Financial Feminist - 237. 5 Sneaky Money Mindsets Ruining Your Financial Goals

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

I’ve seen it over and over again––the smartest, most capable people sabotage their financial success because of mindset traps they don’t even realize they’re falling into. In this episode, I’m walking you through 5 sneaky money mindsets that could be silently wrecking your financial goals—and more importantly, how to break free from them. These aren't just bad habits. They’re deeply-rooted beliefs that keep us playing small, procrastinating, and feeling like we’re not “cut out” for financial freedom. I’ll break down why these mental blocks are so common (especially for women and marginalized folks), how they show up in your daily life, and what to do instead. So whether you're paying off debt, saving for a big goal, or just trying to feel more in control of your money, this is the mindset reset you didn’t know you needed. Mentioned in this episode: How to Stop Emotional Spending: https://herfirst100k.com/financial-feminist-show-notes/stop-emotional-spending/  The #1 Mindset Holding You Back in Life: https://herfirst100k.com/financial-feminist-show-notes/142-the-1-mindset-holding-you-back-in-life/  Read transcripts, learn more about our guests and sponsors, and get more resources at: https://herfirst100k.com/financial-feminist-show-notes/237-5-sneaky-money-mindsets-ruining-your-financial-goals/ Looking for accountability, live coaching, and deeper financial education? Check out our exclusive community! Join the $100K Club: https://herfirst100k.com/100k-pod Our favorite travel and cash-back credit cards, plus other financial resources: https://herfirst100k.com/tools Not sure where to start on your financial journey? Take our FREE money personality quiz! https://herfirst100k.com/quiz Special thanks to our sponsors: Squarespace Go to www.squarespace.com/FFPOD to save 10% off your first website or domain purchase. Rocket Money Stop wasting money on things you don’t use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to RocketMoney.com/FFPOD. Quince For your next trip, treat yourself to the luxe upgrades you deserve from Quince. Go to Quince.com/FFPOD for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Netsuite If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, download the free e-book Navigating Global Trade: 3 Insights for Leaders at NetSuite.com/FFPOD. Masterclass Get an additional 15% off any annual membership at Masterclass.com/FFPOD. Indeed Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com/FFPOD. ResortPass Visit Resortpass.com and use code FFPOD to get $20 off your first ResortPass experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

These five money mindsets are the reason you're not achieving your goals. And in order to become financially successful, you need to know what they are. Let's get into it. But first, a word from our sponsors. Because you're listening to this show, I know that self-development is a primary goal for you, right? You're listening to financial feminists, you're interested in being the best version of yourself. And that's why you should also look at Masterclass. Masterclass is a fantastic way to better your life, whether it's learning how to be a better cook, a better leader, learning how to code, Masterclass has everything.

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to Indeed data. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash FFPOD. Just go to indeed.com slash ffpod right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash ffpod, terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. We've talked about many times on this show that money is not really about numbers. It's not really about being good with math or good with the numbers and the spreadsheets

and the charts. It's all about your mindset. And the truth is most people don't have a good money mindset. Most people are actively sabotaging themselves because they're not understanding what's actually going on psychologically when they're thinking and talking and earning money.

So today we're talking about the five money mindsets that you haven't considered before that are actually sabotaging the way you think about money and sabotaging your financial success. The first one is finding every excuse in the book for why you can't do something. Yeah, you're getting tough love Tory right off the bat here. I think it's very, very common to hear about somebody's financial experience. Maybe it's mine, right? I saved $100,000 at age 25. I have many episodes where we talked about how I did this.

I have an entire book about how I did this. And especially when I was first sharing my story, when I was getting featured on Good Party in America, when I was having articles on CNBC or CNN written about my journey to saving 100k, the comments all had this very common theme, which is, oh, I can't do this too. It's very easy to look at some sort of financial milestone and just think, well, that's not possible for me. And I get it. There's a lot of systemic reasons why you might not be able to save $100,000 at age 25

or pay off your student loans until you're in your 40s. There's a lot of barriers that we talk about on this show every single episode that are keeping you from financial success that have nothing to do with your own personal choices. However, I hate the mindset of writing off somebody's experience because it's not exactly your own. I kind of think it's like a get out of jail free card.

I think it's a person's way of abdicating responsibility rather than looking at somebody's experience and going, okay, they might not look exactly like me. They might not have the exact same degree. They might not live in the exact same city. They might have some privileges that I don't, but also what can I learn from them? They might not live in the exact same city. They might have some privileges that I don't, but also what can I learn from them?

This is a great opportunity for you to understand that you can learn from almost anybody, from almost anybody's financial circumstances, and especially somebody who is actively trying to help other people get better with money. Envy is an opportunity, right? Envy and jealousy is an opportunity for us to take a look at what we really truly want. But every time we go, well, that couldn't be me because

of X, Y, Z reason. Yeah, that might be true, but everybody's lived experience is slightly different. You're never going to find somebody who has the exact same life experience, except if you look in a mirror. The first mindset of finding every excuse in the book as a reason that you can't do something is in fact just sabotaging your success, is in fact just giving your brain a million reasons for you to discount all of the good information or the good learnings that someone else's situation could teach you. But finding excuses and finding every single possible way

to say, well, that couldn't be me or I can't do this, eliminates any sort of path to success. Maybe you can't do exactly what they did, right? But you can formulate it for you. For me, I knew I wasn't going to save a million dollars at 22, but I thought maybe I can do 100K at 25. And that was my happy medium. That was me taking pieces of other people's success,

other people's stories and saying, how can I make it my own? I don't want you throwing away your own responsibility to yourself. Yeah, there's a million things systemically that are outside of our control, but there's also a lot that's in your control. Mindset number two.

We have been told our entire life that there's two kinds of people. There's savers and there's spenders. Now, I could win an Olympic gold medal in saving money, right? I am very good at it. I went from 100K at 25 to being a multimillionaire at 27. I am very, very good at saving money. But as soon as we start classifying people as either savers or spenders,

it makes one person or one type of person feel really good about themselves and the other type of person less so, right? The spenders always feel immediate shame, but they also internalize that belief. They're like, okay, I'm just a spender. I can't save any money. And it also makes savers potentially

too hyper-focused on their goal. You know me, I'm a financial expert that is not gonna tell you you can't spend any money because that's not realistic, and frankly, it's not fucking fun. So this sort of classification of are you a saver or are you a spender doesn't actually help you achieve your goals and gets you in this mindset rut where you're just a self-affirming

prophecy. So rather than classifying yourself as one or the other, I need you to understand that actually we're all spenders. Yes, even me who again could win an Olympic gold medal in saving money. I'm a spender. I will eventually spend all of the money I have saved. It might not be for a while, right? It might be in 30 years when I retire. It might be on a wedding in a couple years or in a house in a couple months, right? But the thing about spenders, we're actually all spenders.

We're all going to spend the money we have saved. We're all going to spend. So I do need you to figure out what you actually want to spend money on. And if you were someone who would have classified yourself as a spender, right? If you said, oh, I'm a saver, I'm a spender, I'm definitely a spender. This is a great way for you to actually get your brain on board to save more money. Because if you can say to yourself, you know what? I am going to spend this money that I have saved for retirement.

It just is not now. Or I am going to spend this money that I have saved for a down payment on a house. It's just not right now. You can start to see that you can rewire all of your spending tendencies to actually get your brain on board to start saving more. So stop classifying yourself as either a saver or a spender. We are all spenders. It's just a matter of when and how we spend that money. So number one was all about finding excuses, finding every excuse in the book for saying,

I can't do this. The second one was thinking about classifying yourself as either a saver or a spender. In fact, we're all spenders. And the third one is something that is so pervasive and is something that I think impacts every aspect of our lives, not just money. When we think about any goal that we have or something that we're trying to do, whether that's trying to get in shape, trying to pay off our debts, going back to school to get an education. Our brain does this interesting thing where it immediately goes to the amount of time that that thing is going to take you. So whether it's paying off student loans and realizing that that's going to be a 10-year

process or it's going to get a bachelor's degree and knowing that's going to be four years or it's like, okay, I know I'm not going to become a bachelor's degree and knowing that's going to be four years, or it's like, okay, I know I'm not going to become the rock overnight. I'm not going to look like him going to the gym once, and this is probably going to take me, you know, months if not years. Our brain immediately wants to disengage from that goal, because we want immediate gratification. This is how our brains work, right? We want dopamine, we want serotonin, we want things that immediately make us feel better. So we think to ourself, oh God, this is gonna take me 10 fucking years.

Why would I do anything at all about it? This is gonna take so long. Oh my God, going back to school, that's gonna take me four years. This happened to me a lot when I was starting my business. I remember thinking to myself in 2016, when I just wanted to get out of corporate, this was my first job out of school.

And immediately I was like, I don't think this is for me. This is awful. And the fact that I was going to have to stay there for 35 years, I was like, how am I going to do this? But also I want to build a business that gets me out now. That wasn't realistic, right? The business that I wanted was not going to be built in three months. So I remember thinking to myself,

well, if it's going to take years to build this business, why do it at all? Here's the deal, though. Whether it's 10 years, a year, even six months, and you're thinking, God, it's going to take that long, time will pass anyway. The 10 years is going to happen regardless of whether you're pursuing your goal or not. The four years it's going to take to get your degree are going to happen anyway. So you can either spend the next four years

enrolling and getting your bachelor's degree and putting yourself in a very different financial and life stage in the next four years, after that four years, or you can remain in exactly the same spot, or maybe even a worse financial and life stage. The same thing with your debt. Yeah, it might take a really long time to pay off your debt. It might take a really, really long time and a lot of effort, but you're either going to be in a better place in 10 years or the same or even worse life stage. It doesn't matter how long something takes.

It doesn't matter that this is going to be a multi-year or even multi-decade process. But it does matter that you start now, because I want those years to be better than the years before. I want you to have time pass, and knowing that you're setting yourself up, that you're investing in your future rather than staying stagnant. When it comes to investing, for example, starting now is way better than thinking, oh, I'm not perfect, I don't have all of the answers,

so I'm gonna wait until I know more. The truth is time is gonna pass anyway. The four years, the 10 years, the six months are going to pass anyway. The four years, the 10 years, the six months are going to pass anyway. So I would rather you put yourself in a way better position to actually get closer to achieving your goals than looking back and going, wow, I didn't do anything in that six months

to actually get where I wanted to go. When we come back from the show, we're sharing more about the money mindsets that are sabotaging you. And if you want even more about the money mindsets that are sabotaging you. And if you want even more about spending versus saving, listen to episode 25 where we talk about the emotional spending triggers that cause people to mindlessly spend. Again, that's episode 25.

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use offer code SF pod to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Number four, this one. Oh my God. Okay, I'm going to put myself up on a soap box here for a second. When we hear the word billionaire, Okay, I'm gonna put myself up on a soapbox here for a second. When we hear the word billionaire, we typically associate billionaires with Elon Musk,

Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and for good reason, right? Most billionaires are men and most billionaires are bad people. Most billionaires have exploited their way and won capitalism to a point where they have more money than they know what to do with. I don't want that for myself. I don't want that for you. There's a lot of billionaires that are not good people. There's a lot of billionaires that have pursued wealth at the expense of the environment, at the expense of their team and laborers, at the expense of their own families,

and sometimes at the expense of general morality. So a lot of people, myself included, look at billionaires and think, I'm good, I'm good, I don't need that much money. But where it really starts to get toxic and where it really starts to sabotage your own financial goals is when you start lumping billionaires with millionaires. A lot of people on the internet think that these two things are the same. And when they talk about eating the rich, they want to eat somebody who's a millionaire as well as a billionaire. My friend over at Your Rich BFF, Vivian, talks about the difference, okay?

A millionaire, let's give an example of a grain of sand, right, if you have a million dollars, you have a grain of sand. And let's say you have a couple million dollars, okay? We have a couple grains of sand. You know how small a grain of sand is, right? We've all been to a beach. It's extremely tiny.

It's like, I can barely fit it between my fingernails. That's how tiny it is. But when we talk about a billionaire, they have a bucket of sand and some of them maybe even have a small beach, right? They have lots of millions. And we're not just talking about a hundred million dollars, right? We're talking about at least a thousand million dollars. That's what a billion is, a thousand million. That's a lot of grains of sand. And we've talked about on the show before

about how women in particular feel this really uncomfortable level of pursuing money. We feel like if we are rich or want to be rich, it's bad. uncomfortable level of pursuing money, right? We feel like if we are rich or want to be rich, it's bad. It's gauche, it's impolite, that the pursuit of money is somehow wrong. If you're out here wanting to be a billionaire, that is your primary goal. Yeah, that's not great. But if you want a million dollars or even some millions of dollars,

that is a very different story from having billions and billions of dollars. I live in Seattle. The average home price is $950,000 in this city. That is a million dollars. So if I were to just buy a decent home in the Seattle area, right? And especially if I'm trying to buy it without taking a loan from the bank, I need at least a million dollars to do that. In order to protect myself in retirement, for anybody, the average person to protect themselves in retirement,

you're going to need millions of dollars. So this idea that billionaires and millionaires are the same thing and therefore we should eat all of the rich people and lump them all together and also actively push away wanting to be a millionaire, it's just not true. It's not the same thing. And if you're a member of a marginalized group, I have said it many times, but I'll say it again.

A financial education is your best form of protest. Having money means having options, and nothing bad happens when women have money. Nothing bad happens. So when you have millions of dollars, it's very different than having billions of dollars. And in fact, it's actually as much money as you need to live a comfortable, safe, healthy life

and hopefully also take care of your family and community. Millionaires and billionaires could not be more different. And when you lump them together in your head or in the comment section, it's just not accurate and it's also not helpful for everybody else who's just trying to get by. Our final one. This one kind of couples with number three, but I was talking about this in our recent live coaching we do in the 100K Club.

In both of our programs, the 100K Club and Stock Market School, I do monthly live coaching. It's one of my favorite, the 100K club and stock market school, I do monthly live coaching. It's one of my favorite parts of the month. It's the only coaching I do anymore. And it's so impactful. I can literally see people's mindsets shifting. I can see their progress towards debt getting way, way easier. We have helped literally thousands, we're at tens of thousands of people at this point, help them impact their money, help them actually get better with money and investing and paying off debt. And recently in the 100K Club, this just happened a couple of days ago, somebody asked a question about feeling discouraged and feeling like they had this mountain of debt.

I believe this person had $116,000 in student loans. And so it's not just a tiny amount of debt. That's a significant amount. And they were asking, how do I actually stay motivated and how do I not get immediately overwhelmed in the pursuit of paying off that debt? And what I've talked about in workshops before and what I told this person on coaching is the Mount Everest example. When we're encountering a big goal, again, whether it's financial, it is $116,000 of debt, it is trying to invest enough to protect your retirement, or it's something not related to finance. It's getting fit,

it's having a better relationship with food, it's bettering your relationship with your partner. What happens is we look at any goal like it's Mount Everest and we're standing at the bottom of the mountain. It's so difficult to figure out how the fuck you're gonna climb this mountain because you're staring straight up at it. You're seeing the full this mountain because you're staring straight up at it. You're seeing the full

entire mountain, right? You're seeing $116,000 of debt. You're seeing arguments and conflicts with your partner and the amount of time it's going to take you to resolve those conflicts. You're looking at, God, I haven't been to the gym in months and now I have to get back on the treadmill. This is going to suck, right? You're looking at every single possible thing that could go wrong because you're looking straight up the mountain. And no wonder you're getting overwhelmed. You're looking at the fucking tallest mountain in the world and you're going, how the hell am I going to climb this thing?

So I need you to stop looking up and start looking forward. Stop looking up and start looking forward. How do you climb a mountain? You climb it one step at a time. You just look forward. You look at the things that are in your sight line. You look at the things that you can control, the problems that are going to come up on the trail that you're on right now.

When I was building her first 100K as a business, that's the perfect example, honestly, as I was looking at, oh my God, in three years I'm going to have to hire somebody and I have no idea how to do that. And also in a year I'm going to need a lawyer and I don't know any lawyers. And what happens if someone on the internet yells at me? I don't have the tools that I need to figure that out and to navigate that. I was looking at the business that I wanted to build that was going to happen in three years or five years or 10 years. Right? I was looking at the mountain and the mountain kept getting bigger. When in actuality,

I just needed to focus on the problems in front of me. I just needed to focus on not getting tripped on the problems in front of me. I just needed to focus on not getting tripped up and not falling flat on my face, hiking up the mountain one step at a time. Because the truth is, all of the problems that I was stressed about, I knew how to solve when I actually encountered them. Because I had another year of experience

or another three years of experience. It's the same thing with your debt. It's the same thing with any other financial goal. You're getting overwhelmed because you're looking at the entire mountain as opposed to just the steps in front of you. So, okay, $116,000 a debt. How can you pay off $500 this week? Or even, can I just put $20 this week to my debt? Can I just put $20 this week to my debt? Right? Take these small steps. Progress matters over perfection. Stop looking up and start looking forward. If you want to take your learning further,

we have an incredible episode with the number one money mindset holding you back. Hint, it is all about this Mount Everest example, but in more detail, it's the all or nothing mindset. And it's holding you back in every aspect of your life way more than you think it is. It is episode 142. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts,

wherever you're listening right now. Team, I need you to work actively to not only better your finances, but to better your money mindset. You can tell from these and so many other mindset episodes that we've talked about on this show that your mindset has everything to do with whether you're financially successful or not. It has everything to do with how close you are to achieving your goals, even how you set goals, or if you're sabotaging yourself along the way.

So as always, please take your financial learning seriously. If this episode was impactful for you, please share it. If you're watching on YouTube, please subscribe to the show. It's the easiest way to make sure that we can continue giving you really important, valuable information. Thank you for supporting Feminist Media. Thank you for being here. And we'll see you very soon. Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First 100K podcast. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First 100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com.

If you're confused about your personal finances and you're wondering where to start, go to herfirst100k.com slash quiz for a free personalized money plan. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields and Tamesha Grant. Research by Sarah Shortino. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and operations by Carina Patel and Amanda LeFeu. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K. Kaylyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmakeva, Sasha Bonar,

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