Hi everyone, and welcome to the thing we never talk about, a podcast about personal finance for weirdos. My name is Tim Iseler. I'm a certified financial planner, and I run my own independent financial advisory business in Durham NC helping artists, musicians, and other people with weird jobs take control of their financial lives. Today I wanna share a real life financial planning case study about the importance of the messages you tell yourself.
I got to thinking about this the other day when listening to an interview with the filmmaker, Robert Rodriguez. I'll link to that interview in the show notes, but the thing I wanna focus on here is what Rodriguez calls labeling and what James Clear calls identity in his bestselling book Atomic Habits. Robert Rodriguez has had a lot of success in his career and made plenty of hit movies, but his first movie called El Mariachi, was completely self-made and self financed for around $7,200.
I wanna underscore that it's not 72,000, which would still be a very small amount of money to make a full length film. He made the whole thing for the equivalent of saving about $600 a month for a year. That's it, to make a full length feature film that actually got released. And Rodriguez made this point during this interview about the labels we give ourselves: you can't wait for someone else to give you permission before you start doing what matters for you.
If you want to be a filmmaker, you can just call yourself a filmmaker and then start doing what filmmakers do, making films. If you have made a film, even if it's a short film, even if it's a low budget film, you are a filmmaker. And then you can do it again and get better and do it again and get better. And it's easier and cheaper than ever to make your own film. You can literally do it with the phone in your pocket and then release it on YouTube and it cost you almost nothing.
Same thing is true when it comes to being a musician. If you wanna be a musician, do what a musician does. Start playing music. It doesn't matter if you have success right away, success follows action. So you tell yourself, I am a musician, and you start doing the things a musician does, and before you know it, pow, you're a musician. You make music, you play music, people see you doing it. You're a musician, because you do the things that a musician does.
The same with writing, the same with physical fitness, the same with learning a new skill, and the same with pretty much everything that you do that's creative or related to self-improvement or taking control of your life. You just have to start telling yourself that you are the thing you aspire to be and start doing the things that that person would do. Rodriguez calls this labeling, as in how you label yourself, but you can also call it identity or just self-talk.
What's the story you're telling yourself about who you are, what you can do, what you're good at? What do your words say about how you see yourself? Here's what I mean by that. Notice the difference between saying something like, I'm trying to eat better and I'm a healthy eater. Or the difference between I'm gonna start going to the gym regularly and I go to the gym each day before I start work. One of those phrasings is sort of a half-hearted aspirational voice.
Like, I'd like to do this, I want to try this. I'm going to start, et cetera, et cetera, and so on in that fashion, and the other voice is active and confident. I do this, I am this, I prioritize these kinds of decisions because I am that person. The language we use matters, especially when it comes to the messages we tell ourselves. And that brings us to the real life financial planning case study I wanna share with you today. It concerns an actual client of mine, who I'll call Sue.
It's not her name, but I don't wanna share her name. So Sue, she is. And how the story she internalized about money was keeping her from moving ahead with her life. So here's the setup. When Sue reached out to me, she was in her early thirties, recently divorced, and through the process of getting divorced and trying to get back on her feet, she had taken on a lot of high interest debt. In other words, a lot of credit card debt.
She wanted to pay down her debt, build up some cash savings, and just generally learn how to better manage her money and her cash flow. Because here's the deal. All of her life, Sue had been the one in her family that was air quotes bad with money. That was the family narrative. That she was bad at managing money, that she made bad decisions, she couldn't be trusted, and everybody kind of laughed and rolled their eyes, oh, sue's bad with money. You know how that goes.
And as you might expect when someone hears that kind of language at home, as a young person, she internalized that narrative and took it with her into adulthood. So when she got married, she didn't pay attention to her financial life because she was the one who was bad with money. And then when she got divorced, she had no idea what to do. So like a lot of people who reach out to a financial advisor, Sue had some specific tactical, actionable goals in mind.
She wanted to eliminate debt, she wanted to build up a reasonable savings cushion, and she wanted to put systems in place to make that easier to maintain in the future. And we did all of that. She did pay off all of that credit card debt and build up a savings account. And she started regularly contributing to her retirement account, which was not necessarily part of her original list of goals, but once you're on a roll, it's pretty easy to keep the momentum going.
But the biggest win through the process of working together was that she learned how to tell a different story about herself. She made the decision to take control of her financial life and then committed to acting the way a person who was quote, good with money would act. And by taking control of her cash flow, setting manageable targets and following through, with some accountability help by yours truly, she had real evidence that she actually was good at managing money.
She wasn't the one who was bad with money anymore, and she had proof. It was right there in the growing balance of her savings account and the shrinking balances on her credit cards. Sue did the things a responsible person would do by deciding to change her narrative and act accordingly. So here's the big takeaway: when it comes to managing your money, you don't need to wait until you have permission to get started.
You don't need to wait until you have all the perfect information, until you know it inside and out, until you have every detail figured out. And you don't need to continue with the mindset or narrative that holds you back just because that's the way it's always been. If you're ready to start making better financial decisions to start being air quote, good with money, you need to tell yourself the right story and then start behaving that way. And again, language matters.
Instead of saying, I need to get serious about managing my money, or I should be saving for retirement, try telling yourself something like I am the type of person who makes good financial decisions. Right. It's a big difference. Not I want to, but I am. Not I should do this, but I am doing this. Now your job is just to do what that person would do, follow through with it, and you will become that person. So what does someone who's good with money do?
That person spends a little bit less than they want to. They save a little bit more than they have been. They pay down debt a little bit faster than they need to, and they buy investments that they can own forever. I've said it before, I'll say it again. If you can get those four things right, every other part of your financial life will get better and easier. It's not complicated and it doesn't have to be perfect before you get started.
Just aim to do a little bit better than whatever you're doing right now, get comfortable with that little bit better, and then over time, slowly bump it up. Tell yourself that you are good with money, start making decisions the way a person who's good with money would make decisions, and what do you know? After a few months, pow, you will be that person. So labels, identity, and self-talk matter a lot when it comes to taking control of your financial life.
Being good or bad with money is just a story you tell yourself and you can change the story to fit the life you wanna live. Alright, that's it for this week. I'll be back next week with a conversation with John Darnielle, bestselling author and founder of the band the Mountain Goats. Now for some disclosures. The Thing We Never Talk About about is for educational and entertainment purposes only. It's not legal, investment, or tax advice. Okay?
People on the show, including yours, truly may have interest for or against any investments discussed. So do yourself a favor and don't make any decisions based on what you hear on this or any podcast. If you have a money or finance question you'd like answered in a future episode, please drop me a line at podcast@iselerfinancial.com. Again, that's podcast@iselerfinancial.com. And Iseler is spelled I-S-E-L-E-R.
If you like what you hear, please like and subscribe to the show wherever you get podcasts. And you can get my insights on money and more delivered directly to your inbox by subscribing to my Keep It Easy newsletter at iselerfinancial.com/newsletter. Thanks for listening. I really appreciate it and I appreciate you.