68: The Joy of Money

You’re listening to the Mastering Money in Midlife podcast with Debbie Sassen, Episode 68.

Welcome to Mastering Money in Midlife, a podcast for midlife women in business to overcome financial anxiety and make more money without burning out or sacrificing their families. Join Certified Life and Money Coach Debbie Sassen, as she shares practical business strategies and mindset shifts that help you dissolve the money blocks that keep you stuck in a cycle of underearning and undersaving, sabotage the growth of your business, and prevent you from building the wealth that you desire.

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the podcast. I am so happy that you’re here today. And besides that, I enjoy speaking with you weekly, on a Tuesday, when this podcast drops, today is a very special day in the calendar; it is the new moon. In the Hebrew calendar, it is the beginning of the month of Adar. We have a saying in Hebrew, “Mishenichnas Adar marbim b’simchah,” “When the month of Adar enters, we increase our joy.”

We are going to be talking about joy on the podcast, today. And we are specifically going to be speaking about the joy of money. But before we start talking about the joy of money, I have two important announcements for you.

Number one, enrollment is now open for Money School. Money School 2.0 is taking place March 13th 14th, and 15th. It is going to be a very practical, hands-on, money information that you can use as an entrepreneur.

It’s going to be looking at your relationship with money; diving deep into the thoughts, your thinking and feelings about money. We might do some tapping around money because that is one of the tools that I bring to my clients, and that I love to bring to my webinars and my coaching sessions.

We’re going to talk about your income, the way you are managing money, how you’re planning for profit; all of the money things that are so critical for entrepreneurs as they are building their business. So, that’s number one. Go to my website, DebbieSassen.com/MoneySchool, that’s one word, and enroll in Money School 2.0. If you can’t join me live, of course, you will be getting the recordings. But make sure that you enroll.

Announcement number two. The May 2023 cohort of Wired for Wealth is also going to open for enrollment on March 13th, when we also start Money School. The biggest, exciting news is that we’re going to have a one-day live event, in person, in Jerusalem, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. I closed up with them this week, and I am really planning to have a beautiful, epic event.

If you are out of Israel or you’re too far away to travel, and you can’t join us in person, of course there will be a virtual option. But if you’re close by and you wanted to come on holiday, even if you don’t live in Israel, it is a beautiful time. It is springtime in Israel. It is the perfect time to visit us. You’ll be able to spend Monday, May 1st, with us in Wired for Wealth. And then, you can plan to have some holidays and travel around this beautiful country.

So, mark your calendars. Enrollment for Wired for Wealth opens on March 13th. It is my signature program for entrepreneurs who want to create consistent 5k – 10k months in their business.

And this year, for the first time, I will also be offering Wired for Wealth Premium. It is specifically for my clients who have already reached $100,000 in their business, and they’re starting to scale and they need to put systems and processes in place.

Wired for Wealth Premium will include one-on-one coaching sessions with me, monthly, for the nine-month duration of the program. So, if you’d like more information on Wired for Wealth, the website is going to be updated very soon. I don’t think it’s quite updated yet, it still has information from the last round.

But you can definitely go onto the website DebbieSassen.com/Wired-for-Wealth and you can start looking at all the information. Enrollment isn’t open anyway, and as soon as it is updated and ready for you to click and schedule a consultation with me, I will let you know.

All right, let’s jump into the podcast. We are talking today about the joy of money. And before we speak about the joy of money, we have to talk about the word joy. Because in the English dictionary and in the Hebrew dictionary, there are multiple words for joy, happiness, gladness, and delight. There are nuances of these different words.

In Hebrew, the word we use at this time of year is, simcha. And that is translated most often, as joy. But let’s talk specifically about what joy, or simcha is. Joy is specifically connected with increasing our involvement. That means the way we’re thinking, the way we’re feeling, the things we’re doing, with spirituality.

Anytime that we strengthen our spiritual side, as opposed to our physical side or our material side, we naturally increase our joy. And so, you might ask the question; how can it be that right now, at this time of year, it is a specific time for joy? If you’re familiar with the holiday of Purim, which is written about in the “Book of Esther” and which we celebrate in the middle of the month of Adar, it was a time in between the two temples.

It was after the First Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, and the Jews were in exile in Babylonia. Ahasuerus was the king in Persia, and he was king over 127 different countries. And at that time, there was an evil man named Haman, who decreed… He was the second in command to the king. He was the king’s closest adviser. He decreed that all of the Jews in all of the 127 nations would be wiped out.

Through a really mind-boggling turn of events, when you look at the story of Purim that’s written in the Book of Esther, line by line by line, and you really understand what’s going on there and try to understand really, because it’s really kind of amazing what happens, you really see how the natural world seems to be what is running the show.

And then, there is this spiritual turn of events, because there is a God in heaven, who is really orchestrating everything from above. And all of a sudden, through really crazy circumstances, the Jews are miraculously saved.

Because of this increase in our connection with our Creator, there is just more joy in our lives at that time. And then, we go from the holiday of Purim, in the middle of the month of Adar, to the holiday of Passover in the middle of the next month, which is the month of Nisan. And that is the month in which God took us out of Egypt, because we were slaves in Egypt.

Then we just keep increasing our joy from Adar to Nisan, as we are now taken out of Egypt, and we’re becoming a people connected to God, to our Creator. And then if we keep skipping a little bit more, even seven weeks past the holiday of Passover, that is the holiday of Shavuot, on which we received the Torah on Mount Sinai.

So, this is the month, and today is the first day of the month of Adar, when we start increasing our joy. We just go from one holiday to another to another. And we get closer and closer and closer to our Creator during this time.

I want to point out something fascinating about the story of Purim. And that is, and I mentioned it a little bit, is that in the entire story, God is hidden. We don’t even see his name written anywhere in the “Book of Esther”. That is something that’s really fascinating.

Now, we’re going to start connecting what’s happening in the story of Purim with our relationship with money. Because we are physical beings living in physical bodies and we do have a spiritual soul that lives inside of us, and we can work and we do work, on our connection with the Creator. But many times, just because we are human beings with human brains, living a human experience, we have this momentary lapse of consciousness.

We kind of forget, let’s say, that we are connected to a Creator who is running the show. And that’s really what happens in Purim. In fact, there is a very common statement that we say when things look like they’re coincidence or things look like they’re happenstance or they’re just the natural course of events.

We look at that in Hebrew as the word “mikreh”; happenstance or coincidence. We flip around the letters, and we say that this event that happens is Rak Mi’Hashem; it is only from God. We have to really be able to turn around the way we see the world to notice that really, God is involved in every single thing that we’re doing; including our money, and the way we interact with our money.

When we remember to bring God into the picture, then that is exactly what will increase our joy. So, what does this have to do with our relationship with money? Specifically, the joy of money that we can experience at this time? And really start working and deepening our relationship with money, day by day by day?

It’s very fascinating that many, many people feel stress and anxiety and tension with their money. The American Psychological Association reports that 70 – 75% of Americans stress and feel anxiety and tension over money. And that’s day-to-day finances, that’s investments, it’s mortgages. It’s your business.

It’s the stress that you feel; is this client going to work with me? Did I sign a new client? Does the client want a refund? Oh, my gosh, I have to pay taxes, my invoicing. Is my cash flow good enough? What does that mean about me? Do I feel shame because I’ve been in debt or I am in debt? And what about all of those mistakes that I’ve made with money? Oy vey, oy vey, oy vey. Right?

There’s just so much drama, stress, and anxiety about money in our life, both in the past and in the present. The mail comes and all of a sudden you have an electricity bill. And it’s winter, it’s been cold, and you’ve been keeping your heat on and all of a sudden, your electricity bill jumps. And again, it’s like, oh, no!

Or, you get a tax bill in the mail, and again, your heart sort of sinks and you feel a clenching in your stomach. There’s anxiety around money that we experience on a day-to-day basis, and we sort of forget that there’s actually a Creator who’s running the show. And none of these bills, and none of these clients who do come to us or don’t come to us, it’s all being orchestrated outside of us.

I am not making it a problem if you forget that God is involved in your day-to-day relationships with money. Again, I really believe that this is something we work on, and we strengthen. We keep, day to day, improving our spiritual connection with our Creator, and with the fact that he is actually orchestrating everything that happens with our money.

But what I would like to invite you to do, is start thinking about money differently. I might be a little bit risky here because I want you to start thinking about it as a human being. I know 100%, that everything that happens to me with my money is created with the One above, but I’m going to take a little baby step and work on it just at a human being level.

I might even expose myself to a little bit of criticism, because what I’m about to tell you, you might be thinking in your mind, “Oh, Debbie, that’s like worshipping money. And isn’t that like worshiping the golden calf?” But just bear with me. If that’s what you think, feel free to send me an email and tell me you don’t agree with my approach. I’m okay with that.

But here’s what I would like to offer you to do, to start shifting and changing the way you interact with money and the relationship that you currently have with money. The first thing is, when you pay your bills, you could say out loud… It used to be, you could write on the back of your check, “Thank you.”

But now, if you’re paying your electricity bill in winter and it has just spiked, you could just think to yourself or say out loud, “Thank you, money, for being enough.” Now, if you want to take it one step higher in saying, “Thank you, God, that there is enough money in my account to pay the bill.” I think that is a beautiful thing to do.

But for many people, they feel the anxiety when they receive the electricity bill, and so just thanking the money for being enough is the next baby step forward to creating a right relationship with your money.

Similarly, when you pay contracted workers or you pay suppliers or you go to the supermarket, whatever it is, when you pay your coaches. Your coaches, if you’re working with a business coach, a money coach, a health coach, a relationship coach, any kind of coach, your coaches probably cost more than, or let’s say the investment to work with your coach, is more than your electricity bill.

It might be more than the bills that you’re paying at your supermarket. Thank money that you have enough. “Thank you that this is enough. Thank you that I have enough. Thank you that there is enough money in my bank account right now.”

And this is the way we’re going to switch the way we feel about money. We’re going to start reprogramming our minds and reprogramming our bodies, that there is enough money in the world. You’ve heard me say before, that we live in an abundant world created by the infinite Creator.

We know in a sort of cerebral cognitive way that there is enough, but in our bodies, we don’t feel it specifically in our personal situations. So, when you’re paying something out, it could be that you’re just pressing a button on your phone to transfer some money. Or, you’re going into your bank account online, and you’re transferring some money. Thank money for being enough.

And even if you are in overdraft, or you have credit card debt, or some other loan that you have outstanding, thank money for being enough. Because there was somebody, or an institution in the world, that lent you money. And that means again, that there is enough money in the world for you to access money in the financial system or with your personal connections that you didn’t have. So again, thank money for being enough, because it really, really is enough.

We want to create that feeling, which will allow joy to erupt from inside of us that there is enough money in the world. It takes us out of scarcity to sufficiency, or out of scarcity to enoughness. And from that enoughness and that sufficiency, then we can grow into abundance.

But some of us need to take that little stepping stone from scarcity to abundance, and we need to be in the enoughness. We need to be in the sufficiency right now. And thanking money for being enough is one way to create that.

The second thing that I really encourage you to do, is write a love letter to money. Now, if you want to throw rotten eggs at me and tell me that we’re worshipping the golden calf, I am here for it. But again, we’re trying to create a right relationship with money. I gave this exact exercise to my Wired for Wealth students and to my Money Healing students.

Last week. when my husband and I celebrated our anniversary because for us it was a day of love. And that was our love relationship. I was encouraging my clients also to develop a love relationship with money. I’m not going to say her name. But I’m going to read you what one of my clients wrote after she wrote her love letter to money.

“She did the work of writing a love letter to money and it was transformative. The dissonance between the love letter and the language of love that I used in it, and how I usually speak to and of money, was so stark. I am left with the most amazing feeling of always being supported by money.”

“Despite how I’ve talked about it, money has stayed with me, looked after me, and supported me throughout. By treating money poorly, I have been able to create so much for myself. I am very excited to see what I can create when I treat money with love, trust, and respect. I also see how creating a loving relationship with money will infuse all my relationships. It was truly amazing. Thank you, Debbie.”

And that is something that I want to point out. That the way you talk about money will infuse all of your relationships, including the relationship with yourself, with your partner, with your business, with God. It’s not that it’s an either/or, we’re either loving money or loving God.

But God is always the One who is orchestrating things from behind the scenes. Just like in the story of Purim. We don’t see Him but we know He is there. Only God could have organized the turnabout and the turn of events that ultimately resulted in the Jews being saved.

And again, it’s only God that can be orchestrating things and creating the turnabout that will take you from where you are today in your relationship with money, your relationship with yourself, your relationship with your partner, your relationship with your business, your relationship with your clients, in all ways.

So, take the time to create a joyful, joyous relationship with money and write a letter of love to money. I really do believe that that will change things for you, for the better, and it will open up a window for more Godliness and more spirituality to enter your life and your business.

I just want to wish you a happy month, Chodesh Tov, we say. It should be a month of joy. It should be a month of connection with our Creator. It should be a month of redemption. Just like the Jews were redeemed during the story of Purim. Whatever you’re going through right now, it should also be a month of redemption for you.

Thank you so much for tuning in to today’s podcast. I just want to close up by reminding you that registration is now open for Money School 2.0. Head on over to my website, DebbieSassen.com/MoneySchool. That’s one word, DebbieSassen.com/MoneySchool. I will see you March 13th in Money School. Bye-bye for now.

Thanks for listening to Mastering Money in Midlife. If you want more information on Debbie Sassen or the resources from the podcast, visit MasteringMoneyInMidlife.com