9 Money Lessons on My 59th Birthday

You’re listening to the Mastering Money in Midlife podcast with Debbie Sassen Episode 38.

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 under earning and under saving, 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. Today, I have a special birthday podcast episode for you. As you know, I record my podcasts on Tuesday morning. Two days ago, on Sunday, July 24, it was my 59th birthday. Next Sunday, July 31st on the Hebrew calendar, is going to be the third of the Hebrew month of Av and that is my Hebrew birthday. I am right to the middle of my birthday week.

I decided that I would bring you nine money lessons that I am learning, and working on, and growing, and developing in myself as a money and business coach. I’m going to share my money lessons with you. I had some, let’s say indecision, around the number of money lessons that I would bring.

It certainly wasn’t going to be 59 for my 59th birthday, because you guys aren’t tuning in to hear me recite War and Peace to you. Then I thought; okay, let’s do 14, because 5 + 9 is 14. But that sounded a little bit stretched. Then I said, “You know what? 9; I can do 9 money lessons.” I was writing them down and I got to 5 and I thought; you know what? Five is complete. That’s a nice round number. We’re gonna go with 5.

Then my mind kept firing, with new ideas and new ideas. I said, “You know what? We’re back to 9; we’re limiting it at 9. In the future, we can just add some more in a different podcast. Because here’s the thing about money, money accompanies us from the cradle to our deathbed. You should live and be well to 59 and 69, and 109, and 120. Money is always a part of our lives.

We need money for everything we want, and do, and have. Almost everything; you can breathe. You know, if you want to live off the grid, by the river, or have your own solar panels installed, you need those so that you can get your electricity to charge up the generator, or whatever it is, you can live with a very bare amount of money.

But most of us, especially if you’re listening to my podcast, on an electronic device, you need money. We’re going to continue growing our relationship with money, healing. We’re going to talk about money healing today on the podcast. At the end of the podcast, I created a special birthday offer for this time. I’ll let you know how you can dive into more money healing with me.

Let me start with lesson number one, when it comes to money. There was an expression, you might have heard it, “new level, new devil.”  I always thought to myself; I don’t know about new level, new devil. I kind of like new level, same old devil, because we always have the same types of money issues that we’re dealing with, but we’re just dealing with them on a new level.

In fact, there is a Hebrew expression, which I’ll translate it for you in English, that I really, really love. The English translation is, “The same woman in a different coat.” If you know the Hebrew it is, Otah geveret b’shinui aderet. That, to me, is what our relationship with money represents. Money is the same woman all the time, she just changes her coat.

Sometimes we’re dealing with our income. Sometimes we’re dealing with our expenses. Sometimes it’s the coat of your investing, or the insurance that you need to buy. Sometimes it’s taxes. We’re gonna talk about taxes today, right? But it’s you and your relationship with money. We’re just changing up the clothes that we’re wearing, depending on the new level in our relationship, and that aspect of money that we’re dealing with at that time.

I’m going to share with you two examples from my life, where I was working on a growing edge in my relationship with money, and I’ve been at the same place over and over again. You can envision it like a corkscrew, we’re always going around and around and around. But it’s the same corkscrew and we’re just going up a level as we continue to follow that curlicue upwards.

The first is an incident that happened to me a couple of weeks ago. Let me give you the backstory. My son and his wife are buying an apartment. They’re in the process of buying an apartment. This is our fifth married child. Because of what we love to do for our children, and how we are blessed with financial resources to support them, we’ve always helped our children in Israel to buy their apartments.

For those of you listeners who are in Israel, you know that the housing prices in Israel, relative to the standard wages or income, are very high. We’ve been blessed to have resources, many of which I inherited from my mother when she passed away eight and a half years ago. Even then I spoke with my accountant, I said, “No, this isn’t my money. This is for my kids, when they get married.” I had that in my mind.

I work, I share this podcast with you, I coach, my husband’s working, and our income covers our expenses. This was always on the side. This is a special gift and blessing that I can use to bless my children. My son is buying his apartment. Okay, it’s time, Debbie has to come up with the goods that she said she was going to, to provide, to support her son.

I had a lot of money drama, because the stocks in my portfolio that were earmarked for my kids for the last eight years, but the stock market is down over 20% this year. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I have to sell them. What a bad time to sell.” I had all of the drama coming up. “If you just hold on to them, of course, the market is going to go up.” I was looking for ways, financially smart ways, to get around selling the stocks right now.

We thought, “Okay, my husband and I, we both have pensions, maybe we could take a loan against our pension. That would be a sensible financial way to borrow money. Then, when the stock market goes back up, and the stock prices rise, we’ll sell and we’ll be able to pay back the loan.”

It turned out to be such a complicated procedure. The amount of money that we thought we could get from my husband’s pension was significantly lower. I thought we would just have one set of paperwork, and then we would be done.

But it was way smaller the amount they were giving us. Then, I went to one of my accounts, and they stopped giving loans against assets 4 or 5 months ago. In the end, I’m like, “We’re gonna have to do so much running around.” Time is valuable, we’ve talked about that. That time is the only resource that is non-renewable. This is just so much effort, you know, I just have to do so much to get ready for it, I’m just going to sell the stocks.

I went into our portfolio. I made a sale. And then, I had so much drama about it, I went and told my husband, “I did it. I feel so bad about it. I can’t believe I did it.” I stomped around the house, I was really pacing back and forth in my living room for five minutes. I got it all out of my system. Then, I was done.

I didn’t try to mindset my way out of it. Like, “Debbie, you knew. This is what you put away eight years ago. It was never yours to begin with.” I just let myself be a human having a human experience, knowing in my logical mind that this money was set aside, in my brain, for my kids. But still, in the moment, I was feeling very uncomfortable selling stocks when the market was down.

But you know what? I had my bit of drama, pounded it out, and then we were done, thank God. I think yesterday, we finally got the funds into my son’s hands. He can pass those on to the seller of the apartment. Then, he can he can go and deal with his mortgage.

So that was number one. As we said, same lady in a different coat. There’s always going to be drama, around money. Sometimes it can last you six months. Sometimes it’s just five minutes, and then it’s done. But allow yourself to be in the drama for at least a little bit of time. Like we don’t have to make ourselves into robots and pretend that we don’t have drama around money.

The second incident that I had, was actually two days ago, on my English birthday. I had a very light schedule in the afternoon. One of my clients moved from Sunday to Monday, which was beautiful because it just gave me time to really enjoy my birthday. That was a beautiful thing. It just gave me time to enjoy my birthday and really, you know, just celebrate the day.

I was doing some visioning about the growth of my business. This year, 2022, my goal is $300,000 of income in my business, and I’m on track to meet that or beat that. I was doing some visioning about my million-dollar year. I have to tell you; a lot of resistance came up in my body to a million-dollar year. It just felt like this crushing weight of actually receiving that much money.

My brain does what brains do, it wanted to go into the how. And even breaking it down into 10 blocks of $100,000 felt overwhelming for me. I’m going to add one more point, that is, my coaching program Wired for Wealth: My launch, that I had in June and July, I welcomed nine clients at $5,000 each; that’s a $45,000 launch.

So, the jump from 45 to 100 is not that big, it’s a little bit more than doubling. And, the jump from my $300,000 year to my million-dollar year is tripling. But still, my body brought up a lot of resistance to that amount of money. That’s where I’m going, that is the person that I’m growing into. But I’m not yet her.

I just allowed myself to be in that place where I could feel all of the resistance, and the hesitation, and the discomfort, and all of the ‘hows’ coming up in my mind: What am I going to do? How’s that going to work? Who’s going to support me? It’s all so normal.

I did some breathing. I did some tapping, that I like to do, and I just dissolved some of those feelings. I didn’t get my resistance down to zero. But I was able to take a little bit of the edge off of that drama.

So, my lesson for you is that wherever you are in your income and in your earnings, and on your trail, to whether it’s a million-dollar year, or a half a million-dollar year, wherever you are, allow yourself to feel the drama. Allow yourself to feel uncomfortable, and not understand how you’re going to get there. Even all of those thoughts, that can be zipping through your mind, like: I don’t know who’s gonna pay me. Where are my clients? I don’t have a big enough audience.

Let them settle. Bring all of that stuff out, get it down on paper, breathe through it, tap through it, whatever modalities you like to use, don’t suppress it and push it down. It’s when we try to ignore all of those thoughts that we’re thinking anyway, those negative thoughts, and we try to suppress the emotions that have us feeling really uncomfortable and having our nervous system activated.

When we push those away, they stay inside of us and they don’t go away. They’re always firing little like energy pings in the background, and they slow us down. Give yourself time to feel and think all the stuff. There’s nothing wrong with you, you are completely normal. So, that’s lesson number one; “New level, same devil.” “Same lady different coat.” Take whichever one of those mantras works for you, and go with it, and learn your money lessons from there.

Lesson number two, you know what? When it comes to money, there are some things that we just have to do. I don’t love paying my taxes, right? I do try to remember, after I pay my taxes, that I’m so grateful. I get to support the roads; I get to support the fire department. All of these different municipal services and government services that I’m supporting. For me, it’s mostly the drama ahead of time of collecting all the paperwork and getting it to my accountant.

I don’t think that I need to coach myself out of that discomfort. There are things that I would much more enjoy doing, than collecting a bunch of paperwork and sending it off to my accountant. But you know what? It’s part of adulting. It’s part of what I do as a business owner. It’s part of what I do as an income earner. I don’t have to love it.

There are all sorts of things that I don’t love. Maybe for you, it’s you don’t love doing the dishes. You don’t love cleaning the toilets. You don’t like preparing food. There are things we do as adults in our life, and we don’t have to mindset our way into loving them. We just have to put them on our schedule, and do them and get it done.

The more time we spend in drama about them, the more time we drag out the discomfort. We talked about that last week, in the episode on money procrastination. Sometimes you just got to do what you got to do. Beginning of story, end of story. Put it on your calendar and get it done. And, guess what? Right after I record this podcast, my accountant needs a few more documents in order to complete my tax filing. So, guess what I’ll be doing the moment I hit ‘stop’ on record?

Money lesson number three, mindset is not everything. I talk a lot about mindset and changing the way you think and you feel about money. but a lot of our relationship with money is buried, and wired and programmed into our nervous system. We came into the world as blank slates. We have talked about this before.

I’m not even sure that we are 100% blank slates when we enter this world, because we’ve been growing in our Mamas’ tummies. We felt her energy and that was programmed into us. There was also some DNA and epigenetics in our relationship with money. So many of us came from financial scarcity and deprivation.

We’re not so many years away from the Holocaust in the Jewish world. We’re less than 100 years away from the Great Depression in the United States. Many of us have family stories about working really, really hard, and barely having enough money to buy food and clothing, and to get through the days and weeks and months and years. That relationship with money is wired into our brains on an unconscious level, and into our bodies on a nervous system level.

Therefore, it is very understandable that in your relationship with money, what is coursing through your nervous system is scarcity, lack and deprivation. Then, on top of that, because our parents grew up with scarcity and lack, and/or our grandparents, and that was their money story, and their money paradigm, we learned from them. When we were children, we were in that blank slate, 0–7-year period of time, we actually witnessed and observed and felt in our bodies, the scarcity, lack and deprivation.

You may have witnessed fighting between your parents. Or, somebody in your family was disempowered around money. Maybe money was this hidden thing and it wasn’t talked about. You downloaded all of that into your body. Money is a mind-body experience. Mindset is not enough; you can’t just change your thoughts about money and change the way you do money. We have to approach money from a top down, that’s your brain, and from a bottom up, from your body.

So, you can work on your thoughts, but I don’t really believe affirmations work. You have to work a lot, a lot, a lot on; money flows to me easily. I love money. Money speeds things up. But so much of the time our body is screaming, “No.” Our body doesn’t agree, and our body is living in scarcity and deprivation. That is where we need to approach our relationship with money more.

Really going deep and understanding and feeling, really feeling deeply, what the energy in our body is doing. Learn to be comfortable with the discomfort that is like frenetic; or frazzled, or pulsating, or wavy, slimy, goopy. I’ve heard so many different ways that people express and describe the energy in their bodies when they’re relating to money.

Befriending your body. Befriending your nervous system. Really asking your body, what it wants to tell you about your relationship with money. Or, what your body wants to tell you about money. That gives you so much insight into where you are today.

When you can let your intuition take over, and not thinking and thought work and mindset your way into a different relationship with money, there is so much knowledge that you can gain from listening to your body, and healing your relationship with money from a bottom-up approach.

If you have been trying to change the way you think about money, and it hasn’t been happening fast enough, and we’re going to talk about pacing and what fast enough means in a moment. But if you’re not getting the results you want, and you’re still feeling the resistance, it could be that you have money healing to do on a deeper level, to really uncover the money paradigm that you’re living.

To understand whose financial identity and whose financial story you’re living. Then, send that story, send that money paradigm, back to the earlier generations, to your parents, your grandparents, your great grandparents. Send that story back where it belongs.

Money lesson number four, and this also relates to healing your relationship with money. There is no right pace for you, with your relationship and healing your relationship with money. Every single one of us has a different speed, pace, momentum, at which we shift and change.

Some of you will go fast in the beginning, and then you’ll slow down. Sometimes it’ll be bumpy up-and-down, and up-and-down. Even as I said in the beginning, something that I’ve been working on in my relationship with my income, in my business, or in my investments, and investments in the stock market, I had some blips down.

That’s okay that there’s an up-down relationship. Nothing moves up in a straight line. But whatever your pace is, you don’t need to hurry it and make it go faster. Better, I think, that you go deeper, and heal your relationship with money from a deeper place. Really allowing those feelings to happen.

Then, once your foundations are much more solid and secure, then I think your relationship, and if you kind of vision it like a building, then you’re going to be able to grow your building, your relationship with money building, taller. It will happen faster, because the foundations are going to be super solid. Your building is not going to implode on you and need to go back to the beginning and start all over again.

When I think about pacing, I like to think about a toddler learning to walk. We can go online and google, I have not done this today, and find out what the average age is that most toddlers learn to walk. It’s probably, as a mom of eight, grandmother of 13, I’ve seen a few kids learn to walk in my day. It’s probably somewhere between, let’s say, 10-11 months and 15-16 months.

I had a couple of children who did start walking at 10 months. But you know what? I’ve also seen toddlers at 8 ½ months walking. I had a grandson walk at 21 months, if I’m not mistaken. I think a friend of mine, even had one of her children started walking it at 2 years, or almost 2 years.

There is the norm, maybe in that 10-to-15-month area. Then, if we think of it like a bell-shaped curve, right there are the tales; some kids walk a little bit earlier than the average, and some kids walk later than the average. Your pace might be normal, whatever normal is, and our relationship is way more complex with money than it is with learning how to walk.

There are so many different aspects, we don’t have to just get our coordination in our body correct. But because, as I said in the beginning of this podcast, there’s your income, and your expenses, and your taxes, and your insurance, and your investing. There’s even more than that, because there’s so many different aspects to your relationship with money. I don’t think there’s anybody in the world who could tell you what a normal pace is. Your pace is normal for you.

You don’t have to be working on all the different aspects of money all the time. So today, you might be working on your budgeting. In three months from now, you might be working on your income. Once you’ve got your income and your expenses sorted out, then you might say, “Okay, now it’s time to do some investing.”

Or maybe, while you’re working on your expenses, you’re like, “I want to start investing. I want to put a little bit of money into my X, a line item, in my expense account, that I’m always going to take out to put in my investments for my long-term.”

There is no right series that you have to do it in. Like, we have to do this first, this second and that third. There’s no right pace. Find the pace that feels comfortable for you. Even if you need to stop for a while, right, you’ve been focusing so much on your relationship with money, that it’s time to take a step back and just breathe and let the dust settle. That is great for you. Don’t let anybody tell you that you need to go faster or that you’re going too slow. If it’s working for you, then it’s working.

Number five, more money does not make you feel more better. Which is a colloquial way of saying that your net worth is not your self-worth. Let me start by explaining what net worth is, in case you don’t know. Your net worth is the difference, we say, between assets and liabilities. Or, it’s the difference between what you own and what you owe.

To keep the example very simple, let’s say that you bought a house for $100,000, and you have a mortgage of $50,000. Those are the only things you own in the entire world. As I said, simple model. So, your assets, what you own, are $100,000. What you owe the bank is 50. One hundred minus 50,000 is 50,000. Your net worth is $50,000.

But your self-worth is infinity. If you have more money, if you have less money, if you’re a multibillionaire like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Or, if you’re someone who has debt, and you have no money that you can call your own, no assets that you can call your own.

You have the clothes on your back, you have some other clothes in your closet, you have your electronic device that you’re listening to this podcast on, and just a few other assets and items that you own in your life. You really are in the minus. Even in the minus a big time, that doesn’t make you more or less worthy as a person.

So many of us confuse our self-worth with our net worth. But they are completely different. The more we can disconnect… This is a lifetime of work. Because the outside world wants us to believe that the more stuff we have, the more money we have; the bigger our house, the fancier our cars, the better we are as a person. The more valuable we are as a person.

That’s not to say that if you own a Ferrari, or you aspire to own a Maserati, because you love cars… They’re beautiful, beautiful cars; the designs, and the speed, and everything. If that’s something that appeals to you. Or, if you want to own a large house, and you want to have it on a lakeside, or a beach front, or whatever it is, that’s not to say that if you own that, that you’re not worthy, or you’re vapid, or something like that.

But we just want to create a very strong disconnect for your infinite worth as a person and the amount of money you have in the bank, the amount of money you earn on a yearly basis. You are a child of God, which makes you 100% valuable and worthy, regardless of what your bank statement, and your investment accounts, say.

Working on that all the time and believing that your self-worth can continue to grow… Because this is the work of a lifetime, to believe that you’re valuable. You can say it all the time, but really to have it plant seeds deep, deep, deep into your psyche and into your nervous system, it’s work.

It’s also one of these relationships that has hills and valleys. Right? Sometimes we feel more worthy. Sometimes something “bad” can happen and we feel less worthy. But do the work of learning how to look at your money completely neutral. These are just numbers on a bank statement. They’re just numbers in your net worth statement. They have nothing to do with who you are, and your value as a person.

That leads me to number six, and that is finances and faith go together. What do I mean here? That means we can do all the work that we can do. We can put in our effort, or as we say in Hebrew, your hishtadlut. “God is always running the show.”

We have to do what’s normal in our businesses, we have to do what’s normal in terms of filing our taxes. If you are selling a program, if you are launching, you have to do the normal things. Always remember that God runs the show.

One of my clients told me yesterday, that she sold a course; she has an online course. Right before we met, she sold a course and she was so excited. She said, “If we had met five minutes earlier,” she wouldn’t have been able to share that celebration with me. The timing was impeccable.

During the course of our coaching session, she said, “I’ve been putting so much effort into social media, and talking about what I do, and sharing value with people. This person, who bought my course, was a referral from somebody else. How do I connect what I’m doing on social media with the fact that this person, who bought my course, was a referral?”

“We didn’t know each other before she bought my course. She’s new to me, and I’m new to her. She heard about it, we had a conversation and then she decided to buy the course.” Here’s the thing, we do our work as business owners, and we have to take the normal steps.

I used to learn a book called, Duties of the Heart, in English. In Hebrew, it’s called, Chovot HaLevavot. There is a chapter in the book where we talk exactly about how much effort we put in, the hishtadlut, and how much we rely on God to help us. We do what’s normal, that’s the learning that I took out of it, from my rabbi. We do the normal things that we do in business.

For example, if you’re a store and you open in the shopping center in town, the normal store is open for probably about eight hours a day. It could be that the shopping center’s open from 10 in the morning until 8 o’clock at night, or 9 in the morning until 9 o’clock at night. But when shops are open, if you own a shop, then your shop should be open during normal business hours for that shopping center.

You can’t expect to have a living wage, a “normal” income, if you just opened up your store between the hours of 3 o’clock in the afternoon and 5 o’clock in the afternoon, or between 10 in the morning and 12 noon. That is not a normal business schedule for a store in the shopping center.

Similarly, in 2022, what is normal for those of us who have online businesses, is that we advertise our business online. Now, does that mean that you are posting 27 times a day on Facebook™, and Instagram™, and Twitter™, and Tik Tok™, and LinkedIn™ and all the social media platforms?

That would be exhausting, I think, for most business owners. Perhaps when you grow your business, very, very large. I don’t know what the cutoff point is, because I haven’t gotten there yet. Then you can have a social media team, who is sharing your value, and your content, and advertising on all the different social media platforms.

But you have to do what’s normal for you, at this stage of your business. If you do not have an online business, but you have a brick-and-mortar business, then you have to figure out the ways that brick-and-mortar businesses in your community and in your neighborhood advertise. Let’s just say, for example, that you have an ice cream store.

By the way, if you have an ice cream store in the center of town, it could also be very, very normal for you to be advertising on social media and target your audience, to the people that are in your community. So, if your ice cream store is in Jerusalem, you wouldn’t be advertising on social media to people who are living in London.

Let’s go back to that ice cream store in Jerusalem. You are actually putting out ads in the local papers that go around, and maybe you’re putting fliers in mailboxes that you have a special deal on ice cream. Because hey, it’s summertime, and it’s hot. Who doesn’t love ice cream during the summer?

But Jerusalem is also a tourist city and because there is so much tourism in Israel during the summer, and especially now, since tourism is on the rise after two years of COVID and a lot of travel restrictions, it could be that you have a lot of people popping into your ice cream store, who never heard of you before.

Never saw your advertisements in the local press or even on social media because you haven’t been targeting them. But because it is summertime, and there are tourists in the area, they come by, and they buy their ice cream cones.

So that is really a simplistic definition that differentiates between what is normal… What’s normal is letting the people in your community know that you have an ice cream store, and that you are open from 10 o’clock in the morning till 9 o’clock at night. Maybe in the summer, when people are out, the weather cools down, they’re out strolling, maybe you even stay open till 10 o’clock at night. Who knows? You figure it out for your business. But that would be normal.

Of course, God is in charge of everything, and he can send you people to your ice cream store who never heard about you five minutes ago, but they happened to walk by and you have a lovely window display, you have a sign hanging out so they know that there is ice cream available here. That is the effort that you put out, the normal effort that you put out.

Then, in they walk. You make a sale to people that you’ve never heard about before, and you might never see again. Although, if your ice cream is really good, they might tell their friends, who will tell their friends, who will that tell their friends. And, that’s how your name, and your business, and your services get spread by word of mouth; do what’s normal. Remember that God organizes the world. My clients are divinely contracted to work with me, and your clients are divinely contracted to work with you.

Money lesson number seven, hustling works, but it is not sustainable over the long term. I know there’s a lot of talk out there about work-life balance. We want to be able to work in our businesses for this amount of hours a day, and have a life and a lifestyle that works for this amount of time. So many of us are hearing these messages, and still we’re sneakily, on the side, hustling, hustling, hustling, in order to do some stuff, get things accomplished with our money.

You know what? I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with hustling. Sometimes we have to hustle to meet a deadline. Sometimes we’re hustling in the beginning of our business, to get all the things done and to get ourselves set up; dot the I’s, cross the T’s, throw spaghetti on the wall, and figure out what’s going on. It’s okay to hustle. I don’t want to bad-mouth hustling, it works.

I think it’s great. It creates a tremendous amount of momentum, and you keep going and going and going. You know what? You can hustle your way to $100,000 in your business, you can even hustle your way up to $200,000 in your business. But long-term hustling is not sustainable, you will hit burnout.

I don’t think that you can hustle your way to a million-dollar business, probably depends on the kind of business that you have. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with hustling, and it’s okay. But be introspective with yourself. Check-in with your body, and your energy and your energy reserves. Make sure you put in a little bit of time, some downtime, to let yourself rejuvenate and get your energy resources back again.

For me, it is definitely on the Shabbat, on Sabbath, when I completely, 100% disconnect from my business and offline. Then, of course, there’s vacation times. Then, as you make more money in your business, you increase your income, then you can take a step back and say, “Okay, I can’t really keep doing this over and over and over again. Who do I need to bring on my team? Who can take over some of those activities? I’m doing them, okay.” This is what I would call my zone of competence, but not my zone of genius.

“I’m doing these activities, okay. But if I were to bring somebody on my team, who could take some of the work off of my plate, then I could focus more in the genius that I can bring to my business. I can be much more in my CEO brain, and in my planning, and in my strategizing than in my doing, doing, doing type of persona.”  Again, if you want to hustle in your business, go for it, but figure out when your energy is being stretched.

This is what happened, by the way, to me, in the beginning of 2022. I had 19 full-time clients in my business. I was feeling drained energetically. I said to myself, “You know what? Now it’s time for me to launch a program because I am maxed out energetically. There is more growth in my business, there’s more for me to share. Now I’m going to create a group program.” I’m so blessed to be able to serve 9 clients in a single hour.

That is the one-to-many model that so many of us aspire to. But hey, I hustled in my business, and I was working with many one-to-one clients over the last 8 years in my business. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, I learned a tremendous amount. Then, it was time for me to shift my business model.

Now, I have a hybrid business model where I’m working one-on-one with some clients. I’m working in a group program with other clients. For me, that’s working for today, and that’s a beautiful thing. Check in where you are, and figure out what your next step is.

Money lesson number eight, not everyone is meant to be with you for every step of your journey. You can read into this so many different ways. You can learn from this statement in so many different ways.

Let’s first talk about your clients. You might work with clients and want to work with them forever. You just love them so much. They’re having so much growth and development when you’re working with them. You’re thinking, “Wow, wouldn’t it be amazing if we kept working together?” Because you as a business owner, I’ll look to myself, me, as a coach, I continue to grow and develop as a person.

I would love to share that with my clients. Help them to stay in my container and work with me, to continue growing and developing as a person and as a business owner, and in their relationship with money. But guess what? We are not meant to work with every person for our entire journey, in our business.

Some people are here to work with us for 6 months. Some people are here to work with us for 12 months. Each one of us has a set timeframe that is divinely guided, in which we are supposed to, whatever that means, in which we work with our clients.

Recently, when I was looking at my email list, I noticed some people who had been previous clients of mine, unsubscribe from my email list. Initially, it’s like, “Wow, I can’t believe that they unsubscribed. She was a client. We worked together, that was amazing.” There was a little bit inside of me that was, maybe even incensed, or hurt that they left.

Then I really have to just stop myself in my tracks and say, “Wait a second, she got what she needed. Our relationship is complete. Not every one of my clients is meant to be with me for her entire journey. Bless her and release her.”  I’m just also sharing with you, that I’m a normal person, with normal thoughts and feelings. There is a little ping of regret or discomfort when people who worked with me say goodbye and leave.

That’s why I always have to come back to the truth, that not every one of our clients is meant to be with us for our entire journey. That’s also true, if you hire someone. One of my clients, she worked with me for 6 months. She was telling me recently, that as she grew her business, one of the employees that she had in her business was no longer suitable. It was great when she was in that hustling phase of her business. Her employee really took a lot of the day-to-day admin. stuff off of her plate.

But as she grew, she needed a more professional staff. It wasn’t suitable anymore that this person, who had come in without the skill set that my client needed to grow her business, was still on her team. She had to let her go and bring in somebody to fill that position, plus other needs in the business. Someone who was more professional, had more experience, more background, whatever it was.

But that’s also true, that not everyone is meant to be with us for our entire journey, for the people whom we employ. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable, especially if you have a small business and the people working for you are really like family. And, it feels uncomfortable for you. You don’t want to hurt their feelings, or put them in a financially stretched position by saying, “Thank you very much, you’ve been amazing. But it’s not going to work for my business, going forward.”

I want to offer to you, as a business owner, that sometimes we have to have these uncomfortable conversations with the people who are working for us. In fact, just this week, I was speaking with two of my clients, and one of them is doing visioning about how she wants to quadruple her business in the next few years. One of her employees, who is a virtual employee and lives in the same country, never wants to have to come into an office.

My client does envision that as she quadruples her business, she is going to have an in-person office experience. Maybe not daily, but sometime during the week, or during the month. I brought that up to her, and I said, “You know what? This person is great on your team, today,” it’s really her right-hand woman.

“But,” I said, “Maybe she’s not going to be the person, right? I’m not putting any ideas into your head. But don’t design your business around one employee. Because there are more people in the world who could fit in your business model when it is four times as large as it is today.”

Then, a similar conversation came up yesterday, with some of my clients. There are certain services that they’re offering in their business, and as they grow, they might have to cut off some of those services and no longer offer them. Whether it’s employees or services, things that you offer in your business, there might be a time where you say, “This was a beautiful chapter in our lives together. But now it’s time to say goodbye.”

Money lesson number nine, and we’re going to finish up with this, that money is a tool. Money is beautiful. It’s very useful. It can give you life experiences that you might not have without money. It definitely, definitely speeds things up, whether that’s a taxi that’s gonna get you from A to B, or medical services that you might want, or higher-level alternative medicine, specialists that you might want. And yet, at the end of the day, your connection with human beings matters for your well-being more than the amount of money you have.

Now, there are statistics that say, and research has been done that says your level of happiness is maxed out at $75,000 of income a year. That study was done several years ago, I don’t remember when it was done anymore. But probably today, it’s maybe more like $100,000. I don’t know what the max amount is.

But even still, you can earn a million dollars a year, you can earn $5 million a year and you know what? At the end of the day, if you have a lot of money in the bank but you’re missing connections with human beings, there’s going to be a big piece in your heart, and in your energy body, that is going to be missing out on part of the beautiful life experiences that we have in this world.

Humans are wired for human connection, so if you are ignoring your family, and not having relationships with friends because you’re putting all of your time and effort into your money, I think that you’re missing out on a big piece of being human being in the world.

Therefore, I would encourage you to do what we’ve talked about in some of the recent episodes of the podcast. That is, to make decisions on things that you’re doing in your life and your business, or whatever, that you can let go of, so that you have more time and energy to be with the people in your life that really matter.

Money comes and goes. The people in your life also come and go. You don’t want to have any regrets when you get to your deathbed and… Sorry to be morbid, sometimes I end up being a little bit morbid, or maybe you call it realistic, on this podcast. But you know what? At the end of the day, it’s the people who surround us that we’re going to remember most. And the experiences that we have with our family, with our friends, that we will remember most.

If you have experience on your local beach, local river, at a local waterpark during the summer, whatever it is, rather than flying off to the Bahamas or Tahiti and having a water experience there… But there is family connection, I think that that really overrides everything.

Those, my friends, are the 9 money lessons that I have to share with you, in honor of my 59th birthday. I said, at the beginning of the podcast, I was going to share a special birthday offer with you, and that is…

Because I believe so strongly in healing your relationship with money, and doing it deeply on a nervous system level, I’m offering Money Healing sessions; a 2-session package with me is $590. That’s 59 with a little zero at the end, and you get 2 hours of deep Money Healing with me. You can stack 3 offers together, meaning you can buy up to 6 Money Healing sessions with me.

We can look into your family-of-origin story around money. We can look into the way you’re feeling about saving money and earning money, and what needs to be opened up inside of you to be released and dissolved, in order for you to feel much more open to asking for money, receiving money and holding on to money.

We can look at relationship with investing money. I spoke a little bit about my relationship with investing here on the podcast today, and how much angst I was feeling about selling stocks in a down market. Then of course, there was that time, many years ago, where I made a big blooper. I lost $50,000 because of my relationship with money, that needed to be healed. I needed to do some cleaning and clearing there, so that I could invest long term.

These different aspects of our relationship with money are sourced in our nervous system. When we work together, we can really unravel what it is that’s blocking you, deconstruct what’s going on, and reprogram your mind and your body to have more money and build long-term wealth.

If that’s something that interests you, please reach out to me by email, Debbie@debbiesassen.com and let me know that you’re interested in Money Healing sessions. If you’re on my newsletter, I let you know that those sessions were available until my Hebrew birthday, which comes out on July 31st. For my podcast listeners, I’m leaving that open until August 10th.

It’s something new. I’m trying it out. And so far, a couple of people have signed up. It’s a beautiful offering and I’m happy for you to join me on your Money Healing journey.

Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today, and I look forward to seeing you next week. Bye.

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.