean, I see how this works, but kind of also want to see what it's like to spend too much.
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B
Yeah. After Joe Dominguez died and I was liberated to explore many other interests that I sort of put on the side because of our mission with youh Money, you, Life, I realized that I felt I kept myself to a very high standard of frugality while I was the avatar for this book. And, I don't know, about 20 years ago, when I moved to the town I live in and was solo, I realized my frugality is like. It's like I have a little cash register in my head. So if I spend $5, if I splurge $5 at the thrift store, I have to save $5 at the grocery store. No, no, no, no, no. We have to get rid of this. And it was not that easy. It was sort of like. It was like some of this internalized domination of my own consciousness in service to a higher purpose. You know, I wanted to spread the word. And not just because. I mean, it wasn't because of the Nine Step program or because of creating a bestseller, but because I was so aware from 1989 on that we were already in what's called overshoot. We were using more of the planet's biocapacity than the planet can afford every year. So, in other words, we were drawing down the ecological bank account. And that terrified me because pretty much, you can use that up. You can use that up. And I thought, like, okay, this program will help people be more frugal. And the frugality. The frugality itself was my goal. Sort of collective frugality would take some of the human pressure of consumption off the living Earth, if that isn't too convoluted. But that really was my motivation.
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C
Well, part of the. Part of the reason I think your message resonated at that point in time is because of how you tied everything to. You connected the dots to, like, life energy. Right. And what we trade in order to live the lives of in an American consumeristic culture. And how every dollar we spend, we're trading a piece of this finite time on our Earth. How did y' all connect those dots and then spread that message?
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B
Well, I have to say that the program itself was developed by Joe Dominguez for his own early retirement. He had that goal from the time he was 12. Really, according to his own stories, he grew up in Spanish Harlem. And he saw through the whole game of money very early on he saw how people were run by money. And so he said, like, I don't want to spend my life on that. So it was like he treated money like military service. You know, you put in your time and then you get to go on to do the other thing. And so it was his strategy, his sort of engineering mind about tracking flows through systems that got him onto this, tracking and evaluating the flow of money and stuff through our lives. And for me, I partnered with him to promote first the seminars and then eventually to write the book. And I went out on the road to publicize it because I thought it was a strategy for lowering consumption in North America. And so I wasn't the one who came up with that idea. He came up with that idea and then I recognized that that idea had the power to change behavior. So it was like it was a perfect marriage of his engineering mind and my social marketing, relational mind.
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C
How does one live in a consumeristic society without fully buying into a consumeristic ethos? So like Vicki, you're probably not single handedly going to bring down the.
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B
No, I'm counting on you. I'm counting on you to do that. And your listeners.
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C
Yeah, it's touching one person at a time. A couple hundred people here, thousands of people maybe in larger settings, and each, each person trying to make individual changes in their lives based on a mindset shift. So how do we maybe adopt that mindset shift and say, I know I live in this society where everything is run by consumption. How do I not be run by it?
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B
One of the things, and this is very your money, your life, is you apply consciousness to the flow of money and stuff through your life. And so consciousness is taking a moment out of the unconscious behavior and going up into a little platform and looking at the behavior down there in the valley and saying, is how I'm earning and spending my money buying me a life I love? So you're applying consciousness at different points along the consumption stream. And that consciousness itself, I think, will lower your consumption. We studied people when we were doing the live seminar. We studied people who had followed the program for at least six months. And to the person they said they were spending more or less, 20% less. And many people said they didn't even know where the money had been going. And almost all of them said they were happier. So that was a little data point for that. So one of the tricks is consciousness. It's not that kind of angry consciousness of like, I'm not going to cooperate with the consumer society. Those corporations aren't going to inhabit my mind. It's not that. Although that's a fun game. It's more like. It's like, more like self defense. Like, I have better things to do with my life.
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C
Yeah.
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B
And so it's not a negative. No, no, no, shouldn't do. It's a positive. Who am I in this world and what brings me the most joy? So that's idea number one. Idea number two is that as you do the program in your money or life or whatever strategy you want, you start to discover that money is not the only means of exchange. It's one means of exchange, and it dominates our consciousness. But relationship is a means of exchange. You know, like if you live in a household, I hope you're not charging your family for doing dishes. You know, it's like your circle of we, the circle of people that you feel related to in some way or another. You don't charge them. I don't, like, have a walk with a friend and listen to her problems and go like, cha ching, that's 30 bucks. So you start to realize that it's not like you strategize, I'm going to build a friendship network so I can save money on therapy. But you recognize that having someone listen to you and give you some feedback about your blind spots does not only happen through therapy, it happens through friendship. It happens through meditation. It happens through, you know, like what I always call stepping on the rake in the, in the tall grass and having it wonk you in the face. You know, it's. It, it happens through life experiences that you have to learn from. So once you start thinking about, like, how am I creating? Well, being outside of the money economy, you start to see it and it's like things that are fun. Like, I went to those Broadway shows for sure, because I was in New York, and that was super fun for me. But a lot of my fun is just hanging out with friends, you know, and like, my fun is I love theater. I mean, being in theater, you know, so if I'm in a play or something, that's cool. Or if I, you know, volunteer to usher for a play, I can, I can go in for free, you know, I mean, it's not that hard once you're thinking about it silo by silo of your spending. It's not that hard to see that money is not the only way you meet your needs. You don't have to buy books. You can get them free from the library True.
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C
Our lives have become so complex, though. It feels like. And I think maybe you're such an advocate of simple living and is there something. How do we simplify if our lives have gotten so complex and it feels like money's going in a hundred different ways directions because we live such complex lives, how do we start to dial that back? It almost feels like it's like these strands of string and that are all mixed up. You've had to deal with that like a ball of yarn that's like completely messed. How do you even start to untangle that?
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B
I think that's, you know, that's not a simple question with a simple answer. Before we're conscious, we basically lace our. We bundle our lives up before we're conscious, where it's like, okay, I have a problem, problem with unhappiness. I'll solve it with the therapist. Then I have a problem with my therapist and I'll solve it with booze. Or else, you know, it's like, it's like we keep solving problems with more products. And so eventually, or even, you know, I mean, I feel for people who come out of college or med school, you know, with so much debt, there isn't an option other than bankruptcy. And so we get on the sort of poison gravy train really early on. So I think, like programs like your money, you, life, it's not the only one. I would say that your money, you, life is a tool for consciousness. It's not consciousness. You start applying consciousness to that. Like, is this working for me? How else can I do this? Can I use the skills I've developed for this job and get a job that brings me more money and not expand my lifestyle to what I'm earning and then some, you know what I mean? It's like, where are your levers of change? Well, ratcheting up your income would be a lever of change. You know, like reducing your expenses. The lever of change. You start creating space in there. It's not an overnight thing if you've gotten that balled up in the dominant economy. And I think it's. People sort of get hopeless about, you know, I'm gonna die in debt. And like, eventually it's like, so what? You know, when I die, the debt disappears, but then your whole life is engaged with paying off that debt. I mean, you become a cash cow for the bank. If that doesn't create indignation, I don't know what it does, you know. So I think addressing the hopeless inevitability that I will never get out of this, you know, that's an important step of like, okay, it's possible other people have done it. Let's see, let's see where the leaks are. I'm not saying that. That silly little thing about the latte, you know, like if you just like, you know, if you just buy Americano coffee and not latte, somehow or another your life is going to change. But I think what that is communicating is that nickel and diming ourselves to death. Well, that was a phrase out of the 60s. How about like $5 and 10 dol, you know, or 50 and 100? Yeah, there's no easy answer to that. But it's. You've been wound into something. You've become a factor of product, you know, a factor of the money economy. How do you get out? You just have to start to be conscious of where the leaks are and it's like also conscious of what you love. You know, what am I trading in this moment?
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C
It does work and really like the fish and water. You have to, you're like, what's water? You have to be at least conscious of it first before you can start to make changes accordingly.
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Yeah. So listen, just listen to George Carlin's shtick on stuff. Do you know what I mean?
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C
Oh, yeah, I remember that one.
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Yeah, yeah. You have to have stuff to put your stuff in.
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C
One of my best friends bought a battery daddy to hold his batteries in. Right. Because you buy enough batteries, then you have to find out how to store them in a way where they're not all over the place.
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Exactly. That's why you go to the thrift store and you get an old makeup case for 10 cents. You put your batteries in there, you know.
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But you're right, I mean, that's where we're at stuff wise is we need to buy more stuff in order to organize the stuff that we have.
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B
Totally. And then just stop, you know, I mean, I know it's difficult at this point, but just limit your Amazon addiction and don't just go over to Walmart. I used to say, you know, like, how do you do this? We just don't go shopping. I mean, if you need something, go get it, but don't shop.
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C
Yeah.
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Except for thrift stores.
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C
I'm with you on that. Thrift stores. You know, I almost like took my kids yesterday. They were like, let's go do something fun. We end up going to the playground instead. But I was like, the thrift store, that was the other place we're going to go. In many ways, you launched the financial independence movement. You and Joe with your book, it feels like some of the current proponents maybe have a little bit of a different mindset about financial independence than you did. It feels like the goal that you had behind financial independence was to live a life of service that was kind of at the heart of it. I'm curious what your take is on the current status of the movement, because it just feels like the core of it is different than how it started.
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Just ask Buddha how he feels about yoga retreats. You know what I mean?
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C
Bastardized. In a sense.
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B
It's like, because of. I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's the Western mind. I don't know if it's. The human mind will take something that's like a, you know, a download from the divine, and we'll strip off the divine part of it and operationalize the material part of it, you know. And I'm not saying Joe and I were divine at all. You know, we're sort of like secondary. Let's say Thoreau is divine. Or Jesus. How about Jesus? You know, so we were operating. We were sort of like translating a spiritual message into something quite practical. But the spirituality gets stripped off and the practicality becomes a. You know, it's like indulgences in the Catholic Church. And I don't know what that is in humans that wants to do that.
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C
So we need a Martin Luther to bring the five movies.
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B
I don't know how conscious Martin Luther was, you know, And I think that there's a lot of people now who look at the range of access to spiritual experiences from that. People are. Are availing themselves of, you know, from teachers to psychedelics to meditation, and they're feeling that there's a breakthrough in consciousness now that's happening. That sort of. That is not from one pointed, enlightened individual, but there's a. You know, the Age of Aquarius, if that's. You know, I don't know. I say that with a little bit of ir, but there is, you know, maybe that's an element of hope. But there is people who connect the dots right now and see that consciousness is rising, but not everywhere, you know, so we have to deal with the consumer culture.
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C
One of the criticisms of the Fire movement is that it's too extreme. Do you think it's possible to take some of the concepts of frugality too far or is even kind of to get at what you're. What you're talking about here? That that extreme sort of reaction is Actually part of what is at the heart of missing a spiritual element that's a necessity to be able to do this.
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B
Well, I do find that many people, not most or all, but many in the fire movement have kind of gotten down to that engineering mind without the spaciousness of what is the meaning of life. And for those people, if they get financially independent, that is big confrontation, because the thing that organized their lives, which was saving money, is no longer necessary. What's necessary now is that you figure out how to, how else to fill your life. And that's difficult for somebody who hasn't given any thought to it. There's no purpose. What is the purpose of financial independence? And so in a way, finding the underbelly of something that rings of truth, but you're not sure you want to give it a go. You know, for example, let's say, you know, you know that you should be running, you know that you should be taking care of your health. But you read the story of the one person in the Boston Marathon who dropped dead and you go, like, I'm not going to do that. You know what I mean? So I don't know how widespread this characterization of the fire movement is. It's just the reputation it's developed because you have to look inside the movement. There's a person who lives in my town who is sort of like a regional leader. He's on the school board, and I mean, he is like one of the most service oriented, sweetest people I know. So a lot of this is questioning the pablum that the culture feeds you all the time. Talk about being subject to social media manipulation. It's like, you know, what do we call them? Conspiracy theories. There's conspiracy theories left, right and center, and it's so easy to spread them. So it's, I would say that's even more of a problem than overspending, when you come right down to it is the unfettered manipulation of our minds. And part of it is product oriented. So we keep buying things and going into debt. But part of it is the product is your participation in society. The product is movement building around prejudices. So owning your own mind, integrity, you know, fidelity to your values and your higher purpose, that's not being well supported by all of the manifestations of the consumer culture. And I would say social media is another form of consumption.
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C
It might be the most oppressive form currently of consumption that most, many, many people listening to this right now partake in, and it's just seen as normal. And so we continue to do it. But we at. At what cost to ourselves, to our, to our time, to our relationships. You're right. I think you're right. I want to take a quick break and I want to get back so many more questions for you, Vicki. So, yeah, hit that break. We'll come right back.
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A
Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart streaming radio and podcasting. Call 844-844-IHeart to get started. That's 844-844-IHEART.
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C
All right, we're back. Still talking with Vicki Robin. Talking about meaning and time and money and the intersection of all those things. And so this is a philosophical conversation with some practical things instituted into it. Vicki, one of my friends works for an organization. Their whole goal is racial reconciliation. That is like the goal of the nonprofit that he works for.
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B
Wow.
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C
And he talks about a term called dignified interdependence. And so this relationship between humans, it's not a top down, let me fix you and help you. It is a dignified, we need each other sort of relationship. And that sprung to mind when I was looking at the most recent update of youf Money, you, Life, because you talk about financial interdependence, right? What does that mean? Why is that powerful?
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B
Wow. Ecology is the absolute reality of the natural world. Everything feeding everything, everything having a niche that both serves themselves and serves the collective. Things that do not serve the collective are weeded out. Eventually. We are interdependent with the illusion of separation. And the illusion of separation is what allows us to live in hierarchies, to overspend to debt, to create the consumer culture. Because we're. We have no allegiance to, we have no responsibility to. We have no awareness of that. It's the ecology of the living earth that is the substrate that creates all wealth. And it's the ecology of society, however small or large. It's humans living together. Now, of course, extreme hierarchies, we're entrapped in that. But like village life, I was talking to you earlier about village life. Humans l. In communities where there is consequences to your behavior that can be seen by the community and responded to. In other words, like if you're, if you're a bad county commissioner, you'll get voted out because you're accountable to real people that you could bump into in the supermarket, you know, real people who can hold you accountable in some way or another. And so that your dignity, your integrity is the coin of the realm. If you're a good actor, you are able to move in community with fluidity because people trust you, because people are willing to trade with you. So we live in an interdependent world, socially, ecologically, and in times through history when money is scarce, whether it's before, like fiat money came into being, mutual aid has been the way that we meet our needs, helping one another. That's the natural form of responsible people in community, is we help one another. And civilization has allowed us to have such a fragmented community where the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker maybe live in different towns or different countries. So there isn't this sense of accountability, and that's a big loss. And when you say, you know, you're talking about racial justice in this organization. And I think, you know, when people are in some way oppressed, in some way, their opportunities are limited because the dominant society will not let them participate. They do turn to one another. Martin Luther King came out of the black church, you know, he wasn't like, you know, it's the ministers in the churches. It's the. That was power. It wasn't just a bunch of individualist black people thinking, oh, I'm going to go to the parade this weekend and then I'm going to go, you know. So I think there's something about the consumer culture that allows us to disconnect from community, you know, and even up to and including AI, that people are going to AI therapists, you know, it's like more and more that sense that's been endemic to human occupation. And this human culture that we need each other is being torn apart piece by piece. I used to say, and this was like 40 years ago, that the consumer culture operates by breaking bonds. So once you bond with somebody, a lot of your needs are met relationally, but you break the bond. And now you need two washing machines, two refrigerators, two vacuum cleaners, and you need to do all the activities to form other bonds. So the degree to which the consumer culture can break your bonds with other people or break your internal bonds with your own integrity, to that degree, it owns you and it owns us.
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C
It makes me think of, I used to ask friends for rides to the airport, and now I use Uber or when I need a lemon because I'm gonna make a good cocktail that night. And I'm like, do I ask the neighbor down the street or do I run to the grocery store? And so often we run to the grocery store instead of turning to our neighbor. But actually, that furthers relationship. Not only is it better for our finances to be able to rely on our neighbors, rely on each other, but there's all these little ways that these new industries have sprung up that like, prevent us from living life the way we used to. That saved us money because we didn't need another service in our life. But also seem to add value at the same time.
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B
Exactly. I mean, we're doing. In my community, I live on Whidbey island in Washington. It's a long, skinny island on South Whidbey island. There's about 25,000 people. And we are organizing neighborhoods around emergency preparedness because we live in an earthquake zone. And we also, you know, we're an island, you know, so we're seaside village. So it makes sense to do that. It's a little bit counterintuitive. I mean, we're working hard to get people in neighborhoods, neighborhood captains, to actually get the neighborhood organized to go out and visit our neighbors and find out what their skills are and what their needs are and where the, you know, where the, the shutoff is for their electricity, you know, so in case of an earthquake. And the more I do that, the more my neighbors become my village. And when during your money you life era, I traveled all over the world. I mean, I don't know if I got it to elite status in any airline, but, you know, it's like my neighbors were the world. And even with my podcast, I did a podcast called what could possibly go right. I could be disconnected from my community. I could consider my community as a source, but not as a relationship. But the more pressure there is from the unraveling, whether it's financial, ecological, justice, all these things, the more pressure from that, the more it is that we need to connect with one another to meet our needs. And so it's not to blame ourselves for how we've traded convenience in relationship. It's not to blame ourselves. Like, bad me, I shouldn't go and get the lemon. I'm going to knock on 16 doors until I find a lemon. But it's the relationships. I mean, it's building relationships with neighbors such that you could knock on the door. And it's also building capacity to design cocktails that don't need lemons.
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C
A little bit of both. A little bit of both.
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B
A Little bit of both.
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C
It seems like in our modern culture money is also seen as like a measuring stick of sorts. Right, right. So you think about the, the Forbes 100 list or whatever and you're like, oh, is Warren Buffett number four, number five this year? And Warren being an interesting case because I think he's very different than a lot of the other people on, on a list like that. But yeah, what. When do you think we started using money as a measuring stick of sorts and as a sign of success? And how destructive is that?
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B
I think it goes way back. I am not a primatologist, you know, I have no expertise. A lot of things I pull out of thin air as metaphors. But if you look at primate groups, there is a pecking order, if you will. That's the wrong term for primates, but you know, there is dominance, you know, and it's the dominant male that gets the food and gets the women, you know, gets its genetic. So we're, we come out of a biology of dominance, a hierarchy. I mean, I think almost like the human consciousness, like sort of the awakening of self reflective consciousness. Perhaps that's what's given us this sort of moral sense, not an operational sense that we need each other and allows to have these affiliations of love rather than utility. I don't think, I mean, we can lay it somewhat at the feet of fiat currency, debt based money which requires growth, it requires being able to pay back the money and then some. And we are stuck in that.
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C
And some of that. Vicki, isn't the worst. Right. I can buy a home only because I can get a mortgage on that home. If I were to try to save up the cash to buy the home. It's not going to happen.
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B
It's not going to happen. Nor are you going to go out and cut logs and build a home.
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C
Right.
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B
Of course you're not.
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C
Maybe somebody with more skills than me would.
- [36:26]
B
Exactly. But I'll tell you what I've done. I'm not, I'm not bragging, but you know, from that fi. Consciousness I stumbled into the being able to buy a house in the village I live in, you know, at the absolute bottom dip of the market, this house appeared and had problems with it. So nobody else would buy it. And it was on a bank auction. So it's a 1900 square foot split entry house. It's like a box. And so I converted the family room into a studio apartment. I've been renting that. That was working so well that I converted the garage into a studio apartment. And, and, and bought a shed, a used shed. So all the stuff in the garage went into the shed. And so then I have two studio apartments. And then I started from time to time I rent my guest room to wonderful traveling artists or you know, whatever people coming through and need a place to live for a couple months. So I have turned this house into a site of production. I've, I've turned this house into well being, not just for me. I mean I'm the queen of my, of my domain. Make no mistake. I bought it because I recognized it had a big south facing yard. So the yard produces food, the roof produces water for 1500 gallon rainwater tank. So a house isn't just a money suck, it is a resource. And I'm not saying you should monetize everything, you know, and sell your son to the neighbor to rake leaves. But, and I have, with some friends developed a whole initiative around this idea of turning underutilized spaces to meet unmet needs. So there's lots of single people living in houses, family sized houses. So we're encouraging people to put what we call in home suites, like what I have in their houses. We share all electricity, water, we share all the utility costs, we share a washer dryer. But everybody has an independent living quarters. And if this idea would catch hold, which is very sort of anti man's home as his castle. But if people started seeing, oh I see, like I don't necessarily have to go out and buy myself long term care insurance, I could put an in home suite in my house and I could trade that for money and care so I could age in place. We just think about, okay, when I get too old to take care of myself, I've got to send myself off to the glue factory. Excuse me, I didn't say that. I've got to send myself off to a facility that will charge me six to $10,000 a month. It's like our minds are framed around, we're going to solve every problem through buying something else rather than going like what do I have available? I don't have any children, so maybe I'm doing in home suites instead of children. But even somebody with children could create these suites in their home so that if they need help and the family rotates in and out, the six kids each come for two months. There's a place for them to live.
- [40:00]
C
Oh, good stuff. Oh man. So much more to get to aging and how that impacts how you think about money and freedom. Get to some more questions along those lines with Vicki right after this.
- [40:16]
A
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- [40:49]
C
Right, we're back with Vicky Robin. We're talking about spending life wisely. It seems like you're just talking a little bit about kind of on that theme of dehumanization and how some of the ways we attempt to solve problems actually create new problems that are worse than the problem that originally existed and cost money. And cost a lot of money.
- [41:08]
B
A lot of money.
- [41:09]
C
Yeah.
- [41:10]
B
Right.
- [41:10]
C
Just makes me think of the book being mortal. I'm not sure if you read it by. Yeah, and just like the way. And I want to talk about actually this about aging with you in just a second. But like the way we do aging in this country and end of life healthcare and just how problematic and how expensive it is and there are. We think we can just throw money at the problem and that's gonna make it better. And in fact, oftentimes it doesn't, Sometimes it does, oftentimes it doesn't. It costs a lot of money and people feel worse about it at the same time.
- [41:44]
B
Right. And now you're into the part of this that is underlying consumerism and many other forms of trying to control the outer world is the fear of death, that once the ego is born, it's born about 10 seconds after you're born. It's like, wait a second, where's the feeding tube? I'm going to have to be adorable to get some food. That's. Who knows what goes on in an infant's mind. But it's that process of I've got to do something to get something from the outside to come into my world to help me to live. So the fear of death is major and it's potentiated. It's increased by the alienation from one another. So we don't have people in our lives who die. We didn't grandma. None of my grandfathers were alive when I was born and I really wasn't around when my grandmothers died. So I have had very little. I mean, I've had my pets die, but I've had very little experience. Now that I'm 80, I'm starting. My friends are starting to die and we're starting to create rituals in my community around death. And so I'm starting to go like, okay, I'm heading toward being an ancestor, you know, whatever that means, I will die. It does have back pressure on your consciousness of your own really moral sense, you know, like, what's that legacy stuff that people talk about? Okay. Or what I talk about about, you know, like the. It's sort of aa for your ego, you know, the realization that in your charging through life, you've created ripples that you in other human beings and in systems and you really want to get right with that. You want to die in peace. So that work for me, what I call coming of aging. In my blog, that didn't start until about two or three years ago. I was still charging along as if I was in the middle years and I was never going to die. But the consumer mindset, I think, has some sort of death aversion in it, like trying to sideline, trying to get rid of, out of the central view, the fact that you will die. And yes, also I would say that some of this aging sickness and death industry comes because other systems have been broken. And so we start to, as I said, the consumer culture works on breaking bonds. And so the more bonds that are broken, the more you need to depend on money to get through the hiccups of life. I'm also very much in the conversation around taking aging out of the realm of disability and into the realm of possibility, that I feel that there's possibilities that are open to me now that were not before. And it's not just skydiving. It's like possibilities for freedom, for a kind of freedom of mind that I couldn't have when I was younger because I was still sort of trying to make something of myself in this world, even if it didn't have to do with money. I was like, I want to have influence. I want to be in the room where it's happening. I want to say something that's going to like, change everything. You know, that sort of attachment to the. To your influence on others. So there's a freedom of mind. There is a freedom of friendship. You know, it's like you don't have so much status in who you pick. There's so many freedoms. When you get rid of status, when you get rid of these things that are more from the middle of your life, there's freedom, like a lot of People, it's freedom of travel, you know, freedom to spend their freedom to read, freedom to learn. It's like this time in life has a spiritual, moral, intellectual, creative value that you don't get when you're younger. And mortality is actually part of it. It's part of the back pressure. It's part of like wanting to, wanting to, you know, some last burst, not of, you know, your bucket list, but some last burst of the beauty that you were given to express in this world being expressed. I mean, I'm, I'm writing now. I have a vision of myself doing a solo show, a one woman show. I've always wanted to do that, so now I'm doing that, you know, and who knows what I'll do next.
- [46:42]
C
That's beautiful. It makes me think about the Brian Johnson, the influencer who doesn't want to die. And he's doing all these things to try to make sure that he doesn't. Right, right. I'm just like it. I think my aversion to it is not that he's healthy, it's that he thinks he's not gonna die or that he doesn't want to die. Because that's all a part of what makes this meaningful is that death is inevitable for all of us.
- [47:11]
B
Right. And then you, you know, it's like, it's like a billion quadrillion dollar industry. You don't have to die is a huge promise. You know, there's a whole industry around the aversion to aging. And the more aversion you can to aging you can have, the more corporations and product based things can make money off you.
- [47:36]
C
Yeah. What? I'm curious. You've said that you are a lot freer than a whole lot of people who have 10 times as much money as you do.
- [47:45]
B
I didn't say that. I didn't say I didn't compare myself to people with money. Or if I did at one point in my past, I'm not going to say that now.
- [47:51]
C
Okay. What I guess what I. My question based on that kind of mindset, what does it mean to be free? And I'm sure for you that's even over the past few years, maybe that definition has shifted. But what does that mean?
- [48:05]
B
Well, glad you asked. I wrote a whole book about that that hasn't been published called Rethinking Freedom in a World with Limits.
- [48:15]
C
Oh, wow.
- [48:17]
B
Because I, I wanted to have Americans fall in love with limits the way we've fallen in love with freedom. To understand limits, not as something that's imposed from the outside by, you know, ahedonic old spinsters. Sorry, that's a terrible term. But entitlement has become our default understanding of freedom. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, and you can't stop me. You know, and even if there's a law, you can't stop me. I mean, and yet there's ecological limits. So there's. The American definition of limits is entitlement. And there's ecological limits that we have, we're breaking on a daily basis. How do you resolve that? How do you get people to think about limits in a different way? And people say, oh, you should talk about boundaries or constraints or something else. No, I like the word limits because it's so edgy, as it were. Edgy, get it?
- [49:20]
C
So what are those limits?
- [49:22]
B
Yeah, so there are natural limits. Like I used to say when I was talking about this. I design your future in 25 limits or less. What are you willing to limit in order to have value someplace else? It's not just limit for limits, it's what do you constrain in order to have value somewhere else? You know, like people who want to run a marathon, they will constrain their lives. You know, you get up at 6:00 in the morning, you run, but you're choosing that constraint in order to do something that you value more. And so understanding limits as the design tools of freedom, not the thwarting of freedom. But the only question is, where are you going to put the constraints in your life? It's all a question of design. With the financial independence movement, okay, we're going to put the constraints over spending and to a degree that we don't collapse our well being so that we can have something else that we want more, which is time. So limits are not in the way they are the way, they're the design tools of freedom. I challenge you to design a universe that has no limits. And here's how the universe goes, comes into being and out of being. And so I wrote that book 20 years ago that never got published. And that's a whole long story to sort of have a language for limits at this point that we could address that. So one of the ideas from the book is that there are four freedoms and we only think in terms of two. We think of freedom from domination, constraint, disease, whatever, freedom from things that we don't want, and freedom to approach things that we do want. So freedom from and freedom to like, I'm free to learn, I'm free to grow, you know, but there are two Other freedoms that we don't see. And these I call the freedoms that connect. Those are the freedoms that separate, I can get away from to whatever, you know, those are the away freedoms. The freedoms that connect are freedom for like you're part of a society. So I can enact my freedom however I want, but what is it for? To what am I dedicating it to? You know, that's like in a marriage, you sacrifice some freedom for this whole dream of love and family. And you know, so that would be, you know, love and family would be a four, a freedom four. And then there's also the one that we were talking about earlier that's even harder, which is called freedom. With like, while I'm enacting my freedom, Everything else in the universe is enacting its freedom. How in the world are we going to be free people in an interconnected world? The only way to do that, I think, is through consciousness. You know, whether you call that love, respect, God, spirit, that's the only realm of true freedom. And we're trying to enact spiritual freedom on a material world and it just doesn't work. But we haven't. The rent hasn't come due.
- [52:58]
C
I feel like I have one last question for you, but I'm not sure how to word it. I just, I guess it something about the intersection of personal finance and ultimate reality. And, and sometimes after this conversation, sometimes it makes talking about like the nuts and bolts of personal finance feel so mundane. But also when you think about the reality of what it looks like to live in this world and not have basic personal finance hygiene, it can lead to a lot of spiritual angst. So it's important, right?
- [53:31]
B
Personal finance. Hygiene is chosen limits.
- [53:35]
C
And so many people don't understand how to do it well so that they can not have money at the forefront of their mind all the time, inculcating, taking over that space that could be used for maybe deeper thoughts that are necessary. Yeah.
- [53:52]
B
So in your necessary money, you, life, we say, you know, money is life energy. It's the hours of your life that you invest in money to get the things that you think you want. But it's also the life energy of the earth. It is the bioproductive capacity of the earth. It's like, you know, out of the natural world comes all value, you know, value as in things. So that's part of the spiritual aspect of earning, spending, saving, investing, etc. It's honoring the earth. And you know, for some people nature is God and some people the earth is made by God. In either case, it's holy. So that's the link that I'm making from, you know, high integrity, relationship with money, personal finance, tracking and evaluating, not buying things you don't need. All of the principles that we all talk about in the fire movement are directly linked with saving the earth and directly linked with whatever the divine is, whatever the substance is in which we live and breathe and have our being. So they all link. If you're messy with your finances, you're just messy with your relationship with life. You know, it's like it's. You're messy with your finances, but you are very careful to not cut down trees while you're still cutting down trees if you're messy with your finance.
- [55:35]
C
Beautiful. Vicky Robin, thank you so much for joining me. Where can how do money listeners find out more about you?
- [55:41]
B
Yeah, right now I'm blogging on Substack and my blog is called Coming of Aging. And I've done a lot of interviews, so probably you could go on YouTube and type in my name and find stuff from 20 years ago.
- [55:57]
C
Well, we'll link to all that stuff in the show notes on the website. Vicki, thank you so much for your time.
- [56:02]
B
You're welcome. It's been very interesting to try to pump up the answers to your question from the deep well within.
- [56:11]
C
Is it just me or did this episode, this conversation, run the gamut? We talked about so many different things, and I just really appreciate Vicki's perspective on the spiritual nature of life and how that impacts your finances. And I think it's probably something that doesn't get talked about enough. And so I'm glad we talked about it today because without that deeper dimension, if we're just trying to achieve financial independence so we, for our own sakes and on a certain timeline that makes us happy, I think we're probably missing out on some of the good that that journey can produce for ourselves and for others. So just appreciate Vicky's honesty and intentionality. Talking about kind of the relationship between spirituality and money. And when it comes to like, my big takeaway from this conversation, gosh, it's really hard to come up with one. But she talked about how we keep solving problems with more products. I think that's very true. But I think my favorite thing that she said, or one of my favorite things she said was to apply consciousness to your money decisions. And it made me think of the Viktor Frankl quote where he basically says, between stimulus and response, there is space. And in that space is our power to choose our response. And then in that response lies our growth and our freedom. And I think it is really easy, especially in a world dominated by algorithms, dominated by email, dominated by things that are done to us where it feels like we're constantly responding. And the same is true with our financial decisions. Right. Where the email comes in for our favorite retailer and we peruse and it feels like we're just kind of going through the motions and we're buying stuff or we're spending money or using money in a certain way that, well, this is just normal. Everybody else is doing this, and so I'm going to do the same. I mean, that Frankel quote is so powerful on just the personal level, the relational level, the discipline level. But I think it has a lot going on for if we relate that to our money as well. So apply consciousness to those decisions that you're making in terms of your finances. And there is always that space for you to do something different. And if you're like, man, I've been going down this path for a long time and I'm starting to kind of rethink whether or not this is best for me, whether this makes the most sense for my family. Well, apply consciousness to those decisions. Take a step back, like she said, like step. Look down into the valley of your own life. And is this the direction you want to be heading in, whether it's in terms of money or all sorts of other things? I just think, hopefully this conversation helps you reflect on the role that your money plays in your life, but also the way your life is heading. And thank you as always, for tuning in again. I know this one came out of left field, but I think in the best way. I love Vicki. I love her message. And it's always fun to hear from someone, too, who has lived a lot of life. So thank you, as always, for joining us. You can find show notes for this episode up on the website@howtomoney.com until next time. Best friend out. You love what you do. You also love the idea of not doing it one day. But it's getting harder to know the best way to move into the future towards retirement. Right. We hear about inflation, rate hikes, the changing market, got to get kids through college, build an emergency fund, and then there's retirement.
- [60:08]
B
Yeah.
- [60:09]
D
Here is where fidelity comes in, though. Fidelity can help you to find clarity and saving for the future, even as your path and your priorities evolve.
- [60:16]
C
How?
- [60:17]
D
Well, they'll help you to create a free, personalized plan that adapts as your priorities change. They'll also show you what's called Timely Insights, small tips on ways to save and invest to help meet your goals, and you can monitor your plan so you stay on target.
- [60:31]
C
The future is coming, and so is retirement. Fidelity can help you take it on your way. Learn more@fidelity.com future expenses charged by your investments and other costs and fees associated with trading or transacting in your account. Apply Fidelity brokerage Services member NYSE SIPC.
- [60:48]
A
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [60:50]
B
Guaranteed human.