6 Pices of Anti-Personal Finance Advice That I Swear By
Your Biggest Vision
Season 3, Ep. 95
I don’t know about you, but I spent years learning everything personal finance I could get my hands on. Every podcast, blog, book, you name it. I thought I could save my way to financial freedom.
Turns out, you can’t. You can’t out-budget a poor income.
But that didn’t mean it was easy for me to go down the path of improving my income, like taking on debt and quitting my job with benefits.
Still, those risks have paid off big time for me. And they went against all of the personal finance advice I consumed.
What about you? What is your relationship with personal finance? Are you overloaded with advice, and you’re not sure where to start?Â
Are you terrified of debt and paying off loans?Â
Maybe you’ve allowed your fear of finances to keep you from making bigger strides with your life or your business.Â
Then this episode is for you! I’ll be discussing:Â
The conventional pieces of personal finance advice I believe simply keep the middle class right where they are, because it spooks us from taking risks.
Exactly how I leveraged debt to work for me, not against me, including how I paid it off and how I think of it today as a seven-figure business owner.
How conventional personal finance advice can scare you into living a life you don’t even desire, if you’re not careful.
I hope this message encouraged you to develop a good relationship with personal finance! If you listened to this but you’d like to ask me more questions, please DM me on Instagram!Â
If you want more inside business secrets, then head over to my Seven-Figure Secrets Podcast! There, we discuss what goes on behind the scenes of running a seven figure business, and I give you the scoop on how to make it happen for you.Â
Want to be coached by Leah directly? Head to her waitlist to be the first to know when spots open up. Leahgervais.com/waitlist

Hear the Episode
Episode Transcription
Leah Gervais: Â Hey visionaries. Welcome back to the show, Leah here. And on today’s episode, we are going to be talking about a few different pieces of personal finance advice I personally follow, live by and swear by.Â
And they have served me well, but they are quite different from a lot of the unconventional personal finance advice you might be used to if you follow people like Dave Ramsey or, um, any other sort of conventional personal finance guru. Um, and it’s taken me, you know, some years and some confidence to decide that I don’t want to believe these and don’t wanna live by them, and that I don’t have to.Â
And I think that that is definitely what we’re sharing and celebrating because for a long time, I think I really did believe that these were the only principles that would get me to wealth and that could work.
And, uh, that’s just not true. There’s so many different ways that you can experience abundance, that you can experience financial freedom. And I am not the richest person in the world, but I certainly have transformed the money part of my life and I feel more confident in it than ever.Â
So I do feel like I’m in a position to share my experience and hope that it helps you, especially if you’re an entrepreneur or if you’re someone that is really working toward transforming the financial part of your life.Â
So, let’s dive in. This whole episode is based on the thing that I wrote down when preparing for this: your mindset is more powerful than math. I mean, to say it again, your mindset is more powerful than math. Now, this isn’t entirely true in the sense that math isn’t wrong. Math is just, it just is, it’s just a tool to show facts in front of us.
But I think where we get it wrong and where we forget how powerful we are is we forget that the tool of math, or any tool that you use to judge or measure the situation that you’re in is a reflection of your beliefs, is a reflection of your inner thoughts, of your belief system, of the way that you move through the world. And so, a lot of these personal finance advice gurus are coming from a very similar narrow lens of how they view the world.
 Namely, they are typically appealing to people who work in the United States who have corporate jobs, who are in a capitalistic economy, and who typically only have one to two sources of income. Usually it’s their nine to five, and then maybe some other either side hustle or investment or stock market investment or um, inheritance or something like that.Â
 You know, maybe they have one other way or, or maybe two, but typically it’s primarily their nine to five job.Â
 So a lot of their personal finance advice is based on the math that goes into getting paid every two weeks, compound interest and credit cards or typical consumer debt that you’re dealing with, because that’s typically the reality for people in that situation.Â
 Now you get to have your reality be whatever you want. And if you’re an entrepreneur right away, your reality is different than that situation. Yet so often entrepreneurs brainwash themselves to believe that because those people have the
 Personal finance backings and credentials, that they still need to believe them. And this gets messy because there, in turn, creates this very complicated conflict internally about which side of the coin you fall on.
  Do you wanna have a riskier mindset? Do you wanna take bigger risks? Do you wanna have, do you wanna write your own set of rules? But then are you too absolutely terrified to do so?Â
 Or are you too sucked into these kinds of conventional rules to even see a different way of doing so? And it can get very fatiguing because you’re kind of fighting, uh, you’re in a tug of war with your own mind.Â
 And what I’ve really learned in what I think you guys will see is the pattern throughout these is that if you want to believe something different, or if you have a belief that feels more true to you than what you’ve been told in the past, and you can truly get behind it, you can truly allow that to be a reality, then everything else can fall into that place.
 No one’s writing the reality except for you. But we often don’t even give ourselves that credit, or we say we have a way that we want reality. But then when we’re trying to make that happen, we, we, we withdraw, we go inward, we get scared, we re, we retract, right?Â
 And so once you realize how powerful your own mind is and the power of your own focus is, the whole world can start to expand. But it does take you choosing to focus on or to choose what to believe, choosing what to focus on, and then not having that tug of war, not doing that internal conflict that can really suck you out of it.Â
 So the first thing that I wanna talk about is how I believe based on all of this, that you can truly train your mind to not focus on stressful parts of your finances.
 And when you do, you can free up your mind to actually be more productive and do things that can change that financial situation. So a little story here. This is actually what inspired me to create this episode today. Last week I was at a dinner party and one of the people that I sat next to was a guy who works at a startup.
 I actually don’t know if the company itself is a startup, but they work, they do funding for startups. So they do funding for small businesses, and they allow anyone to invest in small businesses. They don’t have to be accredited investors, which is typically the case with, uh, you know, VCs or hedge funds.Â
 Anyone, any, at any income level could go and invest a hundred dollars into a small business and they would, you know, then have a piece of that pie they would have a, a stake in, in that small business.
 So it’s a very cool idea. It obviously opens up the opportunity where a lot has been excluded in the past. Um, but we talked a lot just about how hard it is as a small business to make a return and, and how hard it is to do it without investors.Â
 And I built my business without investors. I, uh, I did go into debt, which I’m very open about, but I, you know, I own 100% of my business. I didn’t, I didn’t go out and do fundraising or anything like that. Um, never have. And that has paid off for me because now I own 100% of my business.Â
 And I also think it would be hard to raise money for a personal brand, but I’m sure people have done it. If you’re a good entrepreneur, really anything is possible. The point is, I, I told him about how I went in.
 I went into what in the eyes of the bank is viewed as consumer debt to, to build my business. I went into credit card debt, which was on my personal cards. I did end up getting a business credit card. But nonetheless, it’s that link to me. It’s not like that links to my business.Â
 And then that ends there. That’s, that’s my credit score on the line. That’s my finances on the line. And that’s, that’s the way I chose to do it. And I told him that, you know, it took me, uh, it took me a few years to eventually pay off all of it.Â
 Um, not because I didn’t make enough money to do so, but because I continued investing and it just wasn’t my priority to only pay off that debt. It was my priority to invest in other things, invest in a team, grow a team, invest in myself, invest in different systems, um, you know, to continue with the growth and momentum of my business, even though I did have debt that was continuing to be accumulated.
 But I told him that, you know, it all worked out. I’m very grateful that I went into debt. Best financial decision I could have made because, you know, I don’t have, I don’t have debt anymore. I don’t have consumer debt. I don’t have, uh, personal debt.Â
 In fact, I was able to pay off my student. I remember the day my husband and I were sitting at the kitchen table and we were just looking at our bank accounts and I was like, oh my God, I’m still paying student loans. I just kind of forgot about it. Because it was automatically going out every month.Â
 And I was like, let’s just write the check and pay it off. And we were able to, and that’s, that’s because of my business, right? That’s because I went into debt. That’s why my whole life looks the way it does now.
 That’s why I live across the street from Central Park. That’s why I’m able to have a family in New York City. That’s why I’m able to have the team that I do. That’s why I’m able to have the life that I do. That’s why I’m able to have the business that I do too.Â
 So it very much paid off for me. But when he asked me, when I was talking to him about this and saying, yeah, it took me a few years, but I did get outta debt and now I own my whole whole company. Um, he said, what, what was the day like when you go when you paid off your debt? Like, was that the best day? What did it feel like?
And I kind of paused for a minute and I realized that I don’t even remember the day. I literally don’t remember the day that I made that last credit card payment that annihilated my debt.
 I don’t think about it. Maybe part of that is because I still use my business credit cards. I just pay them off in full every month. I mean, I obviously want the points for credit cards, but really what that made me realize is what a testament that is to the power of mindset work.Â
 Because that wasn’t always the case in the beginning when I decided to go into debt, I was incredibly consumed with the stress of it. It would keep me up at night. I remember crying, thinking that I was going to end up on c n n as a poster child for a millennial who wanted to leave the nine to five and, you know, ha work for herself.Â
 And she just got completely conned into online business and, you know, got fooled into buying things on social media and ended up getting buried in credit card debt and was never able to get out of it. That’s literally what I would go to bed like crying, thinking that would happen. Um, and I was, you know, I was very alone in it.
 I wasn’t married at the time, even if I was, it’s not something that I would’ve necessarily wanted to put on my partner, but it was, it was just me. No one else was going to make that back for me. Um, so it was the center of my thoughts and it was continually hanging over my head and it did constantly stress me out.Â
 And I remember being very afraid that, uh, my credit score would drop and my credit score did drop. So all of those things happened, but through time and through intentional mindset work, I was able to completely redirect my focus to away from the debt, away from the what ifs and toward the what could be and toward the potential and toward what was working and toward the momentum and toward the money that was coming in.Â
 And I got so strong in that and so focused on that, that I literally forgot about the debt that I had, and I just started paying it off.
 I must have just started paying it off, you know, little by little every month till it was annihilated. Um, but I didn’t even pay attention the day that it happened because I was so consumed with the other things going on in my life in business that I didn’t care anymore.Â
 And I really wanna share that story because I think I used to listen to personal finance podcasts all the time that would talk about the day they were debt free and how it was one of the best days of their lives. And now honestly, it kinda makes me sad that people feel that way because that only had as big of a choke hold on you as you allowed it to have.Â
 That only stopped you from doing other things as much as you allowed it to do. So that only consumed you as much as you let it.
 And so if that can be the case with debt, that can be the case with anything, that can be the case with anything in your business, any other part of your finances, anything in your life. And I’m in the end so grateful that that was my path toward my business success.Â
 I think it’s why my business continues to grow so much, because I had to get so good at mindset work, and I had to get so good at focus that now that’s kind of my superpower. You know, I, I see things through, I don’t sit in discomfort and, and complain, um, something my coach might say differently.
 Sometimes I have, or my husband, sometimes of course I come home and I’m like, this isn’t working yet. I’m so frustrated. You know, I’m, I think we’re all human, but I don’t, I don’t give up.
 I don’t throw it in the bag. And I realize the power of my own attention is, is where my power, like every second you get to re choose what you want to focus on, and you get to choose what you want to expand, because we all know the quote, what you focus on expands.Â
 And it’s true. Yet so often we forget that that’s our power, and we get, we drown ourselves in the fears, in the what ifs, in the opinions of others, in the, I don’t know if I can do it in the doubt, in the, in the negativity, in the questioning, in the, in the lack of self-trust. And the more you focus on that, the more it expands.
  So I could obviously talk about this point for the entire episode, but I’m going to keep going. I think it might be one of the most powerful ones though, because it really does.
 You know, I, i I hope that it invites you to pause and, and, and ask yourself how you feel about your own financial situation. Are you currently focusing on what you don’t have the money, you don’t have the debt that you do have the negative, stressful things about your finances?Â
 And look, if you do have things about your finances that you want to change, by all means, you know, take control of your life and change them. But if you’re already on the trajectory to changing them, stop beating yourself up about it day in and day out.Â
 And that was where I was really hurting myself in the beginning. You know, I didn’t wanna have debt. I did not like it, and I did want my business to grow to pay it off, but that was happening. I was working on my business, I was working really hard and I was doing my best.
 And so re kind of like torturing myself daily about that wasn’t gonna get me there. So, you know, don’t be in a situation where you’re uncomfortable with your finances, but you’re not doing anything about it. You’re just going through the motions day after day, kind of staying in your own victimhood, not really taking any risks, not really taking any big actions.Â
 That’s not gonna get you anywhere. But once you have set into motion a plan to get to the financial reality you desire, stick with it and have the diligence to take the actions and do the mindset work to totally focus on what you want to happen.Â
 Okay, the second piece of financial advice that I think goes against the grain is that I, all right, might not go against personal finance advice so much, but I really wanna say this because I’ve been noticing that this is a bit more uncommon than I realized.
 And I say this humbly, but I think I just wanna say it and, and claim it so that it gives you permission to either say it and claim it for yourself or say it and claim that you want it. I don’t just make money. I have money.Â
And I think there’s a lot of people on the internet that are just making money. Now, my intention here is not to shame anyone or their, or their, or their choices, but my philosophy was to spend the money that I made as much as I needed to grow aggressively so that I could get to a comfortable place to then have money.Â
And that worked for me. You get to choose your own financial philosophy. Either you can not grow as aggressively as I did and learn to live on a bit less money. That’s fine.Â
Or you can continue growing past what I’ve done and not, and, and not really have money, but just continue spending and spending and spending. You would probably continue growing at that point. That’s up to you.Â
But choose what you want and go all in on it. And I think that there are a lot of businesses where the profit is high, the profit margin is extremely low, and the stress or the lack is still there. And I think having the intentionality to have a tipping point will deeply serve you.
  And also just help you have awareness about the season of business you’re in and the season of money you’re in. And I think that that will help alleviate some pressure or guilt you might have about things that are or aren’t happening with your finances. I know how easy it is to scroll through social media, see someone buy a house, and wonder, should I have a house?
But I also know that that’s not the season of life I’m in. I live in New York City. I have no desire to leave. And it just doesn’t make sense for us to buy a place right now because we probably wanna have another baby in the next few years, hopefully, if we’re able. So it doesn’t make sense to buy one given the size of our family and the fact that that might grow.Â
 So I have to very much lean into what season of life I’m in, and I really encourage you to do that too. So you’re not beating yourself up about, well, so-and-so has this, so I should, or I’m this age so I should, or I think that this sounds responsible, so I should, what season are you in? Own it. And really know what’s going to work best for you.Â
Third piece of unconventional finance advice, and something that I swear by is I started saving before I paid off all my debt.
So I mentioned that I was in credit card debt for a while, paying that off, excuse me. And I, I even, I think like went into it twice. Like I had it for a while from the beginning, and then I think I paid it off, and then I went into it again.
  And I, I don’t really remember the exact details. Like I said, I forgot the day that I paid it off. But, um, I know that there was like a big transaction that I made, um, even after my business had like, well hit six figures that, that, that prevented me from paying off my credit card in full for a little while.Â
 And, um, during that time, one of the things that I did was start. At that point, I hadn’t really started saving for myself because I was always paying off my credit cards.Â
And I realized, and this goes back to the power of your mindset, that it just made me feel l a sense of lack all the time because I just felt like I wasn’t keeping any of the money that I was making. It was always going to my coaches or my credit card or my business expenses or whatever else.Â
And I believed in those things, but it also felt like I was putting myself last. And that kind of created this tension within me. So I opened a bank account, and I think I called it, well, I actually still have the name, it’s called my wealth account, called it my Louis Vuitton account at some point.Â
But I wanted to really intentionally put money aside that was meant for me, meant for my desires, meant for just what I wanted. It wasn’t meant for emergency savings, it wasn’t meant for debt, it wasn’t meant for, um, my family.
It was just me. And, and also it’s not my husband’s, it’s just I can do whatever I want with it. I still have it to this day. And I started putting a little bit of money there, little by little, not a ton, because I was still wanting to pay off that debt.
 But even though I, I started putting money in there that in theory, I could have put into, um, my, uh, uh, you know, toward my debt because I wanted to train my mind to see that I was put, I was making money for myself, that there was enough for me that I was making something that I would get to experience the benefit of, you know?Â
And I really think that helps my mindset, honestly. I think that that is one of the things that helps me pay off debt. I have a whole actual episode on how I paid off debt, if you’re interested in that.
But I just wanna like debunk this idea that because there’s interest on debt, you need to pay it off by all costs in the end, will you pay more total toward your debt If you prolong how long you’re paying it off and the interest is accumulating and you’re putting that money elsewhere instead, you, you will, it will cost you more.
 But that’s okay. There’s an abundance of money out there. If it is going to put you in a better frame of mind to recognize that you’re putting some money toward your own savings as well as toward debt, even if that costs you a bigger picture, who the hell cares, right?Â
This is again, like what we need to question the advice we’ve been told and actually ask if that works for us. It worked better for me. It puts me in a better energetic state.
It put me in a better frame of mind and it motivated me more to have some savings for myself in addition to paying off debt, even if that costs me a bit more overall. So take that with what you will. Just recognize that you do get a question, these things.
 And just because a path is overall more expensive doesn’t mean it’s the wrong path. Just know it, own it and choose it. The next thing, this one really makes my stomach churn. I think this is some of the worst personal finance advice there is. I do not base where I live on what my, how much I’m gonna be charged in taxes, okay?Â
Obviously, my business does very well. We make a lot of money, uh, you know, that’s relatively speaking, but, um, I’m in a much higher tax bracket than I ever would’ve been at a nine to five job.
And I live in New York City, which is one of the highest taxed places in the United States. And I cannot tell you how often people tell me that I should move to Florida and then just be able to come visit New York frequently with the money that I’m saving, or I should move to Nevada, or I should move to Texas.Â
 And then I could just travel and think about how much more money I’d have. Now, the reason this gives me the ick is because I am not spending the one precious life that I have the day-to-day of it in a place I feel subpar about because of the government’s taxes.
 I cannot think of more victimy, a powerless way to address your life than literally choosing where you live, where you go through your day-to-day life every day. You guys, this isn’t like a decision that you deal with once a year or even once a month.
This is an everyday thing based on something like taxes. Okay? I live where I live based on what I want, based on my desires. That’s abundance. Recognizing that there’s no reason that you can’t have what you want based on finances, because there’s always more money to be made.Â
Now, I’m not trying to hammer on the entrepreneurs that move to, uh, states with no income tax. I know there’s a lot of them, and it is a smart financial move. It is. And if you want to live in Florida, and if you want to live in Texas, and if you want to live in Nevada and it makes no difference to you and you don’t really care where you live, so long as you have a certain kind of house and a certain lifestyle, then of course that makes sense to me. Why wouldn’t you save money in that case?
 If it’s all the same to you to be living in suburbia in Florida or suburbia in, you know, Connecticut where you’re taxed so highly, then hell yeah, go to Florida.Â
That’s not my situation. I love New York. New York City is like where my soul is meant to be. It is like who I am in a city form. I can’t, I don’t have the words for what it feels like to wake up every morning for me here.
 And you know, what, one day that might change, who knows more children, a few years, you know, later on maybe I will change my mind. I’m not saying this permanently, but if I do, this is what I can promise it will be. Because the desire is what’s bringing me to a different place, not because of taxes.Â
I, it just makes me, it blows my mind that people would surrender so much of their power to something like the government’s, uh, tax on your income that you’re going to design your entire life.
Where you raise your kids, where you spend your days, what you’re the, you know, the things you, the hobbies that you have on something like that. I would never, ever do that. And, and I think it’s, I think it’s horrific advice. It just really puts you in a place of like, let’s make you feel really, really small so that you can feel safe and responsible about finances.Â
So check all these boxes so you can be super clever and you’ll have more money, but you’ll be literally miserable because you’re living in a place you don’t care about. Just to say that you get less tax, it, it, it, it, it’s awful. I mean, to that point, why bother starting your own business?Â
It’s gonna be more expensive. Why bother buying nice things? It’s gonna be more expensive. Why bother going on vacation? It’s gonna be exp like, it’s just such a low vibrational attitude, obviously.
I feel very strongly about that. And again, I’m not trying to attack people that choose to do this so long as they do it from a genuine place of desire. Where I think it’s lame is when it’s kind of not a desire and something that feels like you have to do it because of taxes. All right?Â
 The next thing that I, uh, the next piece of advice of unconventional personal finance advice is that my main goal is not to have the biggest profit margin as possible. This is something people talk about a lot, uh, you know, especially, uh, accountants and, and, and money focused business coaches. It’s all about how you can increase your profit margin, increase your profit margin, increase your profit margin.Â
And look, I get it, there’s, there’s a lot of the philosophy I agree with to some extent. I think that that comes from, you know, people trying to make the point that it doesn’t actually matter how much your overall cash is.
If you’re not able to see any of that, if your expenses are so high that you’re only breaking even, or you’re barely seeing anything, or you’re even actually spending more than you’re making, who cares if you make a million dollars? If you’re spending a million dollars, you might as well be making $200,000 and spending $50,000.Â
You actually would see more because your profit margins are higher. So I get that and I agree with that. You wanna actually have some intentionality and thoughtfulness around what your profit is and make sure that your expenses are, you know, in alignment with the life that you wanna have and your goals and what makes sense for you.
 I agree with that. What I, where I think it gets a bit more nuanced than just this blanket statement of having as high of a profit margin as possible is this, is connecting back to our conversation how much you’re going to get taxed on that profit.
So if you live in a place where you are not taxed on your income, then I completely understand having the number one priority in your business structure to be as high of a profit margin as possible. You will see most of that money, you won’t get taxed on that at a state level and that, you know, makes sense to be your biggest goal if you are someone that lives in a place like New York and California.Â
And also, just a huge disclaimer to this whole episode, I am not a personal finance professional. If you want advice from someone that is, then you can always seek out someone who is a financial advisor. I don’t have any license. This is just an anecdotal experience based on my life and my beliefs. Okay?Â
So because I live in such a high tax place, New York, California, you know, other places like that abroad, um, one of my goals is actually to not have as big of a profit margin as possible and to get creative and thoughtful and strategic about how to do that in a way that still grows my business and still feels good toward my overall goals.
Um, but is, you know, creative about and, and honest. Obviously I’m not trying to take any shortcuts, but like, how can I make more donations? Will that cut down my profit margin? Yes, but that is tax deductible money that will then help me not owe as much on taxes and I’d rather my money go to a cause I care about than to my taxes, uh, personally.Â
So I have gotten creative with things like that. I’ve worked with tax professionals to do it. Again, I’m not here to give any advice, but I just want to once again reiterate the importance of examining your goals, your situation, your desires, and make sure that you are living in alignment with that.
 Another thing that I love to do, I do a lot of travel work with my business. I host retreats. I host VIP days all over the world.
And I love to have that. I love to think about how to kind of make my travels go through my business in general, because that’s a huge expense that we have outside of my business is, uh, like in our personal life’s travel.
 So thinking about how to, how to merge the two is very, you know, smart in my mind. Okay, the final piece of unconventional personal finance advice, um, and I really love this one, is that I do not look at the price tag of things. This is a little bit of a, of a, of a generalization. Of course sometimes I look at the price tag of things.
 But the point here, and this is one of the things I’m most proud of in all the money mindset work I’ve done over the years, is I do not base what I want on the cost.
And I think that l bear with me, hear me out for a second. Cause I think that this might turn out a little bit different than you thought. So when I was first trying to transform my outlook with money, my relationship with money, how much money I had and, and earned and received, I pretty much thought my job was to use money to put me in as an inspired, as much of an inspired place, as much of a high belief place as possible.Â
 And in my mind, and you know, at the time I had very little disposable income. I never even ate out to like fast food restaurants. Um, I packed, you know, I packed every lunch. I really, really counted every single dollar. Even though I remember looking at different brands of canned tuna and being like, I don’t know if I can afford the organic one cause it was like $7 instead of five.
Um, so that’s where I was. And uh, I thought that as I wanted to transform that it sort of just meant like spending more like buying the organic tuna or going, being able to prove that I could go out to lunch and pay for it because I could always make more money.Â
Uh, a big thing for me is, uh, you know, I wanted to stop taking the subway and take just Uber and, and taxis instead. Cause I just thought that that’s kind of what I thought I was like supposed to do. And I’m saying that in quotations cuz that’s what you know, wealthier people do and that’s what people that aren’t worried about money do and that’s what people that, um, value their time more than their money do.
 And so I kind of just started doing a lot of that by, by and by by default.
And the point I’m at now is yes, I am in the very privileged position where I very rarely if ever need to look at the price tag of something before I decide if I want it. And I really try to support my clients in that or people that are deciding to work with me. And you can too.Â
 You know, I try to talk to them about our offerings and what it could do for them and support them in reaching a decision about whether or not they want it before price is a factor. Because if you’re only saying yes to something because you can afford it, you’re not actually asking yourself if you need it.Â
That’s how a lot of people who have kind of crappier money mindsets end up with a closet full of on sale clothing that is poor quality and that they don’t even really love because they’re just buying it cuz they can afford it because it’s on sale and it’s a better value than the sweater that they really want but isn’t on sale.
And they just can’t sum spending $160 on a sweater when there’s a $60 sweater on the sale rack. Now the key here is you wanna start asking yourself just, do I want this regardless of if I can afford it? I, I think that, you know, the pendulum can go in the other direction where you’re like, oh, I will buy this $160 sweater because I can’t afford it now.Â
 And in neither situation are you taking the moment to just think, do I even want this? Is this going to serve me? Is this going to make me feel good? Am I gonna wanna wear this when I get up in the morning?Â
 So I, I kind of took it too far in the beginning where I would just spend on anything cuz I could, cuz I felt like that’s what I was supposed to do as I was elevating my own money story and now I’ve kind of reeled it back and I just don’t think about money before I make decisions.
For example, if I want to take a cab somewhere, I don’t look and see how much it is on Uber, I just take the cab. Or if I’m in a hurry, I take the subway. Yes, it’s bougier and more higher vibrational to take a cab, but if it’s gonna take me two or three times as long in New York City traffic as it is to take the subway, I’ll happily take the subway.
 So in either situation I’m making the decision based on what I want, which is typically to save time. So it doesn’t really matter what the vehicle of doing this. I hope I’m explaining this correctly. The point is, yes it is as great as it sounds. I do not look at the price tag of clothing. I do not look at the price tag of caps. I do not look at the price tag of flights.
I don’t look at the price tag of food. I buy what I want when I want it. That also means that sometimes I’m buying the cheaper option, which is not what I would’ve thought of when I was kind of initially embarking on my journey toward more abundance or financial freedom. I thought that it meant I’d always get to choose the more expensive or the more elevated or, or the more luxurious option.Â
 But I’ve kind of started realizing that my desires don’t even always align with that. And that’s kind of lovely. And you get to this place of complete self-trust and complete self attunement and alignment and recognize that if you can just have the courage to say yes to what your inner voice wants, even for something as seemingly spontaneous as do I want to eat out tonight versus do I wanna cook?
Your life becomes so much smoother and you become so much more in flow and it becomes so much easier to make decisions rather than making him on a metric that just again puts you in out of your control and out of your power. I hope I explained that.Â
Okay. Alright everyone, whew, this was a long one. I hope that you enjoyed this episode on some unconventional personal finance advice that has served me.Â
I hope that you DM me if you listen to it, and I hope it gives you the courage to make a decision that really is right for you and really serves the financial future and experience that you want to have, not just the one that you’re in. I think that’s probably the biggest mistake of all right, is we just make decisions from where we are.
 Um, and two, most importantly, help you write the rules of your own personal finance book instead of following someone else’s, especially someone who has no relation to your desires, your background, and what you’re capable of. All right, have a great rest of your day visionaries and I will talk to you soon.
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