Afford Anything - Are We All Financial Hypochondriacs? Why We Feel Broke, Even When Our Bank Accounts Are Full

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

#542: Ever feel like you're never doing enough with your money, even when your finances look good on paper? You're not alone. Katie Gatti Tassin, host of the Money with Katie podcast, dives into a phenomenon called "money dysmorphia" in today’s interview. She shares how she got flooded with responses when she asked her listeners about money dysmorphia. Folks with hefty savings and investments still worry they're not doing enough. It's like they're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Where does this come from? Katie points to a few culprits. Social media is an obvious scapegoat. But traditional media plays a role too. Think about all those TV shows where "normal" families live in massive houses and drive fancy cars. It skews our perception of what's average. Location matters too. Katie talks about how moving from Dallas to Fort Collins changed her spending habits. Different cities have different vibes and social norms around money. The conversation takes an interesting turn when Katie shares her own experience buying a Porsche. She felt conflicted, worried her FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) community would judge her. It highlights how even personal finance experts grapple with these issues. They also touch on how the pandemic shook up financial priorities. When faced with uncertainty, some people realized saving for a far-off future might not be the only goal worth pursuing. Katie and Paula discuss the importance of balance. It's good to save, but not at the expense of living your life now. They suggest seeking out voices in the personal finance world to get a more rounded perspective. Travel comes up as a way to gain financial perspective. Seeing how people live in other parts of the world can make you appreciate what you have or show you where your own country could improve. Katie and Paula offer food for thought on how to navigate our complex relationship with money. It's a conversation that might make you think differently about your own financial mindset. Timestamps Note: Timestamps will vary on individual listening devices based on dynamic advertising run times. 01:13 - Define money dysmorphia concept 02:22 - Social media's influence on financial perceptions 03:57 - Traditional media's impact on financial normalcy 06:03 - Wealth displays in TV and movies 09:52 - Regional cultures affect spending habits 11:35 - Social engineering in consumer culture 14:36 - TV shows shape perceptions of normal lifestyles 17:19 - Lower-income portrayal in media 20:22 - Social circles influence financial habits 23:35 - Importance of balance in financial perspectives 26:34 - Travel's role in gaining financial perspective 29:12 - Key takeaways about money dysmorphia 31:30 - Media's influence on financial normalcy perception 33:46 - Balancing future planning with present enjoyment For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode542 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Do you have money dysmorphia? We're going to discuss that question today with Katie Gatti Tossan, the host of the enormously popular Money with Katie podcast. Welcome to the Afford Anything Podcast, the show that understands you can afford anything but not everything. Every choice carries a tradeoff. And that applies not just to your money, but to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention to any limited resource you need to manage. So what matters most and how do you make choices accordingly? Those are the questions that this podcast is here to answer. We cover five pillars, financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate, and entrepreneurship.

It's double I fire on the Afford Anything podcast. I'm your host, Paula Pant, and welcome, Katie. Thank you so much for having me, Paula. I don't think my show has ever been described as enormously popular before, so I love that. I'm going to stick it in my back pocket for later. Your show is brilliant. Your essay is beautifully written. Oh, thank you. You've elevated the discourse in personal finance. I'm just going to pause for a moment and soak that one in. Thank you. I really, really can't tell you how much that means to me. I've wanted to talk about a concept that you rolled out on one of your episodes, the notion of money dysmorphia. We hear about dysmorphia, as you described it. It's a resonant phrase and resonant phrases often feel as though they're real because the phrasing is just so sticky.

But there is something about that that immediately resonates. The notion that what I used to think of as a large amount of money, I now think of as a rounding error. That makes me wonder, was my perspective skewed when I was 20 and I was viewing these like negligible amounts of money as nothing? Or is my perspective skewed today because of the different position that I'm in? In order to gauge dysmorphia, first I suppose you have to gauge what a healthy baseline is. How do you even know that? There's like a sort of economic Overton window that shifts. And it shifts our perceptions of what's normal upward in some cases. And what I wanted to understand when we produced that episode was what is the most common way that this manifests? because in a lot of the coverage that I was seeing in recent months, it was really focused on social media. That social media is the reason why everyone feels as though they don't have enough.

To your point about things feeling resonant, intuitively that made sense. I know how that feels. I've been on Instagram before and seen a peer on a yacht in Croatia and gone, oh, my vacation was just to a national park. What am I doing here? Like, I must be doing something wrong. I only have myself to blame. But what I was really curious about was how broader culture influences us and not just social media, but media in general. And so I put out this call for submissions basically and said, hey, money dysmorphia is this thing that happens when your perception of your financial situation doesn't match your reality. Your objective reality and perception do not line up. And

it can manifest in a couple of different ways. Sometimes you feel like you're never doing enough, despite being financially completely healthy and totally fine. And other times, it manifests in like avoidable behavior, right? Because you are spending like there's no tomorrow, but you are unwilling to acknowledge the reality, which is that you don't have money to be living that way. And Paula, I was shocked by the responses I got because I figured it was going to be half and half or that I was mostly going to hear from people who were spending like there was no tomorrow. But of the roughly 140 responses I got, I'd say 125 of them were people being like, yeah, I'm 30 years old. I have a paid off house and half a million dollars in investments.

Am I okay? Am I doing enough? And I would be like, oh, it was people that were by every measure so far ahead of the game, were doing so amazingly. We're making incredible decisions. But there was this one phrase that I kept seeing over and over and over again. It was actually really uncanny the amount of times that this exact same verbiage showed up in these emails.

It was, I feel like the rug could get pulled out from under me at any moment. And so it never feels like enough. And I think that that element of our financial psychology is so interesting. Like why does so many people feel this way? What is it about our culture, about our society, about the systems we exist within that constantly makes you feel as though you need to be shoring up your reserves to an extent that you need to be ready for any catastrophe, even if you know that, A, you have enough, B, you are properly insured. It's just such an interesting and big money topic.

To your first point, that the people who, the respondents were objectively doing well, it strikes me that, of course, you and I both, the people in our ecosystem are the people who self-select as those who listen to personal finance podcasts. Yes. The people who are listening to this easily could be keeping up with the Kardashians right now, but they're choosing to listen to a money podcast instead. And so necessarily there's going to be sampling bias. For sure. That was something that I called out in the episode, which was like, this is not a representative sample of society at large. Right. This is a representative sample of people who listened to a personal finance show, But lucky for you, if you're listening to the personal finance show, it's probably more likely to be representative of you than a sample set that looks at the entire population.

Exactly. And particularly as life experiences of our entire population become so fragmented. Yeah. I used to say it was K-shaped, but now it feels more octopus tentacles. Like it goes in so many directions. What is the K-shape? Talk me through that one. The notion of a K shape is that it's bifurcated. Okay. Right? So like the capital letter K, you kind of have this similar starting point and then it forks off into these two different directions. The concept was initially developed as an economic concept by a professor, Peter Atwater.

He wrote a book called The Confidence Map, and he is a professor at College of William and Mary. Nice. He developed the notion in academic literature. He developed the notion of K-shaped economic recovery to. talk about how different groups of people have different realities. Interesting. When they are recovering from some major event, he developed this notion after the pandemic to talk about the post-pandemic economic recovery.

Fascinating. I am not familiar with either this economist or this theory. So I love this. I'm learning something new. But you're saying that you think that now it might actually be more like tentacles or there's like a lot of different disparate realities. Yeah, exactly. K seems a little bit too binary.

The economic reality of various groups of people is far more complex and far more multifaceted than a simple binary division represented by the fork of a K. Where we get into these different realities, because while it's true that the people that I was talking to by nature of being personal finance show, aficionados, are acutely aware of their situation, of how their money is compounding. of what it's invested in, of what they're spending in. Yes, we're talking to people who have chosen to orient their lives and their financial plans in such a way that will produce good outcomes for them. And I got really into the weeds of the origins of advertising and this phrase

standard of living and quality of life and all these things that we think about as lifestyle monikers that are class status signifiers. And it's easy to think about those things as things that just kind of, nah, came into existence naturally, organically. Like, you kind of from birth are aware of class distinctions. And it's like how we get the keeping up with the Jones's thing of like, you can kind of tell that your neighbors with the bigger house and newer cars are richer than you. And so you start to understand the world around you through this class, not even dichotomy, right?

Because there's more than one layer of this game. But you start to understand. Strata. Yeah, the various strata. You can aspire to higher and higher levels, but it didn't happen naturally. All of these things are the result of very intentional kind of social engineering that happened at the outset of the industrial revolution and then the 1920s and 1930s where there were economists who literally are quoted saying, yeah, standard of living and quality of life and all of these things,

they have to be constantly evolving if we want people to keep spending money. Consumption economists organized the economy in such a way that kind of requires people to constantly be aspiring, consuming, spending more. You get the raise. Now you have the nicer car. Okay, well, now there's always a level above which you can aspire to. And even if you are perfectly content staying at quote unquote your level, even that is going to continue evolving by design. And so I think that there is this kind of seeing through the matrix that the fire community, to its credit, actually does a really good job of going, wait a second. I don't want to orient my entire life around consumption,

but the culture you live in, probably most of the people you know, the media you're consuming, all of these things are designed around that core idea. You're going to make more money. You're going to get more money. And then there is going to be that itch of like, is it enough? I don't know. It doesn't seem like enough. I don't know. I don't know. What's going to happen? I guess it's not surprising at all when you look into the history of how we even got these ideals and phrases and concepts. And so then what I'm hearing is one element of dysmorphia might be that you have what is objectively a very high standard of living.

You have what is a rather nice, luxurious life. You can pull up your phone and order a car. and in minutes a driver will appear from out of the ether and will come to you and will take you where you want to go. And you can reach your destination and pull up your phone and just press a button and then food will appear. It rocks, right? It's like, oh my God, we're living in the future. And even forget the phone. You can turn a faucet and this clean, drinkable water just comes out of it. 24 hours a day.

You don't even have to refill it or anything. You don't have to refill the tank. That water faucet just runs. Yeah. So you could be living what is objectively a very cushy life, one that royalty from the year 1,200 could never have dreamed of. And yet, because you're comparing yourself to a different strata, it doesn't ever feel like enough. That's the classic consumption woe that drives a lot of people into the fire movement, as you pointed out. Yeah. But beyond that, it also seems to me like money dysmorphia could be these feelings of anxiety or fear or any other similar negative feelings that are not necessarily warranted by circumstance. And that's where it gets tricky because I don't want to suggest that modern life is so incredible that no one has any reason to be concerned. We still exist in a world where if you're trying to send your kids to college, yeah, you're going to. to need hundreds of thousands of dollars for that. If you get into an accident and hop in an ambulance, it's going to cost thousands of dollars. There are things both planned and unplanned that will happen that can be very expensive. In some cases, insurance can help kind of cap your downside,

so you're not just facing a bottomless pit of expense. But yeah, at the core of it, where I ended up landing after talking to a bunch of people and reading a bunch of these submissions. One of the things that I think we don't talk about enough, we don't acknowledge enough, it's become such a part of the background of everyday life that we don't acknowledge it. There is such an emphasis on social media, as I noted. There is very little emphasis on traditional media. And there have been studies that have been done in the 21st century about the types of lifestyles that are portrayed as normal on TV.

The types of, you know, you're watching. sitcoms or you're watching reality television, you're pretty much only ever seeing rich people on TV. Right. Comparatively to the way your average person is living, you are seeing upper middle class or rich people on television who seemingly, apparently, this is just like, quote unquote, normal life. Right. Whether you're talking about like the HGTVification of what a house should look like, or you're watching Real Housewives or Kardashians or some of these reality television shows or these people are literally billionaires or centa millionaires. But your brain can't distinguish fake from real.

It's just at the most basic fundamental level, your guard is down, you're watching a sitcom and the family lives in a five-bedroom house and has two brand-new vehicles. Your brain is just interpreting that information and kind of filing it away of like, okay, this is how a normal family lives. There's the fact that we see so many wealthy people represented in our traditional media. We learned so much from media unknowingly about what's normal. It's because that's when everyone got TVs and we all had TV shows that were showing the June Cleaver of that era on television. And so you don't see the eras before that represented and therefore they're kind of absent from our collective understanding of history and progress. But

just it feels like something where unless you really sit back and think about like where did I like inherit or start to understand and believe these things to be true, so much of it is driven by media. And we're just not skeptical about the traditional media that we're consuming in the same way that we are skeptical about the social media that we are consuming. And that makes sense because if you think of home alone. Yes. How did the family in home alone live in that large of a house? The real full house in San Francisco is you can see. see that the outdoor facade of the house where it was shot. Yes. It would be incredibly expensive. Many millions of dollars. That was a family of, let's see. You've got Danny, Uncle Jesse, Joey, plus three kids. So that's what a family of six. Yeah. Before Aunt Becky moved in. Exactly. But there's no part of that storyline that's like acknowledgement of the fact that these are, these people are rich. Right. It's just, this is normal. Normal. That is the subtext. Because Fresh Prince of Bel Air, they outright acknowledge that Uncle Phil is rich. Excellent example.

Right? That was very overtly acknowledged and repeated over and over and over. Oh, Uncle Phil is rich. Hillary was the Rich Valley Girl character. So a show like Fresh Prince really very overtly acknowledged it, whereas a lot of the other shows just didn't. So, yeah, comes off as normal. I think that the only show in recent memory that I can think, of that portrayed poor people was made on Netflix. Did you watch Made by chance? No. It was based on a

memoir by with the same name, by a woman named Stephanie Land, limited series. I think it was like eight episodes. And it shows a woman who is in an abusive relationship, domestic violence, financial abuse. She has a baby with this guy. They live in a trailer and she has to escape and she takes the kid and she starts over cleaning people's houses. So that's why it's called Maid. and it shows her interacting with the welfare system. And it's like, oh, well, I can't get a child care voucher until I have work. Well, no one will hire me because I don't have childcare. So like, how is that?

So how am I supposed to do that? And it really shows you this intimate look at like, oh, how hard is it to get Section 8 housing? How hard is it to go through this system? Look at how stuck she is. This was the only time I have ever seen that experience on television. And that is the experience of tens of millions of Americans. Far more people are facing that than are living in a townhome. in San Francisco on Lombard Street. And yet, which one is on television and consider the norm?

So money dysmorphia comes from social media. It comes also largely from traditional media. Does it also come from neighbors, colleagues, classmates, from the people in our lives who drive nice cars, they have nice clothing. We can see all of these outward elements of their life that make it appear as though they are financially very successful, we cannot see their personal balance sheet. We don't know how much money they have safe for retirement. We don't know if that car was financed or paid for in cash. How much of financial dysmorphia comes from that? I don't know the exact breakdown of how these influences convales to create these outcomes. But I think it's a lot. This is why when I lived in a city like Dallas and hung out with

a lot of my college friends there. I spent a lot of money on bars and restaurants, on my hair, on my makeup, on my clothes, you know, all of these things that just were the norm in my social circle. And in Dallas, young women culture more generally. And when I moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, I spent basically no money on any of those things because people spend their time and money differently in different places. Like there are subcultures regionally and, in the cities you live in. I heard from someone else who expressed this who was like, I moved from L.A. to Denver and my financial situation completely changed. Not because Denver is a much cheaper cost of living. It's not. But you spend so much less because the types of activities you're doing

and as a woman, like the level of material and aesthetic upkeep that you feel is the norm in Denver compared to a place like Los Angeles is so different. To your point about our social circles, I think they are hugely impactful. How is media, impacting our social circles and vice versa. How much is art imitating life? There is an interesting two-way mirror that's happening. And I think the path of least resistance is to assimilate and pay to assimilate. If you've ever lived in a lot of different places with very different cultures and you've kind of paid attention to this, it's really obvious how it happens. I was in a sorority at Alabama. All I cared about was David Yerman and Louis Vuitton and Range Rovers and blah, because that was what the people

around me had. It wasn't until I got out of that environment and moved to a place that did not value those things and where those things did not carry social status and cachet, that I was like, oh, none of that stuff matters. But it's so easy to mistake those priorities as your own because humans are social animals. We want to fit in. There's nothing wrong with wanting to assimilate to your group, right? But you better pick that group wisely because it is going to determine what you feel like you have to spend money on. And so then, in that case, to kind of land upon some solutions for people who are listening to this.

No solutions, just rants. That's what I'm here for. You bring the solutions. I bring the rants. Feeling like they might have money dysmorphia sounds as though being selective about the voices in your personal ecosystem, which could come from being in online communities. Yeah. In which people value saving, value investing, where in the fire community, the status symbol is not given car. In fact, the status symbol is the opposite.

Yeah. It's like, do you have a Honda Civic that is paid off in 20 years old? Exactly. In the fire community, you will get a lot of applause for posting a picture of your odometer hitting like 300,000 miles. Yeah, that's so funny. To the point where it actually becomes, I think, a little bit intimidating. That's such a perfect example. You would get laughed out of the fire community if you ever bought like a Lamborghini or something. You would be absolutely laughed out. That probably causes its own dysmorphia. It probably creates some degree of people who have a 40% savings rate, but who are worried that they're not saving enough. This goes back to what you said earlier. I feel like the rug could get pulled out under me.

So true. I had a crisis when I bought a Porsche and I was like, oh my God, they're going to revoke my fire card. never going to let me hang out on these subreddits again? It was like a real crisis where I was like, who am I if I want this car? Because I want this car and I can afford it in cash. And yet, what are my fire friends going to think that I bought a nice car? Oh. And I totally see that. I have heard from people in the fire community, like readers and listeners who found me

through the fire community, because that was how I got started. Yeah. I've since really pulled some of that back. Not so much, but I bought a Porsche so clearly. I've deconstructed to some extent. But I've heard from people who are like in these chats where people are saving 80% of their income and I can't get anywhere close to that. And I just feel like I'm not doing enough. The average save rate in the United States is 4%.

If you are saving 40, you are crushing it. And I do think that that's why counterweight voices like Ramit Seiti, who emphasize the importance of spending well are so valuable for people who are really. good savers and love saving and love watching the balance go up. Because I don't know, my worst nightmare is finding out at 35 that I have some terminal illness. And I've just spent my entire early adulthood rejecting all opportunities to do fun things to save for the future. And then I don't have a future. It's its own risk in a way. I think the pandemic really brought a lot of that home. Speaking personally, that was really the time where my assumption that I'm going to live until I'm at least 90 was truly challenged. Yeah, it was scary. That was the first moment where I was like, oh,

forget 90. There's no guarantee I'll even see 40. It's scary. And I think it's a good scary. Yeah. I think existential awareness of your own mortality can clarify a lot of things. Once you get past a certain point of security and you know that you're on the right path, I personally have kind of leaned into the notion that it's less important that I'm making as much money as possible and more important that I'm spending my time getting closer and closer to the type of lifestyle and the type of work that I would want to sustain forever. And if that means making less right now, then great. That's totally fine. I don't need more money right now. Obviously, you can always use it, but when it stops being the most important thing and it stops being the most crucial priority,

it's really important to recognize that. Actually, the same. save rate is no longer the most important thing. I'm good now and I can kind of stay on my path, but I don't know, I get scared sometimes for myself and for others that are really into the fire world that find it impossible to stop prioritizing money as number one. It's a habit. Right. And it doesn't seem like it'd be that big of a problem, but when you start orienting your life around it, you kind of lose the forest for the trees. Yeah. We're going to take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors, and we will continue this conversation when we return. The holidays are right around the corner, and if you're hosting, you're going to need to get

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That's what being a fifth third better is all about. It's about not being just one thing, but many things for our customers. Big Bank muscle, fintech hustle. That's your commercial payments of fifth third better. You said a word that I thought was really important when you said the word counterweight. That might be the solution for dysmorphia because that money dysmorphia, can form from excessively being influenced by only one variety of voice. So if you are excessively influenced by Instagram influencers who are on a yacht in Europe every summer,

yes, of course, that's going to morph your reality. If you're excessively influenced by mainstream television, by full house and home alone, you can tell I don't watch much TV because those are the examples I'm reaching for. Everyone's like, Paula, update your television. Someone's like, get this woman in HBO Max subscription now. My dysmorphias, I don't have a dragon and I don't live in Westeros. Oh, she's got that. Okay, cool.

She watches HBO. We're good. Confirmed. Perhaps by having those counterweights, by balancing traditional media with voices from the fire movement, but then counterbalancing that with, it could be anything. Maybe you have a bunch of buddies and you're all into chess or you're all into soccer, whatever it is. Perhaps it's having, like a balanced diet, perhaps it's having that wide variety of vitamins and minerals on your plate. Hmm. I love that you brought a solution.

Oh, thank you. Like I said, I'm here to rant. You're here to give answers. That's such a good distillation of the difference in our shows as I show up and I'm like, look, I got some thoughts, I got some feelings. I have no answers for you, but we're going to take a little meandering path and hopefully you'll have some fun along the way. So I love that you brought some solid advice here. Maybe it's trite to be like, the answer is balance. But as with most things, it kind of is. And there's probably a reason existentially or in the greater cosmos. So much of this always comes back to, you need balance and you need discernment. Yeah. That honing your own personal discernment of, where am I on the spectrum? And how do I move myself a little bit more to the middle? Which voices do I

need to kind of inject a little bit more of because I'm getting a little too radicalized in either direction and I need to maintain some normality here. Right. Travel also plays a big role in this because yes, there's like travel to Paris and you sit at a cafe and decide you're going to start smoking cigarettes or whatever. Attacked. There's also the time that you spend in Kathmandu and you see literal trash fires. Oh man. Just mounds and mounds of plastic being lit on fire. and there's this thing called load shedding, which is when all of the electricity just goes away. And it's frequent. It's just like it's a normal part of daily life. Not so much these days, but definitely when I was a kid. Wow. To what I said earlier about you can turn a tap and there's water that comes out of it, 24 hours a day. That just doesn't exist in a lot of places.

I also don't want to like paint a super negative picture about Nepal because you also have the gorgeous saris. There's also a lot of luxury there too. But what I'm hearing you say is like it's really easy to become myopic when you live in your bubble. Right. Yeah. And if when you can gain some perspective, that can be very expansive. Right. Because I think it can give you perspective about what your reality really is. And I think in both extremes, like if you were to visit a country or even a city of the United States. Right.

That is very poor and see how other people live. Or you go to Oslo, Norway, you will never look at it. the city the same way again. You could eat off those streets that are so clean. Oh, same with Singapore. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can visit places like that too and also go, wow, we could do so much better. Like, let us take that as a challenge in the U.S. to step it up a little bit. But I think that there is like you kind of need both to understand. I've spent too much time now trying to go to countries in Scandinavia. So now I come back to the U.S. and I'm like, I hate it. Aw. This place stinks. But like, you're right. You have to get that bigger picture. So often the tunnel vision like this is

is not just like, what is my social bubble? What is my cultural influences in my little bubble? But just me, me, me, me, me, everything's about me. And I think when you're really focused on yourself and your financial goals and it's so easy for those blinders to just get smaller and smaller and smaller. So maybe dysmorphia is myopia. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Look at that. God, I wish I would have talked to you before I release this episode. I'm about to go put out a, like, guys, breakthrough. Dysmorphia is myopia. Dysmorphia is myopia.

All right. I'm glad we workshoped that one. We got there. Well, this has been such a pleasure, Katie. Thank you for coming on. Likewise. And your show, Money with Katie, is just so beautifully, beautifully done. Oh, thank you.

Likewise. And thank you for having me, Paula. I really, really appreciate it. This was so fun. Thank you, Katie. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key takeaway number one. Money dysmorphia or financial hypochondria affects even people who are financially secure. People who objectively have healthy finances can still feel anxious about their money situation. And it's a battle, really, between your brain and your bank account.

Because your brain is going to think regardless of what your bank account says. this disconnect between reality and perception, this is pretty widespread. And it affects everyone, regardless of your income, regardless of your net worth. If you are prone to feeling anxiety about money, then you might feel anxiety about money no matter how much you have. I'd say 125 of them were people being like, effectively it was this. Yeah, I'm 30 years old. I have a paid off house and half a million dollars in investments. Am I okay? Like, am I doing enough?

And I would be like, oh, it was people that were by every measure so far ahead of the game were doing so amazingly. We're making incredible decisions. But there was this one phrase that I kept seeing over and over and over again. This anxiety about financial security, even among people who are objectively doing well, highlights just how deeply ingrained those money worries can be. It's not just about the numbers, it's about our perception of the numbers. And there are many factors that shape that perception, but the media that we consume, including traditional media, is one of many factors at play. Social media is an easy scapegoat, but traditional media, as well as the conspicuous consumption of our friends, neighbors, colleagues, all of those play a

big role in it as well. So that is the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two, as a continuation of this media theme, media significantly influences our perception of financial normalcy. So our ideas around financial normalcy can be really skewed when we see these unrealistic standards. We learned so much from media unknowingly about what's normal. It's because that's when everyone got TVs and we all had TV shows that were showing the June Cleaver's of that era on television. And so you don't see the eras before that represented and therefore they're kind of absent from our collective understanding of history and progress. The media's influence on our financial perceptions can lead to unrealistic expectations and

unnecessary stress. So pay attention to what you're seeing on TV, to what you're seeing in the movies, even if it's in the background, even if it's not the focal point, perhaps especially if it's not the focal point, pay attention to how those shape your sense of the norm. So that is the second key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway number three, it isn't just about saving for the future. It's about finding joy in the present because you need to balance financial goals. Goal setting is necessarily future orientation, but you have to balance that future orientation with present enjoyment.

And when you do find a balance between these two, you can have an over-escent-rength. you can have an overall healthier relationship with money. I don't know. My worst nightmare is like finding out at 35 that I have some terminal illness. And I've just spent my entire early adulthood rejecting all opportunities to do fun things to save for the future. And then I don't have a future. It's its own risk in a way. I think the pandemic really brought a lot of that home where for me, speaking personally, That was really the time where my assumption that I'm going to live until I'm at least 90 was truly challenged.

Yeah, it was scary. That was the first moment where I was like, oh, forget 90. There's no guarantee I'll even see 40. It's scary. And I think it's a good scary because I think it's true. I think existential awareness of your own mortality can clarify a lot of things. Once you get past a certain point of security and like you know that you're on the right path. This perspective reminds us that while financial security is important, it shouldn't come at the

cost of living a fulfilling life now. In other words, plan for the future, but don't live in it. It makes no sense to sacrifice today for the sake of tomorrow, given that today is a certainty and tomorrow is not. You can devote major elements of today towards building for tomorrow, but don't defer your happiness because tomorrow might never arrive and we need to live our lives with a balance in order to alleviate some of the anxiety that comes up when we overtilt towards tomorrow. Goal setting is future orientation and anxiety is worry about the future. And so it makes sense that people who are goal oriented might be prone to anxiety, at least some people.

and so by pulling ourselves back into the present, we can alleviate some of that worry and have a better life today. So those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Katie Gadita San, host of Money with Katie. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode, please do three things. First and foremost, sign up for our newsletter. It is absolutely zero cost and lots of benefit.

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