Financial Forgiveness: Healing Your History with Money and Rewriting Your Future

You are listening to the Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast with Debbie Sassen, episode number 187.

Hello my friends, and welcome back to the podcast and happy new year, Shana Tova. I'm recording this episode, actually the intro to this episode because I will be resharing an episode that I recorded, I think three years ago, maybe four years ago, on forgiving your financial mistakes, but. I change, you change the world changes, and it's always a good idea.

Just like in the Jewish year, we come back to the same point in the year, the New Year's, the Yom Kippur that we're about to reach. We come back to the same point, but we're always on a different level. So I wanted to share this episode again and I wanted to give you as an introduction, some new insights to financial forgiveness.

And before I jump into that, I want to give you some background on how I think about money. I know last week on the podcast, we talked about rewriting your money blueprint for the new year, Rosh Hashanah. We're rewriting, we're really be inscribing. We ask God to inscribe us in the book of life. And now as we approach Yom Kippur, were asking to be signed and sealed in the book of life.

And so let's just start with my overall approach and belief about money. First of all. Money is spiritual during these days, these 10 days of repentance, the days of awe. We might think, no, no, no. Debbie, I don't wanna talk about money. Money isn't spiritual. But as we talked about last week, God set your income, your potential income for the year on Rosh Hashanah, and it hasn't been sealed yet.

And if there were any ways in which you behaved, acted, even thought about money, judged other people with money. In the previous year. These days are perfect. These are the exact days that you want to be clearing any mistakes, any shame that you might have, any judgements that you might have of other people.

And we're gonna get to exactly this in a minute, but this is the perfect time because money is, it's a resource in the world and just like food can be used. To take care of yourself. Give yourself energy so that you can do God's command, so that you can take care of your family, so you can serve your clients.

Money is also the same. Money is what buys you the food. Money gives you the roof over your head. Money gives you a summer holiday with your family so you can bond together. Money is what you use to give charity to give Akah. Money is a beautiful resource in the world and it's powerful. We can do so much good in the world with money.

Money is a resource for healing. Money is an opportunity. It's a money opportunity that you can have when you have money to live with less financial stress. So many people have just regular daily weakling, anxiety, stress, marriage challenges because of money or over money. Money isn't the thing. Money is an inanimate object.

Like I said, it's a resource, but it, there's so much stress and when you allow yourself graciously and gratefully to receive more money, to earn more money, right, that just reduces so much stress, money. Solves money problems, right? Money isn't gonna, you know, be able to solve things that have no connection with money.

But money might give you opportunities if you have childhood trauma and you need money to heal yourself. If your synagogue, your shul, wants to build a building, you can give back using money. Money is that resource, that is energy. It propels things. It moves things. So money will solve a lot of money problems.

If you need to work on parts of yourself, whether that's spiritually or energetically, or if you need to work on your business, grow your business. Money is the resource that allows you to do it. there is so much opportunity when you have more money, of course, if you have billions of dollars, even multimillions of dollars, right?

There's probably like a limiting factor on how much more happiness there is, an incremental amount of like units of happiness that you can have when you have more money. But so many of my people are just dealing with the basics. And when I mean basics, I mean, you know, even multimillions, and I'm gonna tell you about one of my clients right now.

So recently I've been working with a woman. She's an amazing therapist, emotional healer. She does fantastic work with her clients. And she came to me in the last year and a half when she received an inheritance from her late parents. Her parents passed away, the second one. And she received a beautiful inheritance.

Because she has not accustomed herself to becoming a vessel for holding money, large amounts of money, like she makes a great living, her husband makes a good living. They take care of their kids, their dog parents also, and they live a good life. And they don't suffer for lack of vacations or, or anything.

They live a nice, comfortable life, but growing wealth beyond just taking care of their regular needs and there is some money in retirement accounts, but really not much. they had not changed their financial identity such that in particular, my client, it was her inheritance and her husband didn't get involved with it.

But because her financial identity was so much so a giver, she cares. She's a therapist. She cares so much about people. What happened was she got herself into a cycle of giving and giving and giving, and as I opened, money is an amazing resource. It gives you an opportunity to give back and we love to do that.

But she ended up in a state where she was. Overgiving to people that she knew, people that she loved, people that she wanted to support. Charity organizations, they seem to know when people are giving other organizations get lists. I don't know how it works, but she was being the focus, the target, if you will, of various charity organizations.

And when we went through her accounts, we noticed there were double, even triple charges from the same organizations. And we did a lot of. Clearing both physically from her bank account and healing because again, her big heart and I want more open-hearted, big-hearted women, God-centered entrepreneurs, people to be, receiving money so that they can give and give back.

But there does come a point where you need to look at your finance. And understand what's going on. So we did a lot of healing and clearing around that. And what that does is when you remove any self-judgment, any guilt, any shame, any anxiety, and boy oh boy, did she have a lot of anxiety around what was happening.

What that does is it clears the air, if you will. It clears energetic space and it gives you more energetic capacity to allow more money to flow to you, to flow through you and to be held by you in beautiful ways. So that's a real life story that happened to one of my clients, really in the last year and a half.

And I think it's important If you know that you are overgiving and something needs to change, this is your opportunity right before Yom Kippur, and I'm going to share on the podcast episode a three step process for doing this. This is your opportunity to really look at what's happening.

With your money and change the way you're doing it. So that's story number one. Story number two is my personal story, because this is the work that I do in the world, and I have done a lot of money healing, money clearing. I've looked at my childhood origin stories around money, but recently in this timeframe.

Right around now, Rosh Hashan Qur. I was looking at my experience during college specifically, 'cause I've done a lot of clearing on my childhood stuff and my parents' stuff and whatever, and what came up for me was some of the women that I was in college with, I went to Smith College, which if you don't know what, it's on the East coast, it is a small school.

There is a very tiny Jewish population there. I really don't know. It had to be God's plan. I don't know why I ended up there, but I did, and I felt like there were so many young women at Smith that had gone to boarding school, they'd gone to prep school and they were so out of my league. That's the only way that I could say it, or I was not in their league.

And I felt like I was other, I felt like I was different from them. And this is where I noticed that I had been judging people with money. And when you judge people with money, that's never a good sign for you to receive money. You can't receive money and allow yourself to be a vessel to hold money when you are judging other people who have, at least it looks like on the outside,

 It looks like they have more than you do, and that's not going to allow you, 'cause again, you're making this gap. there's them and there's me, and there's this bridge between them and near the twain shall meet. So if you notice that you're judging rich people, and I also have a podcast episode on Judging Rich people.

I'll put that into the show notes. But you can't become a wealthy person when you are judging people. So. What I did is I flipped the script on that. I was like, okay, this was an experience that God gave me and I did some tapping on it, EFT, emotional freedom tech technique, tapping on really clearing any energy of feeling like I didn't belong to them.

And I really had to go through this a few times because I was still feeling some angst in my belly about, me and them. And we were in different worlds. And what I really came to the conclusion was that. These young women, I was put into the same classrooms with them. We lived in the same like sorority houses, dormitory houses.

We lived together. And what God was doing was expanding my horizons, expanding me, showing me what was possible. This was the exact experience that I was supposed to have, not to judge them, but to see possibility. And indeed, after college I went to work on Wall Street. That never would've happened. To this 18-year-old girl who'd been living in Los Angeles, riding her bicycle down Pacific Coast Highway and working in my cousin's camera store.

I didn't have that on my radar screen. So this was a beautiful experience, a beautiful clearing, and really allowing these other young women who grew up at boarding schools and prep schools and were, I felt were so different for me. Really, they were 18 and 20 and 21.

We were all the same young women. Learning for our college educations. I was on rec council. I was on the recreation council with them. We were, there was so much similar that why did my brain want to make a difference between us? I don't know. But it was so that now more than 40 years later, I could clear that belief.

I could stop judging them and that I could become a bigger vessel for receiving and holding more money. And sharing this work in the world because really this is my work in the world. It is my work to help God centered women and men to earn more money, to receive more money, to hold more money, and take care of themselves and their families graciously and give back.

Alright, my friends, that was a very long introduction. It was almost a podcast episode in and of itself. So without further ado, here is episode 180 7 for you today.

 Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the podcast. We are in a new Jewish year, so I want to wish all of my listeners a Shana Tova Happy New Year and give you my dearest blessings for sweetness.

And abundance and prosperity and all the joyous things that you are praying for and dreaming and hoping for this year. We had a lovely and meaningful hanah with our family. I hope you did as well. Wherever you are in the world. 

Today I'm going to speak about the emotional side of money, and I'm going to cover three steps to forgiving your financial mistakes. Financial mistakes happen to all of us, but very frequently there are such heavy emotions surrounding our mistakes that it keeps us back. We think that we're wrong.

There's something not good enough about us, and those sort of emotional heaviness is, and that baggage that we're carrying will stop us from actually setting out that plan that I'm talking about. Moving forward toward it. So we're going to follow a three step process that the Rambam gives us for forgiveness.

The Rambam was a very influential Torah scholar and Jewish philosopher who lived in the Middle Ages. The rba, also known as Maimonides, was born in Spain in 1138 and he died in Egypt in the year 1204. And he had a very prolific history, was very well known, and he was also a physician to the Saladin. In Egypt toward the end of his life, and also in the next dynasty that reigned in Egypt after the demise of the Aladin.

So we're speaking about someone who's incredibly intelligent and understood both the physical body and the emotional makeup of the body, and was also a tremendous scholar understanding our Jewish sources. And the Rmba gave us a three step process to forgiving ourselves for our sins against, between us and God, our sins between man and man.

And I think that this three step process is also very useful when we want to forgive ourselves for the financial mistakes that we made. I'm not speaking today about financial mistakes between two people. Perhaps somebody borrowed money from you and didn't give it back. Perhaps somebody injured you and there were financial repercussions.

Or if you have a rental property, we had a rental property once, and the people who were living there, our tenants, they actually still owe us. An amount of money that is equivalent to about $3,000 because they left and they never paid us for the last few months of rent. So there are financial sins, let's call them, for lack of a better word, between man and man.

And we are not going to be addressing those today. We can speak about that on a different podcast, how you want to forgive other people for the things that they did and move on. Today we're speaking only about your money mistakes. The three step process that we learned from the rba, also known as Maimonides, is number one, regret.

Regret for what you did. Step number two is confession to talk about what happened. And step number three is committing not to do it again, and we're gonna speak about specifically what that is and how it looks. Before we get to regret. However, what I would like to share is that there are some other emotions that can prevent you from getting to the stage of regret.

When I meet with my clients who've made their financial mistakes, and I'm very open about speaking about my big money mistake where I lost $50,000. So many of my clients feel tremendous shame or guilt about what happened with their money, and I'm gonna speak about the difference between shame and guilt.

And we learned the difference between guilt and shame from Brene Brown. Renee Brown says that shame has an underlying message of I am bad, whereas guilt has an underlying message of, I did something bad. And I've had people share with me both of those feelings. We didn't really go down deeply into the underlying, you know, am I bad?

Did I do something bad? And the difference between that. But people speak about their financial mistakes with both shame and guilt, also embarrassment. And there's a very heavy feeling. Brings up a lot of negative emotion, and I think it's that sort of like confession stage that the rom bum talks about that they get to when they're meeting with their money coach and perhaps also if they have a financial therapist and they're speaking about their mishaps with money, with a qualified professional.

When we want to get to the stage of regret, what I often see when I'm meeting with my clients and we're doing our work, and that can be just speaking about what happened, dropping into our body, understanding where the energy is like vibrating and coursing and pulsating through their body. That might be one way of getting in touch with the emotions that are in their body.

Very often we do some tapping around the emotion to move the emotion and move the energy. I will be sharing with you in the show notes a tapping video that is on my website. It was recorded four years ago at this time of the year. The quality isn't great, so you're gonna forgive me for that mishap. Okay?

But it is very effective to move the shame and the guilt and the embarrassment in any other heavy, negative emotions you are feeling around your financial mistakes. What I would recommend first is that you write them down on a piece of paper. When they're in your brain and they're taking up space in your mind, it can feel so overwhelming.

Once you can get your thoughts, what went wrong, what you did wrong, what you're thinking about yourself as a person, when you get it out of your mind and onto a piece of paper using a pen or a pencil. You become a witness to, or a watcher of your thoughts, and it gives you a lot more clarity about what is really happening.

It's no longer a part of you, it's something external, and we have a little bit more. Clarity and self-compassion when we're witnessing something, rather than believing that we are the heavy thing and that we are filled with shame and filled with guilt. So I encourage you to take 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour, and write down on a piece of paper.

All of the things that you're feeling, shame, guilt, embarrassment, or whatever about in your finances. It could be that you made an investment like I did, that you really had no business making. Could be you stole money out of your parents' drawer when you were a little kid, or perhaps you stole something from the supermarket or you cheated on a test and because of that, you were able to get a job and you got paid money or you cheated on your tax return, whatever it is.

Write down everything it is that is making you feel uncomfortable around your money. Nobody ever has to see it. After you write it out and after you do some tapping and moving the energy, you can burn up your piece of paper. And once, by the way, actually did this exercise and I had over a page. I probably had a page and a half like on both sides of it and afterwards, and I did some clearing on my financial mishaps.

And also at that time, I added people who owed me money or who I felt cheated or did something inappropriate with money towards me. I took my piece of paper outside, I put it in a disposable aluminum dish, and I burned it. And I felt so much better afterwards because it was like out of me and then it was gone and it actually drained me for about a day and a half because it just felt like so much energy that had been stuck in my body was released.

And when we just start shifting energy, our body needs to heal and it needs to rest. You wanna create time and space for you to like slow down a little bit, drink some water, lots and lots of water. Actually, and you might wanna put an extra hour of sleep on your schedule either during the day or during the night.

Brene Brown says about shame that it cannot survive being spoken. Shame needs three things to survive. It needs secrecy, silence and judgment, meaning we are judging ourselves for our financial mistakes, and I'm going to put together the shame, the guilt, and the embarrassment when we don't talk about them and we hold them inside of us.

It takes a tremendous amount of energy. What I find with my clients is after we get it out and we can be a witness to or a watcher of our negative emotions, and then we can do some tapping to start shifting and healing and clearing those negative emotions. Most of my clients moved to sadness. I don't think I remember that anybody specifically used the term regret, but they feel like so sad that they made this financial mistake and hey, I really wanna give you the benefit of the doubt because very, very few of us were taught anything about money when we were growing up.

Money is like the final frontier. It is the last taboo that is being broken. We are finally in 2022. It's really been going on for about the last 10, 20, maybe even 30 years, but we are finally talking about money. I can't remember how many years ago it was now, but when my grandmother died, my father's mother.

I received $5,000 as an inheritance from my grandmother, and I was, first of all, I don't think I was grateful and like if I really think about it, I should have been overjoyed and had so much gratitude and, and thanks for my grandmother. I do remember asking my dad, saying, daddy, what should I do with this money?

And he really didn't give me any direction, right? It's not his fault. You know, many parents did not help their children figure out what to do with money. We were just supposed to figure it out by ourselves. He told me, go down to the bank and ask them what to do with it. So at the time I went down to the bank, I put it into a certificate of deposit.

I didn't know really too much about what I was doing, but I did, figured, okay, it'll learn some interest. And then in a few years from now, I'll have more money. Now, here's the crazy thing about it. I moved to Israel and I didn't pay close attention to what was going on in that bank. I had a number of accounts in that bank.

There was savings and checking and the certificate of deposit, and I think maybe another account, and my little regional bank was bought by Citibank. And somehow in the computers, that $5,000 certificate of deposit, the paperwork or the computer entry didn't get transferred over to Citibank. It became an unclaimed account.

And because I wasn't in touch with the bank very often, I was in Israel. The account was in Los Angeles. It was ultimately remitted to the state Comptroller of California as unclaimed funds, and I had to jump through hoops in order to get that money back. I had to go and get it notarized with red ribbons and a fancy gold stamp.

Send it off to the state comptroller in California. I finally got my $5,000 back. But as a side note, if you have financial accounts, pay attention to them. Make sure that your addresses are up to date and that you actually have movement of funds from time to time in your accounts, because there are.

Billions, probably trillions of dollars in the world of unclaimed funds because people just lost connection with their money or people died. The records and reportings and the computer systems that we have today were not as good, and people just had money that didn't get claimed, and it's sitting in comptroller's offices around the world.

Alright, so what happens with my clients when we start shifting their feelings and emotions around their money and they no longer feel this heaviness and their guilt and their shame, now we can move into sadness, and I'm going to call that the stage of regret. And when we get to regret, this is the place where we know that something could have been done better than it was actually done.

But perhaps we didn't know how to do it. We didn't take the time to figure it out. We were in a rush. You could have been embarrassed, like when I think back to my $50,000 money mistake and I didn't do the due diligence. I was in a place of being greedy, like, and I know this from doing my own work, is that I wanted to make money.

I thought that I was a big shot and I could make money quickly, and I was being driven by greed. So it wasn't here. The shame and the guilt, but even just talking about and saying, yeah, I was being greedy. Greedy for more money, greedy to make a quick profit, and being able to say that and. Confess it. Talk about it.

Just normalize the fact that we, human beings are driven by emotions. Takes away so much of the charge around the event that happened, but there was probably something that happened because you were doing the best you could at that time. Coulda, woulda, shoulda, maybe done it differently. You had your reasons for not slowing down and figuring it out and doing it differently.

It could be. It was because of the way that you were raised around money. That money was such an emotionally charged topic that you just wanted to bury your head in the sand and not deal with it. Or it could be you thought you knew what was going on, or there was that greed or some arrogance or elitism or whatever it was around money.

You made a mistake and you're like, yep, I could have done better if I could turn back the clock right now. I would've figured it out, but you didn't. So once you can feel that regret now it opens you up to doing things differently and because you've already written it down on paper. Maybe you've done some tapping on it or you've done some journaling on it or something else, you've, you've actually burned it like I recommended, right?

You've regretted your mistake and you've talked about it, you've confessed it. Now we can get on to step three, which is committing not to doing it again. So the question is, if you made a financial mistake like I did, investing in something that I never should have invested in, how do I commit to not doing it again?

Number one is education. If there are things that have to do with money that you don't know, you can get yourself some financial education. Google is your friend. Anything that you don't know about with money, you can just put it into Google and Google will give you more answers than you will ever know.

When it came to investing in the stock market, I did so much research that I ultimately wrote a book, the One K Investor, simple Smart Steps to Start investing with a thousand dollars or less. And believe you me, I have never made that same financial mistake again. I took back control of our investment accounts from the investment managers who were managing our accounts, and only I now investor money.

We do have some pensions in Israel and because of the way things are set up here, we do have financial managers for our pension accounts, but the money that is in our US dollar accounts that I manage because I now understand and feel confident that I can manage the money. Your mistake might be that you got into a tremendous amount of credit card debt.

That is a very prevalent money mistake. Many, many people are in credit card debt or in Israel, in overdraft and other countries of the world. Or perhaps you borrowed money from somebody in your family. You simply owe other people money. When you commit not to doing that again, you actually create a financial plan.

Where you have a line item in your monthly spending plan or budget for paying back your loans, that can include reducing your expenses and increasing your income so that you have more money available to pay back your loans. If you stole something and that was your financial mistake that you made, maybe there's a way that you can also, you might feel a tremendous amount of shame if you would approach somebody and admit that you stole something.

I'm not going to be your religious leader, your spiritual leader, and tell you exactly what you should do and how you should make amends. But I can actually think about a situation right now, and as I'm recording this podcast, I can just. Feel all the tension rising up is in my body as I imagine somebody going and confronting someone from whom they, they stole money.

And that can be a very emotionally triggering event. But that's something that if you wanted to. Make sure that you didn't do again and you really wanted to make amends. You could figure out how to do it by reaching out for help to a religious or spiritual leader, also a coach or a therapist, so that you can change that situation around and never face it again.

Many of my clients have been in debt to the tax authorities and they've created payment plans, so that wouldn't happen again if you want to make sure that you always have money to pay your taxes. As a business owner and as an entrepreneur, make sure that you have a savings account set aside specifically for taxes.

Every time one of your clients pays you money, if they pay you a hundred dollars, make sure you take 30 or $40 and you put it aside into your tax account. Do it in real time. Don't wait till the end of the year. So many entrepreneurs are chasing their tails and creating sales and selling things at the last minute so that they can all of a sudden come up with a large amount of money to pay their tax bills.

If you want to not get into like tax debt, again, create a plan so it doesn't happen again. It doesn't help you to solve last year's problem. But you can make sure that going forward it doesn't happen, and then you just have an outstanding debt to your tax authorities and you'll pay that over time. It might require that you reduce your standard of living for a little while while you're paying down your debt.

That is really all it takes. It's very, very simple. Not easy, because it might require that you say no to some things while you are fixing your financial mistakes. It might require that you actually create a plan and stick to the plan in spite of your desire to go off plan and do things differently. You might have other things to do with your time.

Somebody was in a conversation with me on LinkedIn recently, and at the end of the conversation she said, now I have to figure out when I can find the time to read your book. And I was like, well, you can set aside 10 or 15 minutes a day and commit to that plan. It's simple. It's not always easy because something is going to come and draw your attention away, or you'll push it off till the end of the day.

You'll be very tired and you won't want to engage in learning about money and becoming more literate with your finances. Learning the jargon. Learning the lingo, saying no to some spending that you might wanna do because you want to. You need to, you've committed to putting money aside in your savings account.

But there are three simple steps to forgiving yourself for your financial mistakes. Number one is feeling regret. Regret is again, on that spectrum from shame and guilt and embarrassment. We're moving towards more neutral emotions. Regret is. Much more just a recognition that something happened that you would prefer didn't happen, but you're moving towards feeling financially in control and on top of your money and feeling that financial freedom, which is where we all want to get to, but it's no longer that secretive and self-judgment that you were putting on yourself for making that mistake.

So number one is regret. Number two is confession, just talking about it, creating neutrality, just taking off that emotional charge because we've become a witness to our emotions. And step number three is creating the plan and committing to the plan. So whatever financial mistake happened, there's a 90% chance it's not going to happen again.

That's what I have for you today, my friends, before the holiday of Yom Kippur, and this is the holiday in the Jewish world. When we ask God to forgive us for the sins that we committed against him, and this is one of the ways that we forgive ourselves and we can come closer to God, is that we forgive ourselves and we take away the barriers between us and our creator.

I wish you a Shenatova Titova. It should be a good year and a sweet year, and I bless you that you should have financial freedom and financial abundance and financial prosperity this year. Bye-bye my friends. 

Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode of the Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. I hope that you uncovered some money mistakes that you've made in the past. I mean, we have all made money mistakes. It's why I talk about my $50,000 money mistake in my book, the one K Investor, and wherever you are right now, take some time out.

I know that these are. High pressure times of the year. You don't have a lot of time between Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, building your Suka, taking care of your family. But if you can find one little area around money that's causing you some angst, that's causing you some anxiety and you can forgive yourself, I really, really.

Do believe that you free up energetic capacity inside of you. You let things go, and you create space for more abundance in your life. In this coming year. We know that in Rosh Hashanah, God sets for us how much money we can receive its potential. How much of a vessel, how much of a cl we say in Hebrew, can you make yourself to earn more money and receive more money this year and build sustainable wealth?

That all comes with you. Taking ownership of the mistakes that you've made, forgiving yourself. 'cause you can't make more when you're beating yourself over the head. Right? Clear the air, clear the space. I really wish you a Shava Tiva. It should be a beautiful, blessed year for you and your family.

And I will see you next week on the Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. Bye-bye for now.