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Matt Pierce: Guess what's back. Business and Brews, where real business talk meets real people, and always fuel by good brew. This time we're going podcast first, bite-sized, insightful, and built for conversations you'll want to share. I'm your host, Matt Pierce, founder and CEO of Immediate, and I'll be sitting down with leaders, entrepreneurs, and friends to talk about leadership, growth, and the stories that make business worth talking about. So grab your favorite brew, pull up a chair, and let's talk business the way it's meant to be talked about. Business and Brews, back, bolder.
Matt: Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Business and Brews. I'm your host, Matt Pierce And given that it's a short week due to Memorial Day, we're gonna do something a little bit different. No guests this week, just a conversation that I think is incredibly important, especially right now. going to talk about the connection between financial health and mental health. Because whether we wanna admit it or not, money stress impacts almost every part of our lives. It impacts relationships, it impacts sleep.
Matt Pierce: better than ever.
Matt: It impacts confidence, health, and for a lot of people, it creates this ⁓ anxiety that just follows them around every single day. And reality is ⁓ you have to be quote unquote bad with money to feel financial pressure. A lot of people are doing their absolute best and still feeling squeezed. So today I want to talk through a few things. One, the financial landscape, which I think we all have a decent understanding of, so we'll keep that part short. Two, how financial stress impacts both mental and physical wellbeing. And then three, we'll finish with a few practical things you can do to regain a little bit of control and reduce some of that pressure. So grab your favorite brew and let's jump in. And we'll start with the obvious. feel really expensive right now, right? Gas prices, ⁓ insurance, housing, ⁓ out to a nice dinner somehow costs the same as a week's worth of groceries right now. And even though inflation has slowed from where it was a couple years ago, people are still feeling the effects of the cumulative price increases across almost every category of life. A that stands out to me, and if you follow along on Business and Brews, you've probably heard this a few times, but roughly 65 % of Americans say they're living paycheck to paycheck. And what's interesting about this is that it isn't limited to lower income households. You see this stress across every single income bracket. Why? it's because financial pressure is often less about income and it's more about margin, right? ⁓ it's the gap between what comes in and what goes out. And when the margin gets tight, life gets stressful very quickly. One unexpected a car repair, a medical bill, appliance replacement, that suddenly feels overwhelming. So at over the last six years, we've had a front row seat to this reality. one of the biggest things we've learned is this. Most people are not irresponsible. They're simply reactive, right? Most employees accessing their pay early, they're not doing it for extravagant purchases. They're buying groceries. They're paying utility bills, right? Bill due date doesn't match up with pay date. putting gas in the car so they can get to work. Or they're simply handling any of ⁓ a of other unexpected life moments. ⁓ And when you zoom out, what you realize is that financial stress isn't really about money alone. It's about stability and it's about feeling safe. It's about feeling like you can breathe, So when people don't feel that, it starts to impact everything else, which us to the second section of this episode, which mental health. As you would ⁓ financial stress, of course, one of the most common forms of stress in America. Unfortunately, doesn't just stay in the money category of life. ⁓ bleeds into everything. There's a growing amount of research showing strong connections between financial stress and anxiety, depression, sleep disruption, relationship strain, and even physical health decline. The American Psychological Association for ⁓ one point it was like 13 straight years and then COVID hit. And COVID was number one for that year. But then for the next four years, This became it again. Money is the top stressor for Americans year after year after year. And honestly, it makes sense uncertainty is exhausting. When someone's constantly thinking, how am gonna pay this bill? What if something else goes wrong? Am I falling behind? Your brain just never really gets to rest. And over time, that chronic stress kind of seeps into the physical body and you start to have these negative physical consequences of elevated cortisol levels, poor sleep, right? Waking up at 2 a.m., watching the ceiling fan spin around and around trying to figure out how you're gonna pay that bill, right? It's higher blood pressure, it's fatigue. It could be weight fluctuation, lower immune response, ⁓ all things that the mental aspect of it start to flow in and you see it and feel it physically. Financial stress literally changes how your body functions. So mentally it creates what I would call survival mode thinking. And when people are under this intense financial pressure, long-term planning just becomes incredibly difficult. You stop thinking about personal growth, you stop thinking about retirement at some point, decades in the future. There's no real thought of, I enough margin to start investing? what are my future goals? ⁓ these things that just kind of start getting pushed back further and further. Because ⁓ all you're thinking about is, can I make it to Friday? Or can I make it to next Friday? And that's one reason that financial literacy matters so much is because ⁓ literacy isn't just about spreadsheets and budgets. It's about reducing stress ⁓ order to create clarity. It's about helping people feel like they have options again. And I think this is an important distinction
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because sometimes people hear financial literacy and they immediately think like, great, person's about to lecture me about budgeting. ⁓ it's not the point, right? The is that to become financial literate, it's really creating enough stability and awareness to reduce some of that fear and increase confidence. I also just simply want to say this. If you are going through a difficult financial season right now, you are certainly not alone. your financial situation does not define your worth. I think that's a really important thing to remember. ⁓ so as we think about that and transitioning kind of into the third section of like, all right, Matt, well, you painted a pretty bleak scene here. Right? what can we do to try to get on the right track or what can we do to start to make some small tweaks to fix some of this? So we'll end this episode. And I know this one's a lot shorter than they typically are, but we felt like this was a short week. And so it deserved a short episode. That's just kind of punchy and to the point ⁓ and quite frankly what a lot of us are feeling. So let's close with a few practical things that can help financially and mentally, not perfection, right? This is just progress, How can we do little things to help make progress on our lifelong financial wellness journey? So one, I would say you can focus on visibility, not guilt. One of the worst things people do during stressful financial periods is avoidance. You avoid checking your accounts. You avoid opening bills, right? You watch it just stack up on your kitchen counter. You talking about money entirely. And while... Emotionally, that is understanding. It usually increases anxiety in the long term. Clarity reduces stress. So even if the numbers aren't ideal, understanding where you stand today gives your brain something concrete to work with. grows ⁓ uncertainty. I'm gonna say that again. Fear grows in uncertainty. So start simple, right? You need to know what's coming in. Right? Whether it's watching your clock in and clock out and understanding what each paycheck is going to be, when the paycheck's coming, if there's any like gig, hustle, whatever you're doing to have income, you want to understand what's coming in and then have a really good understanding of what's going out. Right? Knowing when your bills are due, when they're due, but then when they're late. Right? Sometimes they may say, hey, this is due by such and such day, but but the late fee doesn't hit until a few days later. Like really understand that the ins and outs and then start to identify the pressure points, right? This is again, this is not to shame yourself. It's in order to create awareness. So when you do that, now you start to understand inflows and outflows, timing of all those things when bill due date is versus when payday does. So secondly, you take that and then you start to build A lot of people call it an emergency fund. I don't think of it as an emergency fund. think of it as, I would almost say, think of it as a breathing room fund, right? Like notice that I didn't say like become financially independent. Like that's not, that's not something that's just going to happen, right? Social loves to make people feel behind financially. I mean, are story after story of people that are flaunting all these things that aren't really theirs. to make themselves feel better and make a lot of other people feel worse. I would encourage you to ignore those things, right? The goal again, not perfection, is to make progress, is to create margin, is to create breathing room, right? So this is why I call it a breathing room fund. So ⁓ setting $20 a week or building toward your first... $500 goal, right? I want to have $500 that I set aside over the next eight months and I can back into that that it means I need to save $25 every bi-weekly paycheck to get to that. So I have $500 worth of breathing room. So when one of those things we talked about earlier pops up when there's something unexpected, which inevitably will happen, you've got capital there, right? You've got money there to help do that. And what that does is having these little goals and achieving these small goals along the way, it starts to create a really strong positive psychological shift. Because mentally, savings represents safety. It tells your brain, all right, I think I can handle a surprise, right? And that matters a lot more than people realize. Just getting yourself out of a spot where you constantly know that financial surprise could set you into a really bad tailspin, that you've got that little bit extra, that breathing room fund, allows you to kind of free up that part of your brain and go, all right, I've got the safety is there, right? ⁓ So that leads into third, which is really hard thing to do. And I'm preface it by saying that when you're in the middle ⁓ of, let's take a sports analogy. When you're in the middle of the game, it's hard to take a step back and look at the big picture, right? When you're in the middle of a pay period and you're watching your bank account dwindle you know it's Friday before you get paid and you got bills that are due and you got, you know, ⁓ end of school year parties that your kids are going to and you've got all these things that are chipping and pulling at you financially, it's hard to do this. But the third thing is that you wanna take a minute to zoom out and think long-term. So difficult seasons have a way of convincing us that they'll last forever. But most financial journeys are built slowly over time, right? ⁓ one of the healthiest mental shifts you can make is learning to separate where am I today from where am I headed long-term, okay? ⁓ progress ⁓ healthy habits compound, consistency compounds. And honestly, ⁓ just psychologically, hope matters. ⁓ Sometimes the healthiest thing you can do mentally is to remind yourself this season is not the whole story. And so if you take some of these small things, piece them together, stack
them week after week, over time, you start to just breathe a little easier. And some of those mental and physical issues that you run into and ⁓ that you're having day. start to trickle down and they start to get a little lower and they start to feel like you can overcome this. again, ⁓ get the feeling in the sense that this season is not the whole story. There is a longer term big picture that's out there. So as we wrap up today's episode, ⁓ want to encourage you with this ⁓ health and mental health are deeply connected. Taking care of one often helps improve the other. You don't need a perfect budget. don't have to have everything figured out, right? You just need a starting point, a more awareness, a little more consistency, and a little grace for yourself along the way. Financial literacy, said it already a couple of times, I'm gonna say it again. Financial literacy is not about perfection with money. It's about feeling a little more in control. just one step at a time. And if this topic resonates with you, I'd encourage you to spend time exploring resources as we kind of did research for this episode and things up, of course, because I gave some stats earlier, we pulled those from the American Psychological Association, go to their website. They've got a lot of really good stuff on there that helps a mental perspective. Ramsey Solutions, which is ⁓ Dave Ramsey, who You know, one of the most prominent people that talks about ⁓ personal financial health and wellbeing and has a lot of practical tips and tricks, check out their website. You can always go to ⁓ NerdWallet. There's just a lot of really good information there. Or there's also this piece of the puzzle that ⁓ you look around your circle and you see people that you know aren't quite as stressed out. maybe have it together a little bit. Don't feel like you can't go up and say, love to talk to you about just about money. And I know this is kind of a taboo subject, but ⁓ I love to sit down and just have a conversation about some best tips and tricks ⁓ and that you've done that help you manage your And they're gonna learn something from you and you're gonna learn something from them. And I think that there's a lot of people in this. in this world who just don't feel comfortable going and having those conversations. We were raised, and most of us were raised like, don't talk about money. And ⁓ I just think that's an important thing to go do, ⁓ if you go and find someone that you trust and that you've known for a while and you can sit down and have a really candid conversation with them, I'd encourage you to do that. Because the more time that we normalize talking about money and stress, the more ⁓ help other people realize that they're not alone. So I hope you found this valuable. This is something that obviously is near and dear to my heart and at immediate, it's something that we work day in and day out to help improve the financial wellbeing of thousands upon thousands of people across the country ⁓ as they the peaks and valleys ⁓ of their stream. I'll look forward to the next episode of Business and Brews. If you didn't like this, good, next week we'll be back interviewing other people. ⁓ If did enjoy it, let us know. ⁓ We'll to do some more of these in the future. Thanks for your time ⁓ and appreciate everybody listening and hope everybody gets some value out of this. We'll talk to you next time.