Spending, Splurging & Stacking Cash: How Entrepreneurs Build Real Wealth

You are listening to the Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast with Debbie Sassen, episode number 189. Hello my friends, and welcome back to the podcast. I have a Juicy Money episode for you today. But before we dive into today's episode, I want to tell you about an upcoming masterclass that I am running on November 6th, this masterclass called Money versus Wealth, the Art of Receiving and Holding Big Money.

It's a free masterclass. It is happening at 12 o'clock in the afternoon eastern time, seven in the evening, Israel time, and. And I am going to go deep on the difference between what money is. We're gonna talk a little bit about that today on the podcast. What money is, what money isn't, what wealth is, what wealth isn't.

And if you want to receive more money, that's charge higher prices, attract higher paying clients, and really be able to be in the energy, the frequency of wealth. You want to be in this masterclass and at the end of the masterclass, I'm gonna let you know about a new money community that I'm opening up.

It is really going to be a beautiful November for me after a gorgeous long summer. I have just finished hosting my parents who were here for two weeks in Israel, and in fact, yesterday as I'm recording this podcast, we were really blessed to welcome home one of our heroes, one of our hostages, Aton Moore, whose motorcade drove.

Through my neighborhood in Beit Mish, and we were among the crowds, the throngs, who were able to escort Etan home after he spent more than two years in captivity in Gaza. So November is just looking new. New November, bright November, I don't know, is the word for, is there a word for like abundance that starts with an N?

I don't know. It doesn't really matter. But go to my website, debbiesassen.com/masterclass and sign up for the wealth. And Money Masterclass that's happening on November 6th. Now, let us dive into today's podcast, spending splurging and stacking cash. It is all about money, all about really personal finance today because your business is here to finance your personal life.

Your personal life is not here to finance your business. And so I really felt it was important to dive into this topic of spending versus stacking cash with just a little bit of a splurge, vibe to it. In fact, the last splurge, if I think about it, that I had, you know, for myself, I was in Toronto in July.

And I went shopping there with some friends at Swarovski, and I fell in love with this pair of earrings, a little bit of a diamond and some, I guess it's, you know, cubic zirconium, but it's not real diamonds, but a pair of earrings that I really love. And if you know me, I'm not a big jewelry person.

I'm, I don't usually wear jewelry as I'm recording my podcast. I am not wearing my watch. I'm not wearing my rings. I always have necklaces on. I don't take them off and earrings is the one thing that I make sure to put on before I leave the house, so that's why I bought them. There's always like a good memory, a little bit of a splurge.

I did it also when my husband and I were in Puerto Rico about three years ago. He. It's something to remind me, something to almost hook. It's an earring. It goes in, it goes into my ear, it like hooks into my ear. Something to remind me of those beautiful memories on that beautiful experience that I had.

So that to me is a splurge. I am not one of these People who goes on like outlandish splurges. I spend money way more on experience than on things. That's just the kind of person I am. And today I really wanna dive into you understanding your money habits because that will help you open up a whole world of possibility.

So first, let's start by discussing the difference between spending and stacking cash, and then we're gonna add in the splurge at the end. So we all need to spend money. Money is a core survival issue. We spend money for food, electricity, housing, water, transportation. We need money. It's just one of those things in our life.

What happens is that people are often spending money unconsciously or maybe compulsively. They're not aware of where their money is going, and rather than making decisions, really thinking about it intentionally, do I wanna buy this thing? Do I not wanna buy this? Thing. Do I wanna buy the earrings? Do I not wanna buy the earrings?

We end up in this frenetic energy of spend, spend, spend, and there's no awareness or clarity around what we're spending. I'm currently working with one of my clients, it's more a financial planning, type of engagement than a business growing engagement. But there was so much lack of clarity. Around where her money was going and it created so much anxiety, so much stress around money.

And that's what happens when you are not aware of where your money's going. And I'm not saying that you have to like budget down to the penny or budget down to the shekel, especially as a mom of a large family. That wasn't something that worked for us over the long term. We did have periods of time.

Where we would really track all of our spending because it gives you so much awareness. But I never felt it was feasible while we're busy raising our family to really have to be on top of every receipt, every time I needed to fill up the cards for my kids, for their bus rides, every new pair of shoes, pair of socks, there, just so many little details.

But if I could have broad categories and know pretty much where our money was going, and if you know me, I'm a saver way more than a. Spender. I like to stack cash. I like to have money put away for the future for a splurge, for something, a whoopsie that comes up. I don't know. We recently had to have a technician in our house because our gas-based water heater wasn't working.

It needed to be cleaned out. Also, when my parents were in town, we rented cars like daily. I helped my kids so that we could all get around, all be together. We rented two different cars for two of our children. And then we needed another car during the day to move people around. So because we don't spend money regularly on owning a car and the insurance and the gas, that is necessary for running a car.

My husband has a company car and we always made that work together with a taxi here and there, buses here and there for the kids when we wanna rent a car. We just do it, and it's not an everyday occurrence. It's not an everyday expense. So when you are aware of where your money's going, right, you know how much is going out on food, you know how much is going out for water, for transportation, for healthcare.

That gives you so much agency over your money because when you look at where your money is going in the spending, it gives you the opportunity to say, Hey. If I was to replay this, if I was to do this again, is this where I would've wanted to spend my money? And sometimes it's yes, and sometimes it's no.

sometimes you're like, oh, I really, I'm looking at that now. Maybe you bought something and you were in a rush. You were feeling pressured. Maybe it was a bad hair day. Maybe you gained a few pounds or kilos and you were feeling really ugly in your body. You weren't feeling confident, and so you bought some clothing, and then you look at it and you're like.

Oh, no, no, no. I really don't like that. What was I even thinking? And I've totally done that. A long time ago, I ran a class. It was before I wrote my book, the one K Investor, but I actually had a course called the one K Investor. It was a three part course, and I spoke specifically about a top that I bought.

One of my friends was making a wedding, and I really felt at that time that I wasn't back to my, I think it was my post pregnancy weight, whatever it was, and I. And bought a top that I didn't really love, but I felt like I needed something flashy, something to pretty me up. So I bought this thing. I even took it to a seamstress to have it, you know, much more tailored to me.

I wore it once, maybe twice, and then I gave it away because I. Didn't love it, but because I wasn't feeling good in my body, I felt this, you know, I felt compelled to go and buy something. It was this energy of not enoughness, this energy of, you know, me not being enough. it was really coming from my ego speaking and your ego.

Is just a normal part of you. It wants to protect you. It's part of your survival energy. It's your fear of being judged by people outside of you. It's you wanting to control the situation. And of course, if I have the exact right top that everybody's gonna think that I'm just beautiful and whatever, right?

then all of a sudden we feel like we're something, we feel like we're better. We feel like, you know, we're, I don't know if on top of the world, but we're just like one notch up. So that's where I encourage you to look at where your money's going, look at your spending and ask yourself, is this where I want my money to go?

Because if it's not, now you have the ability to make different choices. And rather than being in this. Frenetic energy rather than being in this lack energy or this scarcity around money and like spending, spending, spending, you can actually like lower your vibration to calmness you lower your vibration to gr, to groundedness and even gratitude for the money that you have, and you can, you know, decide if you want to spend your money differently.

But so often also, we come from a. Parents and grandparents, and they really were living in scarcity. My grandparents escaped from Nazi Germany and they built their lives up from zero. They left everything behind. I mean, I think they were able to bring some of their furniture with them because they left early in 1939.

So my grandmother was able to pack up some of the family furniture then, and it still lives in my grandparents' house. My grandparents passed away already many years ago, almost 30 years ago. But that furniture is in the house, some of it. And my dad owns the house and, he rents it out. But, there were a few things, but most everything, clothes, shoes, anything that couldn't fit into the suitcase, like family heirlooms.

Like they were just left behind. And. And my grandmother was an amazing cook, and she worked at the city college in Los Angeles as the in the cafeteria, and she became in charge of the cafeteria, opened up her own confectionary business. She started from nothing and my grandfather, who had owned a whole department.

He became a bookkeeper and he was really starting again from nothing. The family was in scarcity. I remember growing up and my dad obviously was brought up in this environment and we did all the couponing, which is amazing. Yes, if you have coupons available, use the coupons because why not? Free money?

Love free money. But saving foil, which I still do. You know, I remember my grandparents saving paper towels, the Terry paper towels because they really knew what scarcity was, and that energy flowed into my family. It was in my family of origin and similar for my mom's family, she and her cousins, my mom's mother and her mother's sister, they were two families.

They lived very close to each other and they used to like divide up a milk ration between the two families. Who was gonna get the milk that the families could afford? Was it gonna be the pregnant mom, the nursing mom, the baby, the toddler? There was real scarcity in their family. And that money, energy, that money messaging came down to me and my family.

So, you know, I definitely took that on and have more of a tendency to save and make sure that I have for the future because that's who I am. And some of my other siblings, they took it to the other extreme and rather than, than saving And, you know, my siblings do, they all have savings, but, they became much more spenders, which was

Sort of to offset that like scarcity mentality and that energy that we grew up with. And there's no judgment on anybody, so don't think this is, you know about I did it better than they, they did it better than I did. You know, we just, each of us is a unique world, a unique personality, and we took it our own way.

But what you wanna do is you want to come into like contact connection with your money and figure out how you're spending. Because if everything goes into spending. What happens is you're not gonna be stacking cash and stacking cash is the way that you build wealth, stacking cash is that you take some of your money, that money is flowing to you through your job through, if you own real estate and you have rental income, money flows to you.

Just think about it like cash flow, like a river. The money is flowing and some of it is gonna go out again. Down the river, it's gonna be spent. And some of it you're going to keep and not with hoarding energy. 'cause if you think about the water that gets dammed up like by beavers or logs or something like that, it tends to attract mosquitoes, becomes poisonous, toxic.

We don't want that hoarding toxic energy around our money, but we wanna save some of that water in the water cooler. We wanna save some of that water to quench our thirst, that money to take care of us in the future. And sometimes we're gonna need it because you're going to have summer vacation next year, and you're gonna wanna have stacked cash in a vacation fund so that you can go away with your family.

Some of it you might wanna stack in a car fund because you know that your car is 5, 10, 15 years old and you know that at some point in the future you're gonna need some car repairs. You might need to replace the car. Are going to need to do some body work. We just had a flat tire, for example, on our car, and we needed to go to the garage and take care of the flat tires, what that was obviously on our company car, so we didn't have to pay for it, but we know that if you have.

You know, things that need to be taken care of, or like I said, the gas water heater that we have, we needed to take care of that. And if you have cash stacked in a safe savings account, that money will be there for the life events that happen. Nothing lasts forever. Things break down. Things need to be fixed.

So don't spend all of your money. Because when it comes to that expense that you're gonna have in the future for just running your daily life, you're gonna wanna have some stacked cash in a set aside savings account for the life events that you know are gonna happen. You don't know when, but you know they're gonna happen.

Well, maybe summer vacation. You kind of know when it happens. So that's one way to stack your cash. The other way to stack your cash, and I really want you to think about this, is stacking, this is compounding your money for your future when you invest money for the future. This is how you put your money to work for you.

So if you put it into the stock market, for example, on average over long periods of time, your money will grow by about 10% per year. So if you put a thousand dollars into the stock market in a year from now, on average, it doesn't happen every year. Some years the markets go up by over 20%. In 2024, the market went up, I think by 24%.

So I remember that 24, 24. So if you would put a thousand dollars into the stock market in 2024, what's 24% of $1,240? You would've had $1,240 at the end of the year. And then if it goes up again by 10% in 2025 in the markets or up so far this year. You would make another $120 on your money. So at the end of two years, and I'm not predicting, I just want you to know this is not a crystal ball.

It's just explaining to you how compounded growth works. But you would end up with like $1,300 in the bank. After two years, not the bank, really, it's an investment. It's not, just putting your money in a savings account that's gonna earn you three, 4% of interest. There's a huge difference between safe savings, where your money is getting low interest rate for being in the bank in a very safe place.

It's not being put at risk or setting it aside for long-term compound growth, and again, over long periods of time. Whether it is the stock market or it could be something like gold. I mean, gold has done incredibly well this year. So it could be commodities like gold, like silver. It could be in wheat. I'm not, we're not talking about all the different types of investments.

Now, real estate, obviously, if you wanted to buy a rental property, you wanted to buy something, not your primary residence that you live in, but you wanted to invest money. In an investment property that's gonna give you a cash flow with rental income, and then the value of the property is also going to increase over time.

Like these are ways that you can really stack and compound your wealth over long periods of time. The problem that so many people have is that they're just so focused on getting through the month, right? Month to month, paycheck to paycheck, just paying the bills that they don't have the time and the energy.

And maybe you're just a little bit anxious and you don't know the language of building wealth. That's something that I talk about in my book, the one K Investor, simple Smart Steps to Start Investing with a thousand dollars a. Or less. It's available on Amazon. We will link it in the show notes. But if you don't intentionally take your money and think about how much you wanna stack for the future, how much compound growth you want, and do you want the compound growth for you, for your future?

You maybe you want to buy a bigger house as your family's growing, you wanna help your kids, you wanna. Educate them, send them to college. You wanna help them when they get married. Like there are things that, you know, it's so far off in the future, five years, 10 years, 20 years in the future that we just push it off till tomorrow, right?

It's kind of like that Scarlet O'Hara gone with the wind, fiddly D all think about it tomorrow, but we really can't do it because your money needs time to grow and stack for the future. There's. Big difference between money now and money in the future. Money now is right here. It's in your hand and you spend it, but you need time for wealth to build for the long term.

So if you're looking at your money and you're thinking about what you wanna do at it, do with it. Here's what I strongly recommend. Look at the ways that your money is being deployed in your life. How much is going on spending? How much of your money? Is going to cover your future spending needs, wants and desires.

If you don't have, you know, money stacked up for the future, and even if you have retirement accounts, maybe your employer, maybe you have social security or a different pension plan between omi, we have in Israel. It you. It's really important for you to know how much is going to be available for you.

I mean, the statistics in the US are pretty abysmal that people in their fifties have less than a hundred thousand dollars saved up for their future. And let's just run some very simple numbers. I haven't sat down to think about this ahead of time, but just imagine for example, that your lifestyle costs you $5,000 a month.

Okay, this is just really simple. Back of the envelope calculations. If you have a hundred thousand dollars saved away for your retirement and you need $5,000 a month to cover your expenses, you have 20 months of living expenses. That's less than two years. Many people in their forties, in their fifties, even in their sixties, haven't even thought clearly about the kind of money they're going to need in their retirement.

How much money, you know, people say, oh, I'm just gonna work until I am, I'm a hundred. Like really, like my dad is here visiting, he's 87 years old and my dad sold his. Business at 80 years old. You know what? Today at 87, he doesn't even have the energy that he had seven years ago. Believing that you're gonna be able to work till a hundred.

I mean, I hope that you do. I hope that you have the energy that healthcare has advanced and we all have so much energy that we can continue with our side hustles. We can. Can continue serving people and doing things that we love, but we really need to get a handle on our numbers, get a handle on what's building, what are we stacking for the future so that we can also take care of our future self.

And this is something so important. It's something that I will be talking about again in that masterclass, money versus Wealth. On November 6th, another, you know, sneaky, shout out to myself. Go and sign up debbiesassen.com/masterclass. So you'll be there. You'll get the replay of the class on November 6th, but it's really important that I'm gonna be specifically telling you, how did you start calculating.

How much money you're going to need for the future. it's not a complicated calculation, but you need to know how much money you need now to take care of your life and even things that you're paying for now, your kids' education, your kids' clothing, things like that. You won't have that in the future, but you might have healthcare costs when you're 70, 80.

90 in your hundreds that you're not paying for. So when I work with my clients, I never assume that their expenses are going to be less in the future. In fact, they might be more, you just never know. So it's really important for you to get a handle on it. So where does the splurge come in? Listen, we're all humans.

We all love to be able to go away and buy something like earrings from Swarovski that weren't on my list of things that I wanted to buy when I was away. I mean, I knew my husband and I were gonna go traveling. We went to Yellowstone, we went to the Grand Tetons. We had an itinerary of different hikes that we wanted, different experiences that we wanted to enjoy.

But those 200 and something dollars earrings, they were not on my wishlist, but. We like to splurge things come up things happen. So I always recommend when you're thinking about your spending, you have a splurge account. If you have not yet set aside a splurge account, start with like 1% of your income every month.

It's not a lot. If you have the capacity, put away 5% of your income a month, and if you wanna splurge, then this gives you the opportunity to know, oh, I have this amount of money. Let's say $200 in my splurge account. So I have to look and see, can I afford to buy this splurge because I've got the $200 in my account.

If I look and say, oh, $200, the earrings are $240, okay, maybe I'll take from next month's splurge account. I'll buy that splurge now so that I can enjoy something and have something special now and that I won't splurge next month. So many times we're just like. I want this, I desire this, and it just comes from this like gut need that I wanna have something now.

But when you have a splurge account, it helps you to slow down and think intentionally, is this something that I really want? Do I really want this? Like we could really ask yourself, do I really want this thing? Is this gonna be the thing that helps me have the memories? Is this gonna light me up for the future for long periods of time?

Most of the time it's not. We just have this like. Instinct. This like gut reaction like, oh my gosh, I need this and I need this right now. And it's so not true. Have you ever put things into your cart at Amazon? I do this all the time. I think right about the time my parents arrived for a visit in Israel and I was feeling like just I needed to have a relaxing moment.

We had just finished all the Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Suko. We just finished those and my parents were due to arrive two days later. I had this face mask, these like cloth face masks. You open a package, wear them. And I was like, wow. And I just like gave myself 10, 15 minutes to relax with this face mask.

And you know what happened? I got this bee in my bonnet because it was such a relaxing experience. I need to go on Amazon and I need to buy more of these, like that need. And I spent about five or 10 minutes like researching them on Amazon. By the way, your time is also. A very important asset. it's also gonna run out.

Money can grow and compound, but time will run out. And I was researching, looking at reviews. I was gonna get myself a box of these face masks. At some point later on in the day, I think I got distracted by something. I was like, Debbie, what are you even thinking about? Like this particular face mask has been in your cabinet, in your bathroom for like two years, and I kid you not, it was sitting there for two years.

You think you're gonna buy a box of 20 face masks and. Take care of yourself like that every single week for the next 20 weeks. Like that was just stupid, but it was such a gut reaction. I needed to do this splurge right now in the moment, and I was gonna change over my whole life and take care of my face with a face mask every day for the next like year.

I'm like, no. Stop that. And so if you put things in your Amazon cart, don't press the buy button. It's just a gut reaction. It's a coming from a need. It's coming from your ego, coming from like, I need this thing right now and come back in like a day, 24 hours, 48 hours later. And I am constantly putting things in I, and I'm like, even like, what was I even thinking?

There was this book that I heard about on somebody's podcast they just had to have, and I. Come back and I'm like, no, I definitely don't need that book. And delete, delete, delete. So this is where the way that I save myself, lots of splurge money, but I do enjoy those experiences. I do go enjoy traveling and when I buy myself a little memento and then I wear those earrings in the future, it just reminds me of that beautiful time that I have and I can connect the dots and it's just this feel good feeling that floods my body.

So. Plan your splurges, plan them intentionally. I mean, we don't know when a splurged idea thing is gonna come about, but if you're the kind of person who goes window shopping and you see clothing in the window and you're like, oh my gosh, I have to have that thing that is so cool. Or you find a pair of shoes or a pair of sunglasses, a hat, whatever it is that you like, that you love to splurge on, make sure that you have money in a splurge account so that you can be intentional about your spending.

And you don't just spend, spend, spend. Because when you're doing that today. Your future self isn't having money stacking for her, and you wanna make sure that you're saving money intentionally for the little life happens moments like your gas water heater like dies and you need to have it fixed and cleaned out, or the tires on your car need to be repaired.

Or once upon a time, many years ago, my, now I think it's my 20-year-old son, he picked up my prescription sunglasses and being the curious 2-year-old that he was, he like. Took them in his hands and broke them in half. And I needed to get myself a pair of new prescription sunglasses. And of course, that was not on my budget that month.

So really think about your spending. Be more intentional. I recommend going down all the categories of your spending. Like, and it doesn't have to be to the penny, but if you can reduce your spending in every category or several categories by just 1%, and I'm not talking about making huge broad brush strokes change in your spending, but just a little bits of money.

That you can put aside into a splurge account or little bits of money that you can put aside and you can stack your cash for your future, you will definitely be living a much more wealthy and abundant life. So this is really a very conceptual like podcast episode. Today, I gave you a few pointers and how-tos on how to do it.

But get to know your money, get to know your money flow, get to know how money comes into your life, how it flows in. Notice how you hold onto money, how you stack cash for the future. notice if there's splurging, is there like a rush of money going out and how you're spending, and is it like this calm, beautiful river flow?

Is it like a torrent, a raging river? The money goes out, out, out. So it leaves you like. Parched and dry until the next cash flow comes in. And make sure that you are growing and compounding your money. You are stacking your cash for the future. And if you have any questions you wanna go deeper into this concept, please join me on November 6th.

For my masterclass, money versus Wealth, go to my website, debbiesassen.com/masterclass and I will see you November 6th, 12 o'clock Eastern. 7:00 PM in Israel, the replay will be available for a limited period of time, 72 hours, maybe for five days. But you wanna make sure that you take this opportunity to really get to know what's the difference between money, the difference between wealth, and how you can become.

A receiver, you can become really an infinite receiver of receiving more money and holding more money and being in the frequency of wealth. Thanks so much for tuning in today, and I will see you next week on the Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. Bye-bye for now. I.