Welcome to Good Money Vibes, the podcast to help you feel good with money. My name is Emilie. I’m a Money Confidence Coach, and it is my job to help you feel good with money, that’s just my overall thing. A little bit about me, so in 2020, I underwent my own financial transformation, having only had debt in my adult life, um, to being debt-free, building an emergency fund, and kind of teaching myself everything there is to know about finance. So now, it’s my job to help you learn everything there is about finance, but most importantly, only the important things that you need to know and how they actually make sense in living your best life.
It’s my job to help you uncover what it is you want to do with your life and what’s stopping you from getting there and bridging that gap. So whether it’s poor money mindset, limiting beliefs, that’s where people work with me to help uncover and break through those kinds of things, or whether it’s building a financial game plan in order to achieve the goals that you want to achieve and live the life that you want to live.
So that’s a little bit about me and why we’re here today. We’re going to be talking about uncovering your money story. So, what is your money story? Your money story is basically all the things that build up your money mindset. So, your money mindset is the way you think, the way you feel, the way you act around money, basically every single financial decision you make, from buying a house, buying a car, to picking up an extra chocolate bar with your meal deal, every single financial decision, and it’s brought together by lots of different things, from our upbringing.
So, this is what uncovering your money story is all about because really, I don’t think anyone realises that as they’re walking through Tesco, making decisions about what to buy, their upbringing up until the age of seven is affecting what they’re doing. So, I just want you to take that in for a moment. Age seven. In 2013, researchers from the University of Cambridge found that by age seven, your financial behaviours, things like delaying gratification, um, are set. And they found, um, in another study, that children as young as 3 to 5 years old can hold conversations or start to hold conversations about money, where emotions are linked.
And that is the part about money that no one talks about. We often think money is numbers in a bank account, when it is very rarely that. Yes, the numbers in our bank account allow us to make certain financial decisions, but really, it’s all about the behaviors, and it’s all about the emotions, and what behaviours and emotions you gained from your parents, your caregivers, from your society, from the people that you are around in your upbringing. Those are what you are using today unless you’ve done the work to unpick those and kind of build new habits.
So, I’m going to use my own financial upbringing as an example, to maybe help trigger some thoughts, um, and some prompts that you might want to think about in your own time. So, I grew up in a council estate, living off benefits, single parent household, um, and for the large part of it, I was an only child. So, I had a sister when I was 12 years old. So, for most of my childhood, definitely up until the age seven, I was an only child.
What my life looked like as a child, it wasn’t necessarily negative, but there weren’t little luxuries. There were never any holidays, um, things were very much like hand to mouth, but in terms of, I never, I didn’t feel like I was aware of the financial struggle, but I was also aware that sometimes we would just have beans on toast, or um, just cheese slices out of a packet. Um, and at the time, I was like, “This is weird, but sure.” And now looking back, I’m like, “Oh, okay, we were struggling.”
Um, but the main thing I took away from my childhood, and I didn’t realise this until 2020, until I kind of had my financial transformation, was that because I grew up living off not a lot of money, I learned that money comes into your household, and it leaves your household, like, it comes into your bank account, and it goes out. There was never any excess for saving, investing, anything like that at all, no such thing as an emergency fund. Everything was very much like, well, the money comes into my mom’s bank account, she withdraws the money, she pays the bills, she buys some food, um, and maybe there’s like a little bit left over for some new school shoes that I need, or um, a new jumper because I’ve grown up a size, that sort of thing.
So, what happened when I went into my adult life, and I started to earn my own money, even though I started to earn quite good money in the grand scheme of things, money came into my bank account, and it went out. I didn’t know any different. The second thing that really ties into how I spent my money in my early 20s, that is directly linked to my childhood, is that when I was growing up, because we didn’t have a lot of money, often when I would ask for things, as small children do, my mom would tell me, “We can’t afford that. I can’t afford that.” But when you’re older and you have your
own money, you can buy it yourself. And that, without me realising, set me up for this pattern in my early 20s where, as soon as I got money, I was like, “Oh, I can afford this now. I’m going to buy it.” And it wasn’t necessarily things I needed or even wanted, it was just the fact that I could afford it. So, that ties in very closely with my childhood and my upbringing and how that’s affected my financial decisions.
Moving on to another example, a client of mine, they grew up in quite a wealthy family, and they never wanted for anything. But, as they went into their adult life, started earning money, you know, you do all the things that you’re supposed to do, the things that are part of the process, you know, you go to college, you go to university, you get the degree, you go find a job, you work your way up that job, um, or you stop and have a family and do all that. And then, but in none of that, are we taught how to actually manage our finances.
So, this person, even though they had grown up with money, they now were starting to feel that fear, that nervousness, that anxiety around money because, well, they grew up with money, but now they’re actually struggling to hold on to it themselves because they’ve never been taught how to effectively manage it, how to prioritise, and those sorts of things.
There are people that do very well financially without support with, and mostly those people were just lucky because what it means is that they grew up with that financial education, with the kind of financial stability there. But a lot of us weren’t, and a lot of us weren’t taught it in school either. So, even though we know we learn money from our childhood, it wasn’t from school, which is why none of us has this practical education of what to actually do with our money.
And that’s why, thankfully, people like me exist, to be able to help you to learn to manage your money. So, one thing you’re going to learn in this podcast is that I bloody love telling my clients to financial journal. I said that all wrong, is to have a financial journal. And what this is, is it’s all about understanding our emotions around financial decisions.
But alongside it, I like to give out prompts to help people maybe uncover certain limiting beliefs or negative money beliefs they have in order to rewrite them. So, I’m going to leave you with a prompt today, and this is something again for you maybe to sit on, to come back to another time when you can, or if you’re listening to this on the bus to work, and you’ve got the notes open, let’s do it.
I want you to think about your earliest money memory. It doesn’t have to be numbers. I want you to think about whether that was a positive or a negative experience, and how that experience is potentially affecting your ability to manage money today. So, that’s your action for this week. I want you to think on your earliest money memory, and also just think in general about how your caregivers were around money and whether there’s any other societal, um, religious, cultural, what’s the, [Music] word, triggers, I guess, well, really struggle with that word, that might be influencing or have influenced your ability to manage money and how you behave with money now.
I don’t want this to be like, “Oh, okay, that’s how I am with money, so that’s it.” No, no, no, we can very easily rewrite your money story, but in order to do that, we do have to uncover the things that happened, and the things that are building your money story, the things that are making up your money mindset. But once we are aware of them, and that’s how I work with my clients, is we build awareness of our limiting beliefs, of our money beliefs, our money habits, our experiences growing up, and just becoming aware of them when we do go out and about and are making financial decisions.
So, whether when we’re building our budget, when we’re out in the shops, when we’re making big financial decisions, how are those experiences affecting our decisions, and also, what can we say about them? A lot of the time, especially the limiting beliefs, and especially being a woman, there are so many that are just not true. There’s such a big thing around women having to justify expenses, and any time that they spend money, that now a lot of us hold that in our lives, which is, if we buy anything, we feel the need immediately to justify it, whereas we wouldn’t expect that of our male partners, of our male friends or colleagues.
So, little things around childhood influences, societal influences, becoming aware of them and acknowledging that those are the things that are affecting you, but it doesn’t have to be that way. And that through awareness of those influences, we can start to change the narrative and start to build a more positive mindset, being aware of the truth, which is, you don’t need to justify every spend. You don’t need to feel bad if you make a mistake financially. You were never taught about money. It’s all about, and I’m going to say this in every single episode because this is just like the crux of it all, it’s all about our values, being clear on what is important to us, and spending in alignment with that, spending in alignment with what we want our life to look like. And if something is not serving us, to drop it.
Thank you for listening to this episode. Um, I’m sorry, it’s a bit higgledy-piggledy, first time doing a podcast. If you listened, if you liked, if you resonated with any of it, please do let me know. It means so much. Um, if there’s anything in particular that you want me to cover, also just let me know because why not, um, and yeah, I will see you soon. Thanks, bye.
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