Episode 357: Self-Reflection About Money with Amanda Clayman
Financial therapist Amanda Clayman returns to Forever35 (after seven years!) to talk to Doree and Elise about the TikTok trend “loud budgeting” and its shame penalty, how the pandemic made people think about their money differently, what the phrase “money dysmorphia” really means, and the classic saver-spender relationships many people end up in.
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Episode Chapters
*Time stamps are approximate and do not include ads
00:00 - intro with Doree and Elise
~12:00 - Intro to Amanda Clayman
~12:40 - Amanda’s Self-Care
~14:12 - First ad break
~14:30 - Where Amanda Clayman is now
~17:00 - How to reckon with the loss of security in a social safety net
~20:21 - The Pandemic and Money
~22:30 - Loud budgeting
~25:00 - Amanda’s take on not budgeting
~27:00 - Money dysmorphia
~32:00 - Second ad Break
~32:09 - Money and Relationships
~37:00 - Listener Questions
~45:00 - How to connect with Amanda
~46:00 - Intention zone
Transcript
The transcript for this episode is Ai generated.
Doree Shafrir (00:10):
Hello and welcome Forever35, a podcast about the things we do to take care of ourselves. I'm Doree Shafrir.
Elise Hu (00:18):
And I'm Elise Hu. And we are two friends who like to talk a lot about serums
Doree Shafrir (00:22):
And we're still doing Money month. We're still in it.
Elise Hu (00:27):
I've learned a lot from Money Month because as it turns out, I didn't know much. Well, my finances would indicate You're
Doree Shafrir (00:39):
So good. I feel like you're so good with money, you have a plan and stuff.
Elise Hu (00:44):
Well, I have somebody who helps manage my retirement funds. Yes.
Doree Shafrir (00:50):
Right.
Elise Hu (00:51):
But I don't have a budget. But as it turns out from Dana, Miranda, you don't need a budget.
Doree Shafrir (00:56):
You don't need a budget. That's true.
Elise Hu (00:59):
I do a lot of intuitive spending. I just didn't know that's what it was called. So now I can be like, I just do intuitive spending. It's not that I just wait until I run out of money. I just, I'm spending
Doree Shafrir (01:13):
Intuitively. That's really funny. I mean fair.
Elise Hu (01:19):
I did do some things early on in my career that my mother insisted on because my mother is pretty good with money and just planning in general, and she's just a long-term thinker and I'm not as much of a long-term thinker. And she was like, oh, your companies do retirement match. You must maximize your retirement match. So whatever it was, even when I was making $14,900 a year, I would do my 6% or whatever ever retirement so that it could be matched. And that has grown over time. So that's helpful. So these days it's like, will we ever be able to retire? I dunno.
Doree Shafrir (02:02):
I mean, right. What is retirement? I will say my parents are long past retirement age and my dad has been, he's now fully retired, but he has been semi-retired for quite some time. But my mom, who just turned 75, still works. And she doesn't show any signs of slowing down. She teaches at the college level. She teaches intro writing classes and public speaking and stuff like that. And so she is an adjunct at two different schools in Boston and last semester she taught five classes. I'm like, mom, whatcha doing? She's like, well, I'm at this school from eight to nine 30. Then I get on the tea and I go to the other school from noon to three. And I'm like, what? Oh my God. And I don't know the ins and outs of my parents' finances. I'm sure it is nice that it, I'm sure it is helpful that she's working. I think she just needs to be kept busy.
Elise Hu (03:13):
So she enjoys it. Yeah, she's not working. She enjoys, right?
Doree Shafrir (03:18):
Yes. And I am like, okay, that's inspiring. But also I feel like when I'm 75 I'll be working because I have to work, not because I feel like it.
Elise Hu (03:28):
I have an aunt who's kind of in that situation because she divorces can really bankrupt you or they can be kind of value destroying. And so she got divorced I think later in life. And as a result is now in her seventies and working at a Menards. Menards is the store that Tim Walls made famous because it's in the Midwest. It's kind of like a hardware store. And yeah, she's like, she has to though. And so it's unfortunate, but good for her. So it's very apt that we're doing Money month. Of course. And we are going to have two more guests, so we'll have, this week we're going to have Amanda Clayman who we will introduce more formally coming up. Amanda Clayman is a financial therapist who has been on Forever35 back when this show
Doree Shafrir (04:19):
First started way back in the day.
Elise Hu (04:21):
And then next week we have the host of Yo Hiro Dero, who's going to take a lot of y'all's questions. You have sent in a lot of questions about money and finances and we're really excited to have her. So my big life update is that all the kids are home because school is out. Yay. Yes. And for this week, this week we're doing, I guess it now has a name, but it's what we did as kids all summer previously when we weren't at camp, which was kid rotting, you were just at home and figured it out for yourself and then we're bored. And so that's what my kids are doing. And yesterday Rob and Luna made this elaborate fort under the piano. So I have this
Doree Shafrir (05:06):
Parlor
Elise Hu (05:07):
Grand piano, so it's enough space for Luna to cover it up, put couch cushions all around it. They took some boogie boards to make other walls, so there's boogie boards and couch cushions all around, and then a giant sheet over the piano. And so she slept last night under the piano and she brought in snacks. She brought in a little reading lamp and I think she's going to try and sleep under there again.
Doree Shafrir (05:30):
That's really cute.
Elise Hu (05:32):
Well, Rob thought so too, but I came in, I was gone all day and Rob was with Luna after school because it was the last day of school on Tuesday, and I was gone because of the other kids. And I come home and the living room looks like a tornado, just went through it and everything is all over the place except the fort. And I have no idea what happened and I was going to react unfavorably. But Rob comes out and he was like, check out our Ford, be positive, be positive. He was like, she's really excited to show you. She's really excited. Be positive. Because he knew I was going to be like, what happened? But she gave me the whole tour and she said it was going to be comfortable because they put two yoga mats underneath the sheet that she was going to sleep on under the piano, so it would be soft enough to sleep comfortably. And then my other update is that I have to prepare myself before I share this. I wanted to text you, but I figured I would just save it.
Doree Shafrir (06:49):
Oh my god. Okay.
Elise Hu (06:51):
Yesterday morning I awoke to Issa coming upstairs. So I'm the only bedroom that's upstairs and Issa comes upstairs and she usually, usually I go downstairs
(07:04)
In the morning first and she's in her room getting ready or whatever, but she came upstairs and she's like, mommy, and we're asleep. And she's holding her laundry hamper that has handles on both sides. So this is where she throws her dirty clothes and it's kind of soft. It's like a basket basically. So she's holding it and she was like, Abe brought me a bird. She's like, I think it's dead in there. Can you look? Oh no. I started screaming and then I put, tears are running down my face. I'm screaming. I put the pillow over my head and Rob is like, she doesn't like birds, she doesn't like birds. He's like, I'm getting up, let me take care of it. And they go downstairs and then she comes back to me now dealing with this bird that may or may not be dead, not sure. And Lisa was like, well, at first he brought it in his mouth and I thought it was a piece of tree bark or something. And so then I got really close to it and it was flapping. Oh no, this is twice in what a week? Twice in two weeks. This is too much. So I have been googling about this and I really need a collar with a bell
(08:25)
Because that
Doree Shafrir (08:26):
Way he, because that'll scare away the birds
Elise Hu (08:28):
Hopefully. Or
Doree Shafrir (08:28):
That'll tell the birds that he's coming.
Elise Hu (08:30):
Yeah, because getting too good at this. What if he's trying to bring in a bird for each member of the family? I mean, it sounds like that's
Doree Shafrir (08:38):
What he's going through each of you. He's like, okay, check that one off. He's got his little checklist. I mean, the thing that's so sweet and funny is he really does think he's bringing you gifts. He's like, they'll love this one.
Elise Hu (09:04):
So that wraps up my update and let's get on
Doree Shafrir (09:07):
With the show. Wow. Okay. Should we introduce our guest? Yeah. Amanda is widely recognized as a leader in the field of financial therapy and her approach as a clinician is to decode how thoughts, feelings, and associations shape our financial choices and identify how those patterns both serve and limit us. And she really gets into a lot of that on this episode. And her passion for financial wellness began with a dramatic styling mishap, which she writes about in the $19,000 haircut.
(09:52)
And she also hosts a podcast called Emotional Investment. So before we get to her, just a reminder that our website is FE 35 podcast.com. We have links to everything we and our guests mention on the show, and we're on Instagram at FE 35 podcast. Our Patreon is at patreon.com/forever three five. Our favorite products are at shop my us slash forever three five, and our newsletter is at Forever35podcast.com/newsletter. Also, if you want to reach us, we have a voicemail and a text number at 7 8 1 5 9 1 0 3 9 0, and our email is Forever35podcast@gmail.com. And here is Amanda. Amanda Clayman. Welcome back to Forever35. It's so great to see you again.
Amanda Clayman (10:39):
Thank you for having me. I am excited to be here.
Doree Shafrir (10:42):
Yeah, we were just chatting before we started recording about how you were last on the show in 2018, which I cannot believe it's been that long. So yeah, so welcome back.
Amanda Clayman (10:54):
Thank you. Luckily we're all cured. Money is not an issue for any of us.
Doree Shafrir (11:01):
Totally. Well, as I think we start off by asking our guests, even guests for our theme months about a self-care practice that they have. So is there anything that you're doing right now that you would consider taking care of yourself?
Amanda Clayman (11:18):
Yes, I'm getting really, really into somatic therapies and starting to incorporate that more in my work. But as we say in the clinical field, every therapist is their own first patient. And my technique that I've been really into lately is literally shaking, vigorously, shaking out my arms and legs to kind of complete an adrenaline cycle. I'm in that fight or flight mode. Our body sends kind of blood flow to our limbs and stuff, so we get all the energy in our body and literally just learning how to shake my body, it looks super weird, but boy, let me tell you, it is effective for a kind of physiological reset, just 30 seconds.
Elise Hu (12:03):
That's great. Okay, let's take a break and we will be right back.
Doree Shafrir (12:13):
As we were saying, you were last on in 2018 and a lot has changed since then in the world, presumably your life as well. Can you kind of get us up to speed on where you are in your life, but also in your financial therapy practice?
Amanda Clayman (12:29):
It's been a really interesting ride in that I feel like I have a front row seat to changes in society in many ways. I think that a lot of people are reviewing the trade-offs that they have made in the name of security and safety because I think what we're finding is that the world is a little, the world is maybe less predictable and stable than we thought it would be. Just a tad. Just a tad. And so some of us who really, who have a deep need for that feeling of safety, predictability control, we might've been willing to make some pretty deep sacrifices maybe for creative freedom or pursuing our passion in the name of something that was a little bit more of guaranteed stability. And when people discovered, as so many of us did in COVID, that stable is not necessarily as stable as you think it is that there was a real soul searching that happened after that about what of my life, what of my time am I sacrificing for out of a craving for safety that may or may not be true? How do I want to reckon with that in terms of what I choose to do with this one precious life?
Elise Hu (13:51):
So much of our economic precarity or precariousness has to do with a social safety net that isn't there anymore or is deteriorating. So how do you all reckon with that? Because as a therapist, I'm sure you're not wanting to give individuals more responsibility, but then yet they should feel, I'm assuming you're wanting them to feel a certain amount of agency as well.
Amanda Clayman (14:18):
Yes, and it's an interesting, it's a dilemma that shows up in my client's life. Obviously. It's a dilemma that really shows up in my life too. The people that I was working with really changed when it went from me having an employer to me having a self-pay based
Elise Hu (14:41):
Practice. Wow, interesting.
Amanda Clayman (14:42):
And there was a point where I started to go like, oh, am I just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic? This is starting to feel like I'm operating in a different part of the system than I had been before, and that led to a certain amount of soul searching and am I doing what it is that I want to do? And I think that that's part of a general consciousness raising that's happening for a lot of us now where there is no easy answer of is this a systemic problem? Is this a personal problem or challenge? I find myself doing a lot of meditating on complexity and just situating myself in what we can describe as a complex adaptive system where all of these pieces are moving with each other and our society is evolving at this really fast rate. I think that the most honest thing that we can do is sit in that inquiry.
(15:40)
So I think asking ourselves what is the system helps us develop and change and refine these systems, but we also I think need to give ourselves some grace and give each other some grace in terms of really how limited we are in our ability to enact real leverage in some of these big systems. We want things to be different, but we don't know how to get there and whether or not we can figure out how to get there, the fact of the matter is to not be there right now is a painful experience and it's important to tell ourselves the truth about just when we're in a painful part of the experience. I hope that makes sense. It felt like a really long answer. I like
Doree Shafrir (16:28):
That. I'm wondering what you saw or what you are seeing in your clients in terms of how the pandemic changed the way that they were approaching and thinking about money and were there changes that they made in their financial lives during the pandemic and has that sort of stuck or was the pandemic like this just moment in time that existed in and of itself?
Amanda Clayman (16:52):
No, I think that the pandemic really surfaced a lot of things and kind of intensified for many of us what may have been a simmering trend. Suddenly what might have been a kind of irritation that was at a four or five became we don't have to do this. We could make a different choice, and it's just revealing how many things that we thought were fixed and unchangeable about life. To see those shifts so radically in our environment, I think just really opened up a lot of possibility for people. So where maybe they had been in kind of an enduring, I just put my head down, I deal with it, life is hard. Either that became no longer a four or five and it became an eight or nine in terms of the pain that it was causing us, or we just saw I don't have to live with this four or five, I can make a different choice. And that it got a lot of people, I think out of what had been some embedded patterns in their lives.
Elise Hu (17:58):
Amanda, there's a few schools of thought or various trends in thinking about finances these days. One of them is a Gen Z kind of TikTok trend called loud budgeting. So what is it and should people do it?
Amanda Clayman (18:17):
So I like this. Everything is on a spectrum. So there are things that I like about it and things that make me go loud. Budgeting is a way of really taking this part of our lives that has been quiet, private. We make a lot of these decisions internally and we never share them with even our most intimate partners. So when we are this loud budgeting trend is a way of really bringing visibility and accountability to our financial choices and making that public talking about it. If we have something that we are that's maybe a harder behavior, maybe we're trying to curb spending on a certain area of our lifestyle, we put that out in front of people so that if we go back on our intention, we have to deal with the dissonance of like I said, that I want this thing and then I behaved in a different way and I'm kind of paying a little bit of shame penalty. We can engage in these new practices as a way of shifting our behavior as a way of shifting our society. And I think that's amazing. Where I worry about it is anything that we do authentically and share with the world, and this is just kind of the world of social media, I think anything that we share authentically with an audience has the tendency to become a performance for attention.
(19:48)
And I see that, I would even say in just personal finance news and content, there's a lot of really important personal finance news, but there are also a lot of folks who need to create personal finance content. So some of that content is going to be really helpful news, but some of it is just content for the sake of content. And so when you're a content creator, anytime there's a piece where it supposed to be about healthy money, one of the things about healthy money is that we shouldn't be paying attention to it all the time.
Elise Hu (20:21):
So just to jump off on that idea of how we pay attention to money maybe too much. So on the flip side, we interviewed Dana Miranda, who is a personal finance writer, but kind of a anti personal finance writer because she advocates for a budget free approach because she would argue that financial education, a lot of the personal finance bros out there are failing, meet the needs of marginalized folks and wants to shift the conversation away from kind of that diet culture mindset or scarcity mindset that we are now mapping onto budgeting and our finances. What do you think about that?
Amanda Clayman (21:01):
I'm a big fan of not thinking about money. In fact, my biggest pitch to people a lot of times in terms of why it's important to pay attention to money is we need to pay attention to money sometimes so that we cannot be paying attention to money sometimes. So I really like the ethos of that. I tend to think of all of these different actions and tools as they have a domain where they work and sometimes that domain is a certain kind of personality. There are people who love to look at their numbers, who find that very soothing, that is their temperament. There are other people who have such an anxious conditioned response to money that it's always going to set off that sympathetic nervous system, that fight or flight response. So I'm hesitant to kind of say that there's one way that's going to work for all of us, but it is one of the things that I really try to teach people as part of the financial wellness work is that we want to be paying attention to money or managing money in service of something embedded in our life or embedded in our value system.
(22:19)
Money isn't valuable just in and of itself. So coming to that place of why also helps us know when we've gotten there, but we also can sort of leave that structure behind when it's no longer serving us.
Doree Shafrir (22:34):
I also want to talk about money dysmorphia, which I had heard as a term and then there have been some articles about it recently and a friend texted me an article about it recently and said, I think I have this. Can you talk a little bit about money dysmorphia and how you kind of help your clients navigate it and work through it?
Amanda Clayman (22:57):
Money dysmorphia, just like the term body dysmorphia, which we may be a little bit more familiar with, it's about a fundamental misreading of a situation that from the outside kind of looks one way and from your own personal experience feels very different. So with body dysmorphia, we feel bigger or smaller than our body appears maybe to others. And with money dysmorphia similarly, it's like we have a felt experience of what our money is, the state of our money, whether that is I am living in abundance, I don't have to be careful about my resources because I have so many. Two, oh my gosh, I am living in such profound scarcity, I need to hold onto every dollar so tightly. These are coming from attitudinal positions and when we are behaving with money, whether it's sending money out into the universe, woo-hoo, yolo, or whether we're grasping every dollar, the financial behavior, and this is the important piece, is solving an emotional problem not a financial problem. Does that make sense? Similarly, when we see disordered eating, that is a way of managing our mood state when we are so dysregulated and it's clearly like we get, I'll go back to the complexity again. We live in a super complex world. We have very beautiful internal systems, our human biology for managing this life, but it's not calibrated to the year 2025 where advanced monkeys living on a rock hurling through space at a million miles an hour. So in some ways it's not that serious, although obviously we want to live a meaningful life.
Elise Hu (24:56):
But going back to what we were talking about earlier, I think just awareness and even knowing about this concept is helpful. It's a start,
Amanda Clayman (25:02):
And that's the piece too where if you're reading an article or you're hearing the term money dysmorphia and it really resonates, that is an opportunity then to do some reality testing where we go and look at our money. We want to be able to have a balance between being able to look at, understand and evaluate the data, the information relevant to our personal financial situation, and to balance that then and to ask ourselves to engage in that inquiry of like, huh, I'm noticing that my reaction seems to be really intense around this and I feel like there's a problem. But I've been looking at my numbers for an hour now, and if I'm being honest, not everything's perfect, but I'm not seeing any big red flags the way that I was supposed to. Let me be curious about what it is in my relationship with money that tends to really just go like an arrow to the heart. We tap into the opportunity that comes when money surfaces this personal stuff to be able to say, oh, let me understand myself better. Let me take this as a way to be curious about what's going in and we can find opportunities to heal and grow.
Doree Shafrir (26:16):
So we're just going to take a short break and we will be right back
Elise Hu (26:27):
So we can have messy relationships with money individually, and then we enter into relationships, whether it's business relationships, work relationships, romantic relationships, and then things get even more complicated and complex. So I know everybody's situation is individual and we're about to get to some questions from our listeners, but are there frameworks that you recommend relying upon or a set of or a heuristic or anything that you go back to when coaching folks through their relationships with each other? Relationships. When finances end up being kind of a central conflict point
Amanda Clayman (27:06):
With couples in particular, it's really helpful to think of ourselves not as an individual agent who is correct or incorrect when it comes to money, but rather to think each and every single one of us is looking through a lens and that lens is the way that money makes sense to us. And when we go into a relationship with another person, they have a different lens that was developed and refined through their early experiences with money, the message that they heard, the emotional climate in their house, et cetera. And it's really fascinating. There's a saying that our unconscious picks our partner. So all of y'all out there writing lists of who your preferred person's going to be or checking or unchecking the search criteria and your dating apps like your unconscious is very much in charge of who you end up with. And a lot of times what we are drawn to is a person who has something in their perspective that we don't do as naturally.
(28:12)
Well, I'm going to do some air quotes around, well, because well doesn't necessarily mean it ends up with a bunch of zeros in the bank account. Well can just mean that a person has an easier time doing something than we do. So we get the person who's saying, we need to think about the future, we need to save, we need to be prepared, but one can save their way right out of a happy life if we're always deferring the yes to some future date and we never get there, then have we ever really lived. So it's important in many ways to have that person who might be a little bit more optimistic, who might be more comfortable with risk, who might be just able to get through their permission structure to say yes to something that their partner would never be able to get that yes to.
(29:05)
But they recognize unconsciously that they are going to need that or they want to recruit that in their life, their life. So a big part of what I am doing when I'm working with a couple or working with a family is sort of looking at who naturally takes what roles in the system to try to sometimes where we can define and develop systems of trust to develop boundaries. So a spender can't just spend, there are always going to be boundaries on that. So part of the couple's work would be articul articulating sort of what's behind these values to be able to get really specific about, I love the feeling of freedom that spending gives me, or I love the feeling of procuring that what our family needs. I love that feeling okay, but in order and I want to empower you to be in that role. I need safety over here. I need to make sure that these other goals are being attended to. And that is the integrative work of making sure that both of those perspectives are valued and recognized and brought together into a full system that can then do many things and handle the beautiful complexity that is a lifecycle.
Elise Hu (30:21):
Amanda, we have a couple questions now from our listeners. We have been soliciting them for this month, so we'll play a voicemail first and then have a second question by email.
Listener Voicemail (30:32):
Hey, this is Emily from Nashville. I think you guys were looking for financial questions. I actually have a question about allowance and getting started with kids. Do you have any recommendations on books or I don't know, even like a blog post or a podcast or something about getting started teaching your kids about money, especially from a young age, what works? What are some best practices, any suggestions for these parents to read to get started? Thanks, bye.
Amanda Clayman (31:10):
The allowance question, I love the allowance question. We all really, really desperately, those of us who are parents want to raise children with good financial values, and that is a big scary thing. So one resource that I really love is Ron Lieber's book, the Opposite of Spoiled. It's funny nontraditional title, right? But it works because it's exactly what, yes, that's what I would like. Please, the opposite of spoil, John missed out. Yes. Ron is a great writer. He writes for the New York Times Finance section. He's also a great resource on college for when your kids are older and you're thinking about paying for college. The research on allowance, I would say kind of goes in two camps. There are people who for whom allowance, the purpose of allowance is about teaching your children to manage money. And there's a family culture and there are people for whom allowance is about compensation for labor.
(32:17)
And these are two very different models of allowance. And I would say that in some ways they fall along class lines too, besides just kind of the way that you were. Most of us were just going to repeat some version of how we were raised. But there are real class differences I think in this one too. So when we are thinking of money management as separate from labor, because a lot of us are doing unpaid labor in the house, is kind of the thinking there. I don't get paid for loading the dishwasher after dinner. Why should my child get paid for making their bed? This is just like all family members contribute to household labor is the thinking. And when we're giving money to the child, the purpose of that allowance is so that they learn how to make decisions with money. So we might be looking at spend, save, and give as buckets.
(33:13)
A lot of parents do that. Another sort of common rubric is that you give the child their age in dollars each week. So a 7-year-old is getting $7 in allowance. And the most important thing, and I think if all of us as parents, were being honest, the thing that we really want is for our kid not to be the weird one or the one who has such a different rule or practice in their house that it makes them different from their peers. So I will say that one that we've heard of the one that is very commonly out there, the one that I feel like is a safe lane for parents who don't want their child to have a different allowance go the dollars an age per week. But do understand that when it seems like there's a lack of consensus about the right way to do allowance, that usually what you're seeing is the division between the camps of people who say, this is money for labor and that's what I'm teaching my child versus this is money for them to develop a sense of agency discernment decision making, but it's not about labor.
Elise Hu (34:24):
Okay, great answer. Thank you. And then love that book recommendation. Opposite of spoiled. The opposite of spoiled. Okay.
Doree Shafrir (34:30):
Alright. Second question. This came in via text. My husband wants to aggressively start paying off our house by retirement before then we have a kid going to college and very little is saved for him, especially if he goes out of state, what's the priority?
Amanda Clayman (34:47):
So that would be something that would be obviously outside of my training and licensure to answer as a financial
(34:57)
Question. And I'm sure a financial person would also really want to model that based on the specifics. It is though, I think fundamentally a question about priorities in terms of what is the most important outcome that we want to prepare for. I think that modeling is really helpful in these scenarios to say, well, what would it look like financially if we said 100% our priority is reducing our overhead. Usually part of the plan for paying off the mortgage before retirement is like we think that our income's going to go down in retirement. We don't want to have this huge house payment. So if we pay off the mortgage, then all we have to worry about really is taxes and maintenance when we're older. So it'll be easier to live on a fixed income or reduced income versus our priority is to really maximize our child's chance of not having a burdensome student loan situation that they're bringing forward into their life. So we'll figure out our deal
(36:11)
And we just want to take whatever our resources are and really prioritize the kid. We can't. I've seen many couples get lost perpetually in that argument of which one is correct and neither one is really correct. It's just a choice. But we want to be able to make an informed choice. So looking at this information and being able to say, this is what it looks like if we go a hundred percent in this direction, this is what it looks like. If we go a hundred percent in the other direction, is there some kind of melding or compromise that allows us to be efficient in pursuing both of those? Maybe not. We might not get the house a hundred percent paid off. We may not be able to fully fund our child's education the way that we would like to, but we take a value. That's an abstract kind of argument. We really take the wonderful property of money, which is that we can quantify it. This doesn't have to be an abstract argument forever. We can look at the numbers of these things and then we come back to our feelings, we come back to the relationship and we try to find a useful compromise.
Elise Hu (37:20):
Okay, love that. Very good. Thank
Doree Shafrir (37:21):
You.
Elise Hu (37:22):
Expert advice from Amanda Clayman. Amanda, before we let you go, how can folks find you to learn more?
Amanda Clayman (37:29):
You can easily find me at my website. My name is Amanda Clayman and I'm Amandaclayman.com. I am also on all the socials. I have a podcast, an audible original podcast called Emotional Investment and also a bunch of great financial wellness courses on LinkedIn learning.
Elise Hu (37:47):
Fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank
Amanda Clayman (37:49):
You. Thanks guys.
Doree Shafrir (37:53):
Well, she was a delight as always, and I cannot believe that she was last on the show seven years ago. I was like, holy cow. What? I also remember her kids as being not tiny, but little kids, like 10 or something and now her kid is going to college. I'm like, oh, right Time life comes at you fast. Yeah, life comes at you fast. It really, really does. Anyway, Elise, how did decluttering go? Did you get started on it?
Elise Hu (38:28):
I have decluttered so many stuffed animals. So I have two giant trash bags of stuffed animals that are now cluttering my car because I forgot to take them anywhere.
Doree Shafrir (38:40):
Oh my God.
Elise Hu (38:42):
So I just moved, I dunno that I decluttered. I transferred clutter. So I moved it from my home to my vehicle, but that is going. And then the girls did a good job. Ava found so many clothes that don't fit her anymore from last summer, and she is now depoing them on that site, Depop to resell clothes. So that's how she's going to make some summer money for all of the random in and out and stuff that she's going to walk to with her friends. So she's decluttering. And then Lingling our helper, she helped Luna and Issa kind of clean out all their closets as well. And so we have some hand-me-downs that will go to Rachel's daughter who is kind of our go-to hand-me-down friend because she's a few years younger than my youngest. So everybody needs a go-to hand-me-down friend to receive. So them
Doree Shafrir (39:35):
To give you it's, and I have a few friends who have boys who are two to five years older than Henry. Perfect. I am their go-to hand me down for boy leaning clothing and it's great. It's the best. What about this week?
Elise Hu (39:57):
This week it's my first week without school to take the kids to. So I'm going to enjoy sleeping in. That's my intention. My intention is to sleep one hour later each morning because that is what is stolen from me. During the school year? Yes, during the school year. Ava's in that zero period or zero hour. Oh god. And so I set up
Doree Shafrir (40:22):
At
Elise Hu (40:23):
Six something instead of seven something. So I want to sleep until at least like seven 30 or eight. That's my dream. What about you? How are you doing with your intentions?
Doree Shafrir (40:32):
So my intention last week was to transition to summer and I was really thinking about Henry in this regard.
(40:40)
And so far it seems to be going well. He's having a blast at sports camp. I mean, who knows? Maybe he'll come home today and be like, I hate it. But so far it seems to be going great. And now that we've fixed the sunscreen situation, which we talked about in the casual chat, I think that was when we talked about it, right? Yeah. He has this roll on Coppertone kids mineral sunscreen that has been working great. So hopefully that will continue. Yeah. And next week he'll do a different camp and we're excited about that. So it seems like it's going well. Intention this week is speaking of money month, Matt and I, we're going to try to come up with a roadmap to dig out from this deep hole that we have found ourselves in Deep
Elise Hu (41:26):
Financial hole. Oh, financial hole, okay. Yes. Yeah,
Doree Shafrir (41:33):
We're going to try to tackle that. At least get started.
Elise Hu (41:36):
This is a Matt Dory summit thing. You're not on your own. You have your partner.
Doree Shafrir (41:41):
Yes, correct.
Elise Hu (41:44):
Yeah. Yeah. One of the reasons why I'm sort of not wanting to get married again is because I want to manage my own stuff. Because that was the thing. My spending habits and my ex-husband's spending habits were totally different. But then we were locked together on our credit cards and things like that.
Doree Shafrir (42:07):
Totally.
Elise Hu (42:07):
Yeah. In some ways it's helpful because you can help each other, like your funds are pooled together and then in others it's like, well, we spend differently.
Doree Shafrir (42:14):
Totally. Totally. Alright, well sending you good vibes for your, thank you so much for your intention this week. Thank you so much. Well, Forever35 is hosted and produced by me, Doree Shafrir and Elise Hu, and produced and edited by Samee Junio. Sami Reed is our project manager and our network partner is Acast. Thanks everyone for listening. We'll talk to you soon. Talk to you next time. Bye.