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Tori Dunlap is a money expert, the author of Financial Feminist, and the host of the Financial Feminist podcast. Tori and I are both a part of the same women’s podcaster group. I love her, and have learned a lot from the way she helps women approach money—and even more so, from how she approaches the emotions, trauma, triggers, and stories that underlie our relationship to money. Tori is someone who can just really cut through and resonate.

Today, we talk about Tori’s first financial goal, why nothing bad happens when women have more money, and how we can start to shed some of the unhelpful money stories that have been put on us, as well the unhelpful identities we’ve unwittingly been wearing.

If you’ve ever been told, or thought, that you’re bad with money—this episode is for you. If you feel like you need to justify any spend or any earning…this episode is for you. If you currently feel like you have no control over your money…also for you. What else? We also talk about switching from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset, and about something called the ostrich effect. Toward the end of our conversation, Tori offers some advice about not making one incident or mishap your whole identity.

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Financial Feminist

ELISE:

I can’t believe I’ve never been on this side with you, so this is exciting. I’m very excited. It’s going to be good.

Alright, so I know some of the lore of Tori Dunlap and I love being in your presence and watching you. I think of you as a collective agitator just in the small group that I’m in with you, and obviously also in the collective of, I don’t even think I would call it gentle, but this slow agitation that gets people thinking about the stories that we tell ourselves for you specifically about money, but you have such a wide, vast brain. I feel like the work that you do with people and money is obviously applicable to all parts of their life in some way. But let’s go back to the beginning and it started with a personal, was it an arbitrary goal? This first one, you set that for yourself, right? You wanted to save a hundred thousand dollars by the time you turned 2025. Is that accurate?

TORI:

Yeah. I mean, first of all, I love that you basically called me laundry detergent. I’m like, I’m the agitator, which is so great. No, you’re the apparat. You’re not detergent. No, it’s so good. No, no, no. I mean that as a compliment. I’m taking it as one. No. I set this goal for myself, which was to save a hundred thousand dollars to 25, and it was because I read on a financial blog, this is what I was doing when I was 22, that somebody had saved or accumulated a hundred K in net worth by 25, and I ran some very general initial background or backup napkin math on it and was like, maybe I can do a hundred K saved or invested at 25. And the joke was, as long as I did it the day before I turned 26, it still counts. And so I was writing a blog on the side of my nine to five in marketing and was growing that, and I got into my first job and was graduating college in 2016.

So I was just in this microcosm as we all were of this moment of realizing what kind of person do I want to be? What do I stand for? And realizing in my own life that not only was the woman that all of my friends were coming to ask for financial advice and guidance, but I was also realizing that when I had money, I had options. And my first job was especially toxic, and there was a situation where I realized, oh, I need to get out of here. And I couldn’t, didn’t have the money. And so that a hundred K was the permission slip I needed. Yeah, it was cool to see that number on my bank account or in an app of Cool, I did this. I accomplished this goal, but it was really what that money meant to me. It was the ability to leave that job I didn’t want to be in.

It was the ability to grow a business. It was donating to causes I believed in and going out to eat at nice restaurants and taking care of myself and my community and my family. And that is what I believe I was put on this earth to do is help women see money as their best tool of protest, their best tool of agency, and of options and flexibility and a beautiful life. And since quitting my job in 2019 to run her first center K full-time, we’ve helped over 5 million globally do that. I wrote a New York Times bestseller called Financial Feminist. We host the number one money podcast in the world called Financial Feminist, and finding for women’s financial rights is my favorite thing.

ELISE:

I love it. I love also that 100 K was sort of this arbitrary but beautifully rounded number that it was also not actually part of some calculation that could in of itself be, I don’t want to say scary to women, to sort of calculate how much money do I need, which I think already puts people into a scarcity mindset, but just this arbitrary figure. But I want to understand your relationship to money. It’s interesting. I was talking to this woman earlier today and she was looking at my human design chart and she said that I was the first human design chart she had seen that has this cross of duality. She was like, I’ve never actually seen someone with this before. And what it says to me is that you are able to bridge or understand or transcend dualistic thinking an either or, and I’m like, that is what my whole next book is. Yes, I have a very Elwood like what? It’s hard. I feel like you have a similar energy around money where it is not to say you don’t have sympathy for people like me who have such weird money stories running through my head, but it seems like you can cut through them. What was your relationship to money growing up? The interesting thing about

TORI:

That is so many people believe that money and being good with money is about being good with math. Oh, I’m good with math. I’m good with numbers, so I’m good with money. Oh, I’m not good at math. I’m not good with numbers. Excel spreadsheets are terrifying, so therefore I’m not good with money. And it has nothing to do with math. It is not a financial equation. Being good with money has everything to do with understanding your emotions, understanding your own trauma, understanding your triggers. And that’s not sexy, exciting work, but it’s work that women are really good at and we’re willing to go there often. And yet I hear from women all the time like, oh, I’m so bad with money. And I’m like, no, that’s an identity that you have both put on yourself, but also society has put on you. Money is just like any other skill.

You learn it just like a language or an instrument. You’re going to be bad at it for a period of time. I was lucky enough to have a financial education from my parents, and so a lot of people are shocked to discover that my background is not finance or business. I studied theater and communication in college. I was a liberal arts nerd. I loved that and thought I was going to be an actor for my entire life. And only when I started realizing that this was something, again, that was a privilege that I had for my parents, but also that I had a unique way of communicating it. I wasn’t going to use the jargon. I wasn’t going to explain things in a way that made you feel like shit or involve shame. In that conversation, I was going to story tell to you just like I would on stage playing a part or as an actor that I could communicate that effectively was where I really found the impetus and the growth of her first center K.

But my journey with money, because I had that financial education, my parents did not grow up with a lot of money. And so I think they were very intentional to say, we’re going to give her what we did not have, which is this gift of education and also we’re going to make really good financial decisions, and I’m really thankful for that. I both saw it modeled for me, so I knew, oh yeah, this is how you save money. This is how you think about, oh, we are going on this family trip, so we can’t afford to go out to eat. They were actively telling me those things. So they were not only modeling that behavior, but they also gave me a really great launchpad because we were not in financial scarcity mode my whole life. I think they were. That being said, there is so much about personal finance, and you and I have discussed this before that has nothing to do with how hard you work or what choices you do or don’t make.

But I think most people who talk about money professionally want to make you believe that because a lot easier to deal in black and white than it is to deal in the gray to say, oh, the reason you’re not rich is because you buy too many lattes, right? Or the reason you’re not racist is because you don’t work hard enough. When we know that’s bullshit, we know that’s not true. We know that there’s about 80% of the personal finance equation that’s systemic. That is ableism, sexism, homophobia, racism, a trillion dollar student debt crisis, stagnating minimum wages, lack of paid family leave required federally in the United States, climate change, natural, I can go on and on and on. And also we do have a personal responsibility to take our financial education seriously, and that is the part that we can control. And especially at this moment in time where there is so many things outside of our control and the world feels very scary and overwhelming and our rights are getting stripped every single second of the day, the best thing you can do is say, you know what?

I’m going all in unlearning everything I can about money. I am going to unabashedly say I want to get rich. I want to pursue money. Because really money is a form of control just like everything else. And you have written books about this, you talk about this all the time. I don’t know if there’s anybody better to talk to than you about this, but money I think is the epitome of this. And the truth is, when you have money as a marginalized person, you are uncontrollable. You are no longer controlled because you get to choose whatever the hell you want to do, and you get to be the most generous version of yourself. And nothing bad happens when women have money. So we’ve been told as a society and as a people that, oh, money’s bad money. Getting money is greedy or gosh, or impolite. Talking about money is rude. All of these things, all of these narratives are so commonplace, whether they’re spoken or unspoken, and they’re meant to keep you controlled. They’re meant to keep you from gaining agency. And so I have this quote in my first book, the Patriarchy’s Worst Nightmares and Uncontrollable Woman. And it’s true. And that’s why I need women to have money, and that’s why I need your financial education, and I need you to take that so fucking seriously, especially right now.

ELISE:

Yeah. What did you just say? 80% is systemic. Was that the number? I mean, this is my equation I’ve come

TORI:

Up with. It’s going to be different for every person, but so much of this has nothing to do with whether you’re buying the latte or whatever. And I’ve said publicly and in my book before that, by the way, the very things you’re getting shamed for are only feminine things, right? It’s the latte, it’s the manicure, it’s the blowout, it’s the salon, it’s the shopping addiction. And I’m putting that in quotes. It’s never NFL season tickets. It’s never golf clubs. It’s never video games. And so at the end of the day, we may as well just as ethically as we can under capitalism, without exploiting anybody, our job is to get as rich as possible. When I say rich, I don’t mean Jeff Bezos rich. I mean rich enough that you get to say yes when you want to say yes and no, when you want to say no, and you get to pour back into your community, and you get to take really good care of yourself and your family because when women have money, it’s been proven. We’re more generous. We’re kinder. The world just gets better. And until we fix the system that exists, we have to not only survive the system, but we have to thrive in

ELISE:

It. And not to perpetuate these stories about women and sort of goodness or spirituality or that money is bad or base. But even when we think about, let’s think of Mackenzie Scott, let’s think of Melinda Gates. Let’s think of Loreen Powell Jobs. These are not women who are flaunting on super yachts. These are women invested in their own longevity. These are women who are deeply investing in building stronger and better communities through,

TORI:

And these women have more money than I will ever have than you will ever have, than anybody listening will ever have. And so there is a lot to be said about, yes, women at the peak of wealth are more generous. And we’ve all met shitty rich people. We all have met them. We see them on TV all the time. We know about those kind of people. And so it’s so easy to equate, oh, they’re bad people because they have money or the money made them bad. And yeah, there’s plenty of people like that. And there’s also plenty of people doing really incredible things with that money. But at the end of the day, money is the tool. Money is a tool that allows you to hopefully build better life for yourself, just breathe easier. One of the stats that I think just proves this point, unfortunately so well, is that 99% of abusive relationships have some sort of financial abuse.

So that tells me that if you’re in an abusive marriage, in an abusive relationship, money is being used as a form of control. What happened? What would happen if you had your own money? I literally just got tagged in this video today about this woman who is a stay-at-home mom and who is now going through a divorce with her husband and is realizing that she doesn’t have anything. She doesn’t have a credit score, she doesn’t have a credit card in her own name. She spends on her husband’s card. And because he is interested in ending this relationship is now saying, yeah, I’m taking my cards back. Which we can debate as borderline or maybe fully financial abuse, but she is now not able to make her own choices. She is now starting from scratch. And this just proves to me over and over and over again, we need women to have their own money.

We need women to be engaging in this. And a conversation I had recently with Jen Hatmaker on my show, I would love to talk to you about this actually, because her story was really interesting, married to the same man, evangelical so deep in that as a pastor and a pastor’s wife found out after 25 years that her husband was cheating on her. They have five children together. She basically had to rebuild everything in her life, but her financial life specifically, and she was so kind and told me that I was one of the people she turned to during that process. And we talked. It was so lovely. I cried on the episode, I lost. It was so beautiful. But one of the things that kind of blew my mind when we were having this conversation is that it’s so easy then to see that video that I was just explaining and be like, well, why didn’t she take care of herself?

Or why didn’t she manage this herself? And I’m sometimes guilty of that, especially as someone who is just like, I’ll never give my financial power over to a man. And also, one of the things I talked about with Jen that I would love your thoughts on is I think with all of the expectations we have for women, especially in relationships with men, the emotional labor, the caretaking, the just responsibility of being the primary parent or the primary person in the house, I think a lot of women are so exhausted and so tired by the pressure of that, that they say, oh, here’s this one thing that society has told me I’m bad at that I have confirmed to myself I don’t have the skills for, and I can give him this one thing and take it off my plate and just let him handle it.

And I think whether that’s a conscious or unconscious thought that that’s happening a lot in heteronormative relationships. And it didn’t occur to me until just then that maybe it’s just like, I can’t add one more thing to my plate. I can’t or even fully manage this thing. And what a relief it is to give it to somebody else until you get divorced, until he dies, until you realize that, oh shit, this is the way. This is the only resource we have to survive. I don’t know. I don’t know your thoughts on that, but I thought that was so

ELISE:

Interesting. I think that, and I think of my own relationship with money is exposure therapy in its own way. But yeah, the Jen Hatmaker story, and when I first read Awake, I read a pre galley and I had a friend going through a similar experience, having a similar, a awareness not knowing anything about her financial life and having been blissfully unaware. And what happened with Jen, as she explains in the book, is that things were in terrible disarray and she was rebuilding, even though she had been primary or very bountiful, breadwinner, despite living in this sort of patriarchal evangelical household. I think it’s fear really, fear and anxiety that keeps people away. And yes, there is some relief in handing that over to someone. I have the opposite in my relationship where, and I don’t know when this started. I mean, I had a mom who balanced her checkbook and kept all checks and would go fastidiously, demand all receipts for every credit card transaction.

And yeah, that’s my parents study them, and she still doesn’t bank online. So I watched parents manage, yeah, money in that way. And I had an aversion to, IM part earlier in my life when I was really living paycheck to paycheck. In some ways it was just too scary to be that intimate with my, I just had to have some faith that it would be okay. And it was, which is probably not what you want to hear. But now in my marriage, I am the obsessive compulsive person. I had to get my husband to grant me power of attorney over his preexisting accounts. He is just not on it. And I take care of all of it. And sometimes I do feel a little bit of rage that he gets to just sort of not worry about it. But I am that person in my relationship.

That said, I am extremely responsible. So I’m a good steward of our 4 0 1 Ks and pension. I’m good at it, although not abundance oriented and probably the way that I should be. But yeah, I do think it’s natural. And I would imagine if I had a dominant husband who was like, this is my fiefdom, I would completely hand over the keys. I completely sympathize with how this happens. I have a lot of learned helplessness around other parts of our house. I don’t know how to fix anything. I don’t know how anything works. I don’t know when things need to be maintained, fixed, cleaned. I don’t have any engagement with that part of our life. So I think it’s both. I think it’s an appropriate apportioning of household duties and responsibilities coupled or powered by fear and anxiety and feeling overwhelmed. And to be fair, when I get on the phone with our financial advisor and he’s explaining the things that he’s going to do, I just take stock in our long relationship and how our portfolio has performed as a reason to accept his advice. As I also accept my physician’s advice. It’s not like I really know exactly what he’s talking about, Tori. I will admit that. Totally.

TORI:

Yeah. And the fear part I think is so real because that is the number one emotion that people feel around money, whether it’s fear, shame, it’s all of those, the anxiety, the stress, it’s never, yeah, money. And I have a great relationship. It’s not like joy and I feel that way about money. Most people don’t. And that common feeling that you described, especially early on in your life, we call the ostrich effect, which is you barrier your head in the sand. You act like your problems don’t exist. And the funny thing about that one in particular, because I imagine everybody listening has felt that way and is maybe feeling that way now, is that you start associating money with stress. So you go, my money when I look at it stresses me out. I open my student loan portal and it freaks me out. I open my bills and they scare me.

I log into my bank account and my gut drops, so I’m not going to look at it. And in actuality, that is not what’s happening. You’re stressed about money because you have no idea what’s going on. So the metaphor I give is it’s like driving a car without a gas gauge. So I’m driving my car and I don’t know how far I’m going to get. And in the back of my head, I can’t enjoy my drive. I can’t turn on my radio, I can’t sing along to a song. I can’t eat a snack because the entire time I’m going, oh my God, am I going to break down and I have enough gas maybe to get me two miles. I have enough gas maybe to get me to the next town over, but I could be sitting on the side of the road at two in the morning broken down without cell reception.

And that’s what’s more stressful than getting in my car and seeing my light come on saying, oh, you need gas really quickly. That’s not great, but at least I know, I know how far I can go. Oh, I can go a mile to the nearest gas station and I can look up and make a plan to say, okay, this is how far I can go without breaking down. The reality is so many people are operating without a gas gauge. They’re just raw dogging life. And they’re driving around and they’re like, I could break down at any time. My card could get declined. I could run out of money and I wouldn’t know it because I’m not looking. And so when you live life like that, the subconscious, the record that’s going on in the back of your brain is like, do you have enough money for that?

Can you afford that? Is that something you can actually do? I don’t know. So no, yes, feels exciting because it’s always, there’s a massive asterisk of, I don’t know if I can actually do this. It sucks all the joy out of it versus, you know what? I don’t have a lot of money, but I know what I can and can’t do. I have this budget. People associate budget with deprivation or restriction. No, your budget is your gas gauge in your car. Your budget tells you how far you can go, and you might not be able to get far. And that’s where we talk about the systemic issues. That’s where we talk about, yeah, you’re working really hard. This has nothing to do with you. And also your budget is your best tool for you to be able to manage money in a more accessible way, make money more of your friend rather than your enemy and say, okay, this is how far I can get this month.

So if you are the person who is ostrich yourself, it really isn’t the money that’s freaking you out or the consciousness, it’s the unconsciousness, it’s the, I dunno what’s going on. I’m just going to keep driving and hope I don’t run out of gas. That’s not a fun way to live life. And I know it’s scary to look at your money. I know that’s why I’m here. That’s why I do the work that I do. But we have to get honest with ourselves because at the end of the day, you know that this isn’t going to magically fix itself. You know that. But it’s the lie we tell ourselves because it’s more convenient in the moment. And one of the things I’ve talked about a lot is that true self-care is hard shit. True self-care is looking at your money and eating a salad when you don’t want to fucking eat a salad and having a hard conversation with a friend and going to therapy and going to the gym. These are all things that in the moment feel really uncomfortable, but make future use life better. It’s not the face masks, it’s not the glass bottle of wine. It’s the actual things that feel uncomfortable right now, but are going to make your life better. Looking at your money, taking charge of that is, it feels really uncomfortable, but you’re going to be really happy you did it.

ELISE:

I think that’s so profound, this idea that the fear is actually in the unconscious part of it, not in the reality. I mean, I’ve told this story before, but when I left my job, I mean, I’ve worked for my whole life starting when I was 12 or 14 or whatever. I mean besides babysitting, and I had always relied on these outside structures, and I had a total panic attack. And this woman I work with, Krisa was like, well, what do you need? And I was like, well, what do you mean a budget? She was like, yes, budget. And she’s a spiritual teacher. And she was like the breathlessness of, I don’t have enough. When you don’t actually, you can’t make material or concrete. What enough even is, is where so many people get into trouble, actually write it down and write down some things that you want, but you have to conc. You have to make it real. And that was a profound lesson for me, and I did it, and then I could calm myself down. I’d made it conscious and I was like, okay, this is a number. It’s a big number. I have kids. I live in Los Angeles, but I can do this and I can orient myself around this for the record, I do so much better than I ever did being a full-time employee of someone else, which is probably not an uncommon story, even though it’s a very hard transition.

TORI:

No, because the current corporate structure doesn’t really work for women or from others.

ELISE:

No, no. And to be, yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. And I’ve never had one job, which I think a lot of people don’t understand, but throughout my entire career, I’ve had to do extra things on the side, ghost writing, et cetera. So I’m sort of wired for that, but it’s also been my reality, and I try to be really explicit about that because it’s hard. I have a lot of jobs. I still have a lot of jobs, but it’s fun.

TORI:

One of the things you just touched on that I’ll briefly share as well is that when you start getting honest about your money, you have this moment where you go, oh my God, this is all me. This is my responsibility and I have to control my own spending, and I have to figure out what a Roth IRA is, and oh my God, it’s all me. This is all on me or it’s all on me. I get to call all the shots. I get to use money to create the life that I want. I get to spend money where I want to spend it. I get to not spend on things I don’t want to spend money on. I get to decide how much I’m going to work to a certain extent and what kind of money I want to make or what that looks like. And I think that that is a turning point of a mindset switch between scarcity and abundance, where it’s scarcity is going, oh my God, this is all me. And I don’t trust myself. I don’t trust myself that I can do this. Abundance is, oh, this is all me, and I don’t know everything yet, but I’m going to figure it out.

ELISE:

One of the things, and this might be a cheat, I’m curious for your thoughts around this, and we’ve touched on it, but this idea, I definitely run a story about how money is space and unspiritual and corrupting, and I try and keep that story at bay, but you watch it. It is a highly distorting, corrosive force for a lot of people. I don’t know if, as you said, the cause or more of a symptom of someone who’s gone off the rails and is maybe not so aligned with their own values, or maybe they don’t have values, but

TORI:

Well, in that case, we’re usually talking at least tens of millions of dollars typically

ELISE:

Talking about, and

TORI:

Most people will never touch that amount of money. So when I say, I want you to be rich, I’m talking to the 99% of people who are just like, I can’t make my own decisions. I need enough money to make my own decisions and to feel like I can breathe. That’s what I talk about when I want women to feel rich. And also to your point, I think there’s a quote, and I wish I could remember who said that, but basically, money doesn’t change you. It shows you who you truly are. And I do believe that. And also I am a millionaire, we talk about this publicly. There are certain things that I didn’t even fathom I could spend my money on 10 years ago. So in a way, it has changed me, but it’s also I get to throw money at causes I believe in. It’s so cool. And I also know shitty people. I knew shitty people who are broke, and I know shitty people now who have a lot of money. And again, to your point, I think sometimes money is, it doesn’t make that person a better person.

But we could argue maybe that it’s the same thing with fame. Fame is such an interesting thing where it’s a very difficult thing to navigate. And of course everybody’s like, great, give me money and see if I can navigate it while it’s not going to be that hard. But yeah, I don’t know. I think we can and should talk about people who have just ungodly amounts of money, but most of us, even me and you are never going to achieve that. And so I hate people feeling, oh yeah, again, those people are bad because they’re rich, so I’m not going to pursue money. Those people live a very, very different lifestyle and have probably, there are certain people who have exploited people to get where they are.

ELISE:

Yeah, I think that’s a predominant story is that doing well financially and doing good in the world are mutually exclusive, and that needs to be bridged. I think one of the sort of workarounds that helped me start to shift, I still have a lot of work to do in this space that helped me start to shift, was feeling at this point, I cannot be as philanthropic. It’s really important me to support the schools that my kids attended, the schools that I attended that shaped who I am, who are really mission value driven schools. I want to buy land and preserve it. I want to help animals, all the myriad things. Americas, we all have so many causes that are very near and dear to us, and I’m similar to you, probably very interested in efficient philanthropy and how it might look different in the future.

So that was, I needed to orient that as a goalpost for me rather than, oh, I am just trying to secure generational wealth for my children. But to be like, no, I want to be able to really do things that matter. Feels so good to raise a paddle. It feels so good to write a check or to do smaller things within your community to buy a bunch of Christmas wishlists for foster care kids, whatever it is. So that to me has helped, and maybe it’s a workaround around some of the deeper core issues, but I’m going to give myself permission on that, that you got to peel these onions layer by layer.

TORI:

I mean, not to psychoanalyze you, but it’s the feeling a lot of women experience when they do start doing well financially, where we uniquely have to justify it both to society and to ourselves, right? Oh, I’m charging the things I’m charging because I have a team, or I am doing this thing because I want to be more charitable, or even I’m buying this thing, but it was on sale. We always feel like we have to justify our purchases in a way, our financial decisions in a way that men don’t. And I think, again, because we’ve been told since we were children that women’s, our whole entire gender’s goal is to be as selfless to others as possible, to be in constant service. And God forbid, you do the tiniest little selfish thing, and again, selfish is you just taking care of yourself. And so I’ve experienced that too, where there is sometimes me making money, I feel like, oh, I have to do this for a specific reason that has nothing to do with me.

And I always challenge that for myself and ask, well, okay, let’s say you just got more money for you. Because I think that I’m largely make good decisions and largely want to think about the generosity in community with others. I’m going to be thinking about ways that I can better my life that just are going to have a natural ripple effect. And yes, of course we’re going to go out and donate money and we’re going to volunteer and we’re going to do all of these things, but also just the very act, people who are marginalized having more money just changes the way the world works and changes the way our communities look because we were both conditioned to be more generous, but also we’re just more self-aware and socially aware in a way that a very stereotypical man, straight white man was not, I dunno, is this making sense? No, that I just feel like accurate’s accurate. We have to justify everything. Right? That’s my workaround. Yeah.

ELISE:

You named my workaround

TORI:

And it is so beautiful, and I also can’t believe I’m telling you this. I gained so much inspiration from you, but my task for you then is to go, can I just own a choice around money? Because it feels good to me and it’s not going to be absolutely textbook altruistic. One of the things I think about is I love making money in our business. I’m good at it. It feels like a game to me. It’s something that is interesting to me. I actually do love making money, but there are certain things that I’m not willing to do to make more money. I’m not willing to work 80 hour weeks. I’m not willing to work my team and expect 80 hour weeks from them. I’m not willing to never take a day off and expect them to do the same. There are certain things I’m never willing to do, and that’s where I can say, okay, I’m going to unabashedly pursue money because I know that I have these values.

At the same time, I know that these values are, I’m not going to cross certain lines. So that’s how I’m going to keep, I want to be rich, and I’m putting that in quotes in check because there are certain things I’m never going to be willing to do. There are certain things that I’m never going to, there are lines I’m not willing to cross. And that’s I think where I can have both can be true. I want to get rich. I want my company to make a lot of money, and there’s also certain things that I will not excuse or will not allow just to make an extra million dollars.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, and I think that’s really wise, and I feel like you, I’m more than a decade ahead of you in lived experience, but I’m still learning that lesson, this self-trust, and I’ve talked about that a bit on this podcast, particularly in the last year of just, oh, I can actually really trust myself. I have a lot of faith in my ability to stay tethered to my values, to stay awake to my blind spots, to be doing the self-care and the way that you delineated, which is intensive and hard excavating unconscious work like spelunking into the darkness in the collective and in my own self. And through that work, I think I’ve earned the right to have faith in my own capacity to stay on the rails and to know at least that I think people would tell me if they saw me going off of them. Right?

TORI:

Absolutely.

ELISE:

And you talk about being

TORI:

Good all the time. The version of goodness is sit down, keep to yourself, keep your head down. The money will come. Somebody’s going to notice you. It’s going to work out if you just work hard. And of course that’s not true

ELISE:

Because

TORI:

Everybody would be economically fine because most people are not lazy. Most people deeply care and want to have purpose in life and want to provide for their families and themselves and want to do good. And I do mean capital G. Good here. So yeah, I mean, I take so much inspiration from your work, and one of the things I think about all the time is, yeah, we’ve been told to not pursue money because that keeps us controllable. That’s the good girl. We’re going to give you the bare minimum and we want you to be happy about it. I’m not interested in that.

ELISE:

Well, and I think that you mentioned this idea of hard work and the way that that’s so tethered in our consciousness. I think that there is story that’s very difficult for women because I think in many ways it makes a lot of sense, which is I think women just by nature of our bodies and being connected to the earth, the way that we are cycling with the moon, we have this tomb to the womb thing happening in ourselves every month, whether we decide to have children or do have children or don’t have children, et cetera. And I think that for us, money is a material reality that often feels tied to the planet and things that come from the planet and also to effort. Whereas I feel like for men, maybe it’s a more heady, less connected energy. And I wonder sometimes whether it’s invest, even though women are better investors, but whether it’s an easier leap for men to make money based on nothing and doing nothing and no energy or effort or productivity or creativity, and that it’s a harder leap for women because we are mater is mother, we are so grounded. And I don’t know, this is something I think about. Do you ever think about that, Tori?

TORI:

I’ve never thought about it that way. I mean, I do think my whole work is the way men were educated around money versus women, or the way men are allowed to earn money and allowed to pursue money and allowed to talk about money the way women aren’t about money. Yeah. The thing I think about a lot though, because I see it with, we have now 6 million people in our audience. So I talk to a lot of women on an everyday basis, and the thing I see over and over and over again is an incident happens and it then becomes a woman’s identity. It’s not just something that happened, it’s then your identity. So it’s not, oh, I failed at this thing, or this thing happened and it didn’t work out. It is therefore I am a failure. My business didn’t work. It’s not I failed, or that business failed a failure.

I couldn’t hack it. There was something about me where I couldn’t do it. I see this with money all the time. Again, not just, I don’t have the skills to be good with money, or I’m learning to be good with money or money is something I’m working on. It is, I am bad with money. I was born with the bad with money Gene and men are not hardwired to interpret every action or every outcome as their deep own fault. It’s just something that happened. This is why so many men, I mean, society also allows them to, but why so many men can fail on four businesses and think, I’m going to start another because it’s just, oh, that business didn’t work out or that deal didn’t land. And so that’s why the business, it’s just yet we are so hard on ourselves because it’s an identity, we equate our net worth to our self-worth. So it’s, oh, if we don’t, we’re not making enough money. It’s because I’m not doing enough. Not there are systemic things at play here, not, you know what? I could be showing up in my financial education differently. It’s not just this neutral statement. It’s immediately shame. It’s immediate guilt. It’s immediately a response that feels extremely personal and identity based.

ELISE:

What’s the right response? Because listening to you, it’s interesting because I’m thinking of Adam Newman

TORI:

Being, that’s who I was thinking of,

ELISE:

Who people are like, let’s give you more money. You with the Messiah complex. And he somehow feels like I should have more money and have many at bats versus taking too much responsibility. And yet I’m like, I’d like to see more men taking some ownership and self-responsibility here. Totally. So what’s the balance?

TORI:

I mean, that’s a million dollar question, isn’t it? I think it’s two things, and it’s one, I mean, I could talk to you for a whole hour about this. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. No wonder women are afraid to put themselves out there when society does not allow them to make mistakes. Yeah, correct. I think about all the time, we’ve started talking a lot more about the benefits we offer as a company, and it’s something I’m really proud of. We shut our company down for a week, every single quarter paid where the company just stops so that people can rest. We offer four months of paid family leave, which is not quite enough. But we’re a really small company, and that’s what we can afford right now. It’s unlimited PTO, that truly is. It’s not just like nobody takes a vacation. We offer menstrual leave, we offer paid menstrual leave.

There’s things that we’re doing that I’m really, really proud of. And we’ve talked about that more and more in the last couple months. And the little voice in the back of my head, which is both not imposter syndrome, but is the scaredy cat in me, but also is so real, is going, but what happens when someone gets mad at you about something? What happens, whether it’s true or not, or a half truth, somebody is like, oh, but she did this to me or something happened and I could lose everything overnight and that I look like a sham. And if these things can both be true, right, I will and will continue to make mistakes. And also, I think we do have a good company culture. I’m learning all the time, but it’s something that I’m so scared of is if I talk about all the good things we’re doing, does that make me more of a target?

Or when I put myself out there as a business owner or I post online and somebody comes after me because it happens every day, I hate comments every 10 minutes, it’s going to happen. So no wonder women are freaked out because we don’t get second chances. We sometimes don’t even get first chances. So yeah, no wonder are we afraid to put ourselves out there? No wonder do we feel like we failed when everybody’s screaming at us that we’re a failure because we do not allow women and anybody of any marginalized community the same amount of grace that we allow men. I was just listening to a podcast about the Elon Musk auto autobiography, and whether it’s him or Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, yeah, they’re terrible bosses and they don’t shower and they yell at you and they expect you to work 80 hour weeks. But they’re geniuses. Geniuses, and women are never described that way. They’re bitches and they’re shrews and they’re terrible leaders if you do that. And to your point, the second thing is you should be discouraging that kind of behavior for anybody of any gender identity. But the expectations for men and women are not the same.

ELISE:

No.

TORI:

I mean, it’s one thing with Elizabeth Holmes that I found so fascinating is, yeah, she should go to prison, but she’s doing nothing differently than a bunch of men in Silicon Valley have done forever, which is, oh, it would be nice if we could do this, having no idea about how to actually how to do it. And then they get a hundred million dollars in funding, and they’re called innovators and disruptors, and yes, she should go to jail. And also all these men that have been doing this forever should also go to jail. So all of that is the systemic stuff we’re fighting against every day. That feels very overwhelming. And the only way we work to change that is we keep showing up and then we allow women to make mistakes. Now, of course, there’s a mistake level here. There’s levels of mistakes, but I think that we are so quick to jump on women, to jump on people of color, and the very people we try to make monoliths are, we’re just shocked when they fall off the pedestal, we built them. Other people, they’re going to do that at a personal level. You have to just understand that this is what society wants. This is the feeling you’re going to have is, oh, yeah, again, I did this, so it’s my identity. I think your internal response is when you hear your brain do that, oh, I’m bad with money, or, oh, I can’t do that thing because I’m bad at it. It’s just going, okay, no, I’m learning. I’m learning this thing. And yeah, maybe I am not great at it right now, but I’m vulnerable enough to try

Because that’s at the end of the day, what trying is is it’s extremely vulnerable and cringey and scary, and you’re going to feel uncomfortable because you’re not going to be successful initially. And it’s something I think about all the time. I have high school French and I was just in Paris, and it is so scary to go and try to speak a language that I just have this much knowledge in, but I have to do it if I want to get better, and I have to do it if I am living my values, which is to be respectful in a country and you’re trying to communicate with them in their language, that’s a value for me is you should learn enough in the language to try to communicate. It’s so uncomfortable and it makes me feel so ridiculous, and I feel like a fraud and I feel like an imposter, and I do it anyway because that’s the only way I’m going to get better. It’s the only way I’m going to get comfortable being uncomfortable. And it’s the same thing with money. It’s the same thing with money.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, I think that that makes sense. I know we’re at time. I just hearing you talk about, yes, women are incredibly susceptible to reputational harm, and part of it is this construction of goodness, and it’s very easy to impale it with any instance of bad or harm doing or being a bitch or whatever it is. We see this all over our culture, and all I would offer is, and watching some women navigate who are maybe more in their masculine, we’re often our own grave diggers. We’re the first to take the assault and say, you’re right. I’m terrible. I’m going to go away. I’m thinking of one prolific podcaster in particular who just operates like a man, doesn’t acknowledge, isn’t deterred and it doesn’t stick. And so as much as I would like some more integrity there or even acknowledgement and restitution, I also think it’s an important lesson or modeling of, well, I guess you can just ignore and keep going and nobody is going to continue to mount this attack. I don’t know. But how do you feel when you go to bed at night? No, exactly. It’s not how I would roll. It’s not.

TORI:

And also, yeah, and how do you feel without people telling you how you should

ELISE:

Feel? And that’s where the

TORI:

Self-trust is

ELISE:

There, and it’s a Goldilocks of not throwing yourself in front of the train while taking personal responsibility and accountability and a promise to do better. We need more of that rather than the nothing to see here, or I’m the worst person ever and you shouldn’t pay any attention to me going forward. Nuance.

TORI:

Yeah, absolutely.

ELISE:

Tori, I love you. You’re so brilliant, and I’ll see you soon. Tori Dunlap is smart and she is, I don’t know what makes a generational divide. I don’t know how many years it is. She is of a different generation than me, and I wish I’d had her in my pocket when I were in my twenties. And I’m grateful to have her as a friend now because she does have that energy that cuts through so easily, cuts through I think so many stories and just says the thing. And I say this being in this women’s group with her other podcasters watching her operate and just being really grateful to have people like her in the group. It’s the money ladies who are really breaking through some of the stuck consciousness I’d say, and some of the rest of us who are scared of our own wanting and scared to do better financially and scared to bring more attention to our work.

And she is really stands strong in the face of that. And in that way has become a total expander for me. And if you like Jen Hatmaker or so many other women just feel completely in the dark about your finances, I think she’s a great place to start. I’m not surprised that Jen Hatmaker relied on Tori. Her sort of sweet spot is really getting people going and readjusting their thinking and their feelings about money and putting them into the flow of relating to it very differently in very basic ways that become more complex in time. But she really is like that coach you need at the starting block. Alright, friends, I will see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.