Episode 1080: Personal Finance is more Personal and Less Finance

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining me on episode 1080 of the inspired stewardship podcast.

[00:00:07] Bob Lotich: I'm Bob melodic from seed time. And I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent and your treasure to live out your calling, having the ability to grow your money.

[00:00:19] Like a seed is key to learning God's way of handling money. And one way to be inspired to do that as they'll listen to this, the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott.

[00:00:30] Scott Maderer: like an idea about investing or about something we should do with our money. We have instinctive feelings. Is this a nice idea? Is this a scary idea? Is this therefore true or false? Because obviously if it's scary, if it's frightening, if it's something that feels uncomfortable, it must be wrong. But the reality.

[00:00:52] Feeling uncomfortable and being true or false are not the same thing. Welcome. And thank you for joining us on the [00:01:00] inspired stewardship podcasts. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your. For your true color in the inspired stewardship podcast school, learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.

[00:01:23] In today's episode about investing in yourself through stewarding your treasures. I talk with you about why personal finance is about more than techniques. I talk about why understanding this is really the key to changing your life. And I also talk about why to really make a difference in your money, and you need to first understand yourself.

[00:01:44] As we talk about stewarding your treasures. Wouldn't it be great. If you could support this podcast and do it without costing yourself an extra dime, it turns out you can't. All you have to do is use inspired [00:02:00] stewardship.com/amazon. When you're ready to make a purchase via Amazon and a small commission, we'll come back to support the show.

[00:02:06] If you enjoy the show, when you're ready to buy from Amazon, just use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. Over and over again. Working with training other folks, how to become financial coaches or when I'm working with my clients. And we get to the part where we start talking about money, the feeling a lot of times when people first come to a coach for help with their money is The tricks, give me the techniques, show me what app to use, what tool even doing a spending plan or a budget.

[00:02:38] It feels if I'm, if I do the budget that will magically take care of my finances. If I use cash envelopes, if I follow the baby steps, if I do this technique or that technique that will solve my money problems. And sure those techniques can help. They can help you do things. They can help you make progress, but [00:03:00] they usually aren't the solution to your problem.

[00:03:05] Because the truth is we're more influenced by our feelings than by reason by logic. One of the things I say is that we tend to buy things because of emotion, but then we justify that purchase or that decision using logic, we do it ad hoc from the back. Now it's not about removing all emotion and being only rational.

[00:03:30] Yes. We need to use logic. We need to look at the evidence. We need to think about those things. But at the end of the day, we also need to recognize the fact that we are emotional beings and we will make decisions in part because of emotional things. And that means that any technique or tool or logic that we use.

[00:03:53] Can be derailed and D activated and unplugged because of emotional decisions. [00:04:00] And when it comes to our money, this is definitely true. We're motivated so much by our feelings, but we don't actually think of it that way. We think we're making all our decisions based on facts, but we're usually making them a lot based on emotion.

[00:04:17] We're just ignoring that. We're hiding that from ourselves. If we see something like an idea about investing or about something we should do with our money, we have instinctive feelings. Is this a nice idea? Is this a scary idea? Is this therefore true or false? Because obviously if it's scary, if it's frightening, if it's something that feels uncomfortable, it must be wrong.

[00:04:43] But the reality is feeling uncomfortable and being true or false are not the same thing. And so we tend to filter information using our own biases, and we don't actually think about what's going on. This is one of the ways by the way that folks tend to get [00:05:00] scammed is because we're making emotional decisions.

[00:05:04] We become emotionally connected to money that we don't yet have. And that makes it easy to take advantage of our thinking in terms of scams and cons. The truth is understanding that you have emotional wiring and scripts that come in about how we deal with money actually is important to making changes in your life.

[00:05:30] If you believe things like it's not nice to talk about money it's too late for me, I'll never have enough money to be secure. I deserve it. I should be able to get what I want. Keeping cash in the bank. Investing is only something for the risk it's gambling. If you believe that if you do good, then everything will take care of itself, regardless of anything else, if you have all sorts of beliefs.

[00:05:58] Come up in your head [00:06:00] and it's not that they're false. Oftentimes there's some truth to them, but there's half-truths to these scripts. And because of that, we end up making decisions that aren't always the best decisions for each of us. We also have family of origin, things that cause us to respond to programming about our.

[00:06:22] The truth is if you really want to make a difference in how you handle money, you have to understand yourself. You have to become self aware about your personal beliefs, your personal decision-making, the things that you look at in the world that maybe you don't even really realize are beliefs you have about money.

[00:06:44] You have to unpack the emotional decision making that. Having, this is why personal finance is more personal and less finance. It's why no one app or technique or trick will fix [00:07:00] all your problems because at the end of the day, the cause and the solution of the concerns you have around money is you. I tell people I really work in three areas, time, talent, and money.

[00:07:14] Time talent and treasures finances, but when it comes to time and finances, the truth is both of those are actually about handling yourself, which is that talent component. So even though I tell people and most people come to me for help with money or for help with their productivity. At the end of the day, I really only coach on one thing and that's talent because the only thing we can do is work on ourselves.

[00:07:39] How we handle our time, how we handle our money is all about how we understand and handle ourselves. It's the relationship we have with our history. So the relationship we have with our future it's that double-sided coin between on one side, the fears we have and on the other side, the hopes [00:08:00] and dreams that we have.

[00:08:01] Because the truth is almost anything that can be expressed as a hope or dream can also be expressed as a fear. And almost anything that you express as a fear can also be expressed as a hope or a dream. It's really just two different ways of saying the same thing. We don't understand that we don't unpack that.

[00:08:21] We don't realize that when we say something like I'm afraid I won't have enough money in retirement, you can unpack what that means. What's your dream for retirement? What are you hoping you get to do? Cause it's feeling the lack of money will hold you back from those dreams. That's really the fear. And then when you understand that you can begin to take action.

[00:08:42] You can begin to do something different because you understand your. Those tools and techniques and tricks because to have an effect, because if you understand yourself, you begin to commit to making those changes, as opposed to just [00:09:00] looking for the magic wand that will fix your life. Thanks for listening.

[00:09:05] Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast, as a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you like this episode on the stewardship of treasures, you can sign up for our treasures tips by going to.

[00:09:32] Inspired stewardship.com/treasures or text in the U S 4 4 2 2 2 treasures tips. And we'll send you five weeks of our best tips on stewarding your treasures until next time investor. Your talent and your treasures develop your influence and impact the world.