Hello, everyone. This is your host, Susan Rosin. My guest today is actually a returned guest, which is very exciting. Her name is Mikelann Valterra. Mikelann is a money coach. Is that the correct? Yeah. Some people say money coach, some people say financial coach, some people say financial therapist. But yeah, it's all there. Oh, my goodness. She's all those things. Wow. So many things. So Michalanne, just introduce yourself. You have a much better introduction than I would be doing.
I mean, who the heck am I? Yeah. Why did you Why did I want to be on my podcast? Why did I want to be here? Yeah, these are good questions. So I am a money coach. So real quick, what that means, Susan, for some of your listeners that may not be familiar with it. It used to be that people could go to a financial planner with investment questions, credit counselor with debt issues.
Both of those are really great, important fields, but neither are really equipped to deal with the emotional side of money. So money coaching, and some people call it financial coaching, their synonyms, they mean the same thing, arose to help people with a lot of that, like practical day-to-day finance, when people have questions like, How do I know if I can afford to to Hawaii, and I'm getting stressed about paying for college, and I still want to live my life.
But I'd say one of the biggest things, Susan, is people use and work with money coaches when they're tired of being stressed about money and anxious about money. Probably the number one thing I hear when people call me is they're tired of not feeling in control of their finances. It's like, Oh, my gosh, it's such a big stressor for people. A lot of the work is really practical. I work with people on, let's learn how to manage cash flow, which, boy, doesn't that sound boring?
But what I think is more exciting, a way to say it, is what if we created a nourishing spending plan process where you could design the life that you want? How do we use money to really... First of all, how do you direct money so it goes where you want it to go, where you're in control of this money as opposed to it feeling like it was running low.
I think part of why I was so excited about being on your podcast in particular is you work with so many amazing women in transition, and women in midlife, women in 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. That's exactly who I work with, too. Our demographic, and you and I are part of it, it's such an intense time of life. There's so much going on. What if money could calm down and use us, listen to that, how can we use money to create that next chapter, to create a life that we love with money?
There's just a lot of questions that come up for women in this time of life. I'm like, All right, well, let's talk about it. Yeah. No, exactly. That actually brings brings up a question for me, which is... Excuse me. Sorry. That as you were saying, People, especially when they're in their 50s, have this like, Well, I'm not retired yet, and I still have some time ahead, but I still want to do this or that or whatever. So do you work also with women who are retired or getting ready to retire?
Because there's all the things with Medicare and Social Security and all that stuff, right? Yeah, definitely. The answer is yes. It's interesting because it's such a great use of money coaching, actually, because sometimes when people retire, they're like, Okay, I'll be okay, according to the financial planners, if... And then there's this big scary, if I don't spend more than X amount each year. They're like, How do I do that?
What happens when I need to replace my car and I still wanted to travel and I still want to do this and I still want to do that? Sometimes when people feel like, Okay, the money side has changed, I now know that supposedly I'll be okay if I supposedly do this, but nobody tells you how to do that. I think that the other thing is there's so many emotions that come up when we move into that particular transition of retirement.
Part of it is some people feel like they've spent their whole lives building up, saving up to retire, and now suddenly we're spending it down. So that's its own stressor. Technically, it's called the de-accumulation phase. Again, that sounds a little boring. But it can be stressful. And yet this should be a wonderful, fun time of life where you feel like money is this just sacred tool that you're living your best life.
So transition is a very big, normal transition where people seek out money coaches for sure, because they really feel like they want to do it well. And what I've seen a lot of people do is they actually hire a money coach a year or two before they retire to make sure that They can, and they're going to be okay, and they want the skillset. They want to know that when they hit it, they're going to be okay. Some people talk really practically.
I want to make sure that I don't outspend my resources when I retire, which, hey, I get it. That's super important and practical. Some people know that it's a big emotional bundle of all sorts of things, and they want to be able to be as graceful around money as they can as they sail through this transition. It's a wonderful, wonderful transition, but it is also loaded with so many emotions. Oh, my God.
Yeah. Well, and the other, the part that gets into that, that complicates it, is if you're part of a couple. Are you married or are you not married? Is there a house? Is there this? Is there that? Because a lot of couples, me and my husband as well, keep our finances separate and always have. But then you own the house together, you do this together. Yeah, it's never 100% separate, right? No, exactly. Well, yeah, couples in money is its own special bailiwick, right? It's got a lot in it.
As I was sharing with you before we started recording, I got married about two months ago. That's right. Not surprising, it's a second marriage, right? I'm in my 50s. All those things are up. Combining money, not combining money. What are we combining? Is he going to retire ahead of me? What does that mean? How do we put our lives together? It does take a lot of really thoughtful conversations.
It brings up many things, including different money personalities and how you're different than perhaps the person's first spouse. That comes up a lot. Money is such a fertile, intimate space for couples to talk about and share with, but there's no single way to do money together. Yes, exactly. Unless you started as 20-year-olds together. Right. Sometimes I do meet people there, the long-time happy married. They've been since they were in their 20s.
Have you guys been together for a super long time? Well, it has been now. Yeah, it's been a little over 30 years. As they say, time flies. Yeah, right. I know. I always say time flies when you're having fun and even when you're not. Even when you're not, it does it regardless. Right, exactly. No, I mean, money in transitions, it's It's such a great subject, and I talked about it when I wrote my book, the one that came out in October, Rise Above the Money Fog.
It looks at what money fog is, and we can talk about what that is if you'd like. It also talks about what happens when we go through different transitions? Absolutely. The other thing, as I'm sure you well know, going into a second marriage, is that people bring in all of those experiences with them from the first time around or the first couple. Maybe you moved in with somebody, maybe you didn't get married. There's a lot of different variations. It's so true. Well, yeah.
I mean, sometimes people's first spouse was more of a spender than the next person they marry, and that leaves a huge mark on them when you are dealing for many years with someone who is very different than you are. Let's say you're a saver and you're married to a spender, and then you remarry. People naturally assume that the next person is going to be similar, but what if they're not? Or vice versa.
Or maybe you were married to someone who was what I call an under earner who never made enough money, and so you always had to compensate and be the one to be the provider. And then you get married again, and the next person is a big time career person, and they make lots of money. And so it's such a different... There's so many different things because we're all very different around money. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And it's We're human beings, which means that we're not consistent.
Right, exactly. As I say, I reserve the right to change my mind. Yes, we all change. Over and over and over again. Yeah. Well, what's interesting about that is in midlife, a lot of people's basic money personality does go through a pretty big change because many people, we tend to be very strongly motivated in the first half of our life, either by freedom The desire to be free or the desire for security. That's roughly we tend to be more spenders or more savers.
It's a little simplistic, but it's roughly there. There's nothing wrong with either of those. The dilemma is when we go to the extreme. We're an extreme saver. We're so frugal, we don't spend enough money, or we're an extreme spender and we get into debt. The edges are the problem, but there's nothing wrong with being somewhere in the middle around these. But a lot of times, after people turn 50 or somewhere around midlife, they balance out.
If I was always very much a saver, I become more and more interested in freedom and enjoying my money. If I was always very much, Hey, I want to do what I want when I want. Now suddenly I'm more interested in security.
There is this natural place where we tend to reach for our opposite, which I know a lot of your listeners, if they know anything about psychology, we do tend to balance out in the second half of our life psychologically and look at different strengths and weaknesses in a different way. That's true in money, too. Yeah. Oh, no, absolutely. Absolutely. And just as an aside, we've been talking about... Because you work mostly with women. Is it just about everything you said is applicable to men.
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's not a woman only. It's not like women only are the ones who get emotional about things or do this. No, no. Yeah. I know. I'm glad you brought that up. For example, so when I wrote the book, can I talk about what Money Fog is for a minute? Wait. I titled the book Rise Above the Money Fog, the Key to Confidence, Clarity, and Control Over Your Life. Money fog is when people are experiencing stress or anxiety from being vague around money.
That is absolutely just as applicable to men as it is to women. There's no gender in that. Just a couple of interesting questions for your listeners if they're going, Well, wait, am I in a money fog? Here's three or four questions they can ask themselves. If you've ever felt frustrated and wondered, Where did it all go? That could be a sign you're in a money fog, you're vague about your money.
If you've ever felt fear or anxiety around money, that's usually a signpost that you're likely in a money fog. If you feel guilty about something that you spent, that's often a sign. On a practical side, Susan, when people don't know where they spend their money, that is money fog. When they don't know how much money they need to earn to live the life they want to live, that's a sign. I would throw in, do you feel like money is a sacred tool to live your best life?
If you say, well, of course I do, then you're probably not a fog. But many people, when I ask that, does money feel like it's a sacred tool to live your best life? They're like, what? No. What on earth does that even mean? No, I don't feel good at all. Money fog actually stands for something, F-O-G. The F stands for when we feel fearful when we think about our money. The O stands for when we feel overwhelmed when we think about our money.
And the G stands for guilt, when we feel guilty when we think about our money. And so they're signposts. And as you can tell, Susan, a lot of the money fog is about... It's not only about being vague, because we don't know, for example, how much money we spend or where money is going. It's even more so the feelings around being vague. It's when we feel that anxiety and stress from being vague.
And what I know with money fog is is we often don't know how deep we have fog until we're out of it because it's like driving the car in the fog. I know where you are, you're in San Rafael, right? And so I went to grad school in the Bay Area. Daly City, which is, you and I know, is down by the San Francisco airport. Yeah, exactly. South, right?
So I have never experienced fog in my entire life like I did When I would drive to the San Francisco Airport, Daly City, South Bay area, that fog is so thick that the cities had to put in two signs, two stoplights for every stoplight to let you know a stoplight is coming up because the fog is so thick when it's there, not all the time. But we all know every single listener listening to you has probably been delayed, flying into SFO for fog. I mean, it's like fog hell. Pardon my language.
The money fog is like that. When you're driving in a fog, you drive really slow, you don't have a lot of vision in your life, you're not spending a lot of time thinking about where do you want to go in your life, what do you want to do? What's my purpose? No, you're literally just trying to see the road right in front of your face. You're trying to keep from driving off the road. Or into somebody else. Yeah, exactly. It takes so much energy just to drive very slow and careful.
I think it's why I get excited about the topic of money fog is when people rise out of the money fog, they literally have their vision clear up, and they start to see where they want to go in the next chapter of their life. Things become possible they didn't even know because they couldn't see clearly. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It's interesting because while I'm listening to you, I'm thinking to myself, that's really how everything in our lives work. It's not Just money.
It's spouses, it's children, it's your job. There's just your parents, especially Especially when you get into your 50s and your parents start going downhill, which is also another big worry that a lot of people have it. Particularly women. It is its own life transition. Yeah, no, it's so true. I'm very close to my mom, and I think she and I joke her aging is harder on me sometimes than her I don't like it. It's so... And that's such a kid. That's such a kid thing.
When she stopped coloring her hair, I was so mad. It's her life. She gets to do whatever she wants to do. I'm in my 50s, I'm having this emotional reaction that my mother's choosing to stop coloring her hair. But it's all of these signposts of like, Wait, I I don't want that particular chapter to happen. And yet life is life-ing along, and you don't want to miss the present and enjoying so many things that are right here while we're all worried about the future. Exactly. Especially these days.
There's just so much to worry about. Yeah. Well, and the television news makes sure that you know about every single one of them. Exactly. It's interesting to me to do the studies of happiness. As you probably know, because I study the science of happiness, as they say, and all the measures of happiness, particularly for Americans, have been going down, down, down. And yet the external measures around health care and many, many things actually aren't getting worse.
And there's a lot of questions about why Americans are less and less happy. And there is no single answer, but one of them that comes up very commonly is the constant assault of news. And of course, the younger you are, the more likely you are to be depressed, as all of us know, because of social media. And we know it. It's unequivocal. We all know it, and yet it's not like until social media is going away. So how do we handle that? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
What comes to mind is like, Okay, social media, what's going to come next? There's bound to be something else that It's going to replace social media. Yeah. I was reading Arthur C. Brooks. He does a lot of work on the science of happiness, and he's the guy who wrote From strength to strength and just wrote a bestseller with Oprah on Living your best life. Oh, okay. Build the Life You Want, is the latest book.
One of his points is, make sure in social media, you only follow people you're personally friends with, as opposed to the lifestyles of people that you wish you had. Because I see this with money a lot. It's a version of keeping up with the Joneses. The subject is as old as time. It's just that now we see what we think other people people have that we don't have whenever we pick up our phone.
We have to be really careful about what we bring in to our consciousness from money because a lot of money happiness is connected to feeling like we have enough, feeling satisfaction, this core idea of sufficiency. But that's impacted by what we choose to bring in and look at and read about. Absolutely. I think, and I should say I agree with what you're saying, in that Depending on the age that people are falling into, it depends on what they're getting stressed by.
Yeah. Personally, I would not want to be a person in my teenage or 20s right now. I'm awful glad I'm my age. Yeah, I am, too. I am, too. There's a lot going on that young people are exposed to for sure. Yes, and a much higher/different expectations, right? Yeah. Or what does success look like? Yeah. My son's 24, and he's in a naval program on the East Coast in engineering.
It's been fascinating for him because obviously, I'm in the Seattle area, and we're in our own little bubble here in Seattle, and you don't tend to think about where you live because it's just where you live. Well, now he's been in the Navy a couple of years, and he has been exposed to young men and young women from all over the United States, from so many different socioeconomic backgrounds and states and politics and religion. His personality loves the variety.
He's fascinated with, oh, my gosh, so many different people and perspectives and whatnot. But I I love that he is being exposed to so much. Now he comes back to Seattle, and it's very fun for people to ask him his thoughts and opinions on whatever the subject is. Of course, he's 24. He has many thoughts and opinions on all these. But they're changing as he is being exposed to such a wide, wide, wide variety. Yeah. Oh, exactly.
The other thing that goes along with that with some people is that they're like, Well, I don't like your views, so I'm not going to associate with you. Good news is we taught him not to go there, so he just takes it in. But that a lot is your upbringing. Can you tolerate other people's views? That's right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Because I've always had friends that were not... Their politics and all that stuff was not aligned with mine at all, but they were good people.
Well, yeah. No, it's true. I had friends that were so concerned about Xander going into the Navy and what he would be exposed to because of all these other viewpoints, and I never worried about it because I knew he could handle the variety of it. Speaking of money transitions, he's on the opposite end of where you and I are, and it's been wild to watch him and his buddies go through their financial transitions. They're at the beginning of the empty nest.
There they are, out of the nest and watching him set up his first home and watching him looking at he'd love to get married and looking at him very much in his own interesting wild transition and lots of calls home that says, Well, Mom, I know I was never super interested in this, but so how do mortgages work? I love it. That must really be great for you. Yeah, I could write a lot of funny books as he could because he's always a very funny kid.
He posts all sorts of funny memes of being raised by a money coach. He's got these little platitudes that I've handed them. But yeah, we all have our different personalities, and you take your personality through whatever money transition you're in. The biggest transition that I see is divorce because I work with so many women in what you and I are calling that midlife zone, '40s, '50s, '60s.
One of the things that I wrote about in the book was that there's these three key questions that I often use, which are, they're going to sound really simple, but they are always knowing the answer to, what can I afford? How much is enough? Which is a big question. How much is enough? And what would be possible to do in my life? For example, would it be possible to go to grad school? They're big questions. They sound simple, but they're really big questions.
But what happens, Susan, is that we get to them and come to being able to answer them like, Oh, I pretty much know what I can afford. I know I can go to Hawaii for a week, but probably not a month, that type of thing. We get used to answering these three questions until a huge transition happens.
When you go through a big transition, like I said, divorce is a big one, but it could also be retirement, empty nesting, your kids are finally done with college, so you're done paying for all the big payments, lots of big transitions. But Or the kids want to come home again. There's a big one, the boomerang, right? So the answers to those three questions change when people go through a transition, but it catches people off guard.
Nobody thinks about in the middle of whatever the transition is, particularly if it's not a planned one, that they're like, Oh, wait. Okay, what can I afford? How much is enough? And what would now be possible? All the answers to those have changed in all likelihood if you've gone through a big divorce or if you've gone through whatever the big transition is. Really being able to stop and go, Okay, the answer to how much is enough is different.
For example, I had a client recently who finally, finally, her youngest child finished college, and she's been making huge college tuition payments, it feels like, for years. Now she's done. As we say, the kids are off the family payroll. The question, how much is enough, is different. She doesn't need to make as much money as she used to make. She can step it back. She doesn't have to take as many contracts. She doesn't have to build as many hours. She can have more time to herself.
But we had to really up and go, that question, how much is enough? The answer is different now that you're no longer paying these big college costs. It's just an example of transitions bring these three questions to the forefront, and we've got to look at like, Well, I think the answers might have changed. Right. In that particular situation, what came to mind for me was, Okay, well, maybe if she's enjoying what she's doing, maybe she keeps doing it at that level so she can do stuff for herself.
Totally. Well, that's what's fun to talk about, to have a really conscious conversation because you don't want to be working just to work. That's a symptom of being in the money fog. When people are in a money fog, some people overwork because they're in a money fog because they don't know how much is enough. So just keep working because more must be better, and I seem to be spending everything that I make, and so just keep going. Just put your head down and work, work, work.
But if you're not in a money fog, you literally can answer the question, How much is enough? Then you get to go where you just went, which is, Well, if I keep at this pace, maybe I retire early, or maybe I use some of this money because I wanted to go to Europe for a month, and now I can put that together. But it's so different being in the driver's seat around your personal money. Right. Yeah, absolutely. You're right.
People get into their 50s and probably '60s because women started having babies a little bit later. Absolutely. That's the thing that, especially if you're married, you have to sit down and talk, figure out what you yourself want, and then sit down and talk. Exactly. I do love money and couples couples, because as I said, it's a very intimate space to be looking at what is the joint vision of our life. It's interesting because some couples are so intimate in some ways and not in others.
They may be sleeping together and having sex together, but not knowing what each other earns. There's pockets of intimacy. It does bring up a lot of really deeper subjects. Some people want to go there, and some people say, I don't want to go there. It's different for everyone. I was just looking at my internet thing. It doesn't seem to be as strong as usual. It's strange. I think we're okay. Yeah. No, we are. Usually, it's got three things on it. Right now, it only has two.
Anyways, so okay, Is there anything else you want to throw out that you think we haven't really talked about or- No, I think- that's important for people to think about? Oh, gosh. Do you have five hours, Susan? Let's keep going. No. No, I think that's the big stuff. I mean, obviously, I'm excited about the book. People can grab it on Amazon. What's fun, I'll hold it up for people that are visual, it's 100 pages. You know how hard it was to write a short book?
There's that famous Mark Twain quote that said, when he was writing a letter to his friend, he said, I'm sorry, I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I had to write you a long one instead. I love that quote, right? Just because it's like, But I wrote it to actually have people read it. And so a shorter book, people can sit down with a cup of coffee and enjoy it on a Saturday morning. So yeah, I would love people to grab their own copy. They can They can get it anywhere.
Most people get it on Amazon. Yeah. No, I know. Talk about a success. Yes, exactly. But we won't go there. Anyways, I will also put the title and everything in the show notes. Yeah. No, I would love that. I think the last thing I'd say is I love working with women in midlife, as I know you It's like that wonderful... I know you do insight coaching, which I just love that. I love that word and that term.
What I would encourage listeners is if they're curious about money coaching, just book a free discovery call with me. Go to the website. I've got clients who's in all over the United States. The website is Seattle Money Coach, because I'm in the Seattle area, Seattle Money Coach. But if they go there, they I can book a free discovery call and we can talk about what's the number one thing that's keeping you from rising above the money fog?
Because that's my superpower, and I'm just so excited for people to live their best life. Yeah. I think the important message is that it's possible. Oh, huge. It is so possible. It is 100% possible. The air that you breathe on the other side out of the money fog is so free and clean. It feels so good. Oh, well, on that note, everyone should feel Just happy and ready to go in getting their finances together. They're just going to be inundated with people.
Rise above the money fog together as a group. There you go. I love this work. Thank you so much for having me on and having me back. It's always so fun to talk with you because we both just love working with women in this fertile, interesting, transitionary time of life. So thank you. Yeah, exactly. Helping them to find the door and be able to open it. Well said. Okay, well, let me finish up in my usual, which I'm out of practice here on, which is that neither of us are doctors.
This is not medical advice, which we know. And at some level, it's not really money advice as such, because we've only just done the very outside piece of it and not the real heavy stuff that you have to look at to really do something about your life. But other than that, I will say that I will see everybody next week. And thank you for coming back on. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Susan. As usual. Thanks.