Healing Financial Trauma: Transformational Financial Therapy with Nate Astle

Josh: Welcome to the Wealth and Yourself Podcast, where we help people to design their ideal life and take control of their time and money. I’m your host, Josh St. Laurent. Today we’re joined by Nate Astel. Nate is the founder of the Financial Therapy Clinical Institute. He is a licensed marriage and family therapist and certified financial therapist.

He specializes in couples emotions and money and financial trauma. As a past board member of the Financial Therapy Association, he has been featured in numerous outlets like CNBC. USA Today, TD Ameritrade and Money Geek. Nate, so glad you’re here.

Nate: Yeah, I’m excited to be here.

Josh: Hey, so for anyone listening who isn’t familiar with you, can you tell us about you and your work? 

Nate: Sure. So my background is in. Couples and family therapy. Honestly, my whole professional experience up to this point has been helping people work through the emotional parts of money, the parts that we don’t talk about a whole lot. I, I have been in private practice for several years working with couples with financial conflict or people with.

Maybe overspending patterns that they’re looking to change. Recently I opened the Financial Therapy Clinical Institute, which is a collaborative practice, meaning I work with financial counselors and financial planners to provide a holistic treatment team approach to money. It’s been really, really fun.

It’s kind of my, it’s my dream job and I’m, I’m doing it, so it is very lucky that way.

Josh: Yeah. That’s incredible. I want to talk a little bit more about the clinical institute. Can you kind of give us a brief backstory of like how this all came to be, you know, were you the marriage and family therapist first and got interested in money and then became a financial therapist? Or how did this journey kind of culminate.

Nate: Yeah. I was very lucky That I kind of found out what I want to do. Early in my career, I was in grad school to become a marriage and family therapist. That was a long time in the cards for me. I was looking for a job on campus and got one as a peer financial counselor. So I was helping other students, you know, build budgets and.

You know, understand the basics of credit and things like that. Honestly, I always, I always liked money stuff. It was interesting to me, but it was during that time in my master’s where you realize how deep money really is. We like to talk about numbers and we like to talk about how. We almost treat money like a, it’s a hard science, but it’s not it’s inherently emotional.

You will never be able to experience your money without experiencing your emotions. And so we need to talk about money differently. In that process, I realize that I like this stuff and I. I’m willing to talk about it, which unfortunately, many therapists aren’t. At the time I kind of came up with this dream, like even in grad school that I was gonna open up some kind of practice that included lots of different types of people. 

By the way, this is like, yes, it’s a new idea in the financial therapy space, but we’ve had treatment teams for decades. We’ve had disordered eating clinics with a dietician and a therapist, and maybe a medical doctor or a nurse, and people work together all the time.

We just haven’t seen it. Very rarely, if at all, in the financial planning, financial therapy space. What I hope is, is that what I’m doing at the institute gets copied and people do it better than me, and mental health and financial professionals can work together more often.

Josh: I love the idea. Can you talk a little bit about what’s the work that you’re doing there? What kind of professionals are included and maybe even some of the most common things that you see or encounter.

Nate: The things that I’m doing with clients are the psychological, emotional, relational aspects of money. It very much follows a. Traditional vanilla therapy kind of process. I’m asking them about their feelings. I’m asking them to talk to each other.

I do a lot of couples work there. I also work with a financial counselor, and they are doing more what I’ll call day-to-day money management behavior stuff. So if someone has never had a spending plan or a budget, or they don’t know how to create one, they don’t know how to. Look at all their accounts in a good way it’s that day-to-day financial education that most of us didn’t get growing up.

And sometimes we just kind of need someone to hold our hand while we’re doing it. And that’s what the financial counselor’s doing. I also work with financial planners and they’re doing more of a macro view of the person’s financial life. You know, long-term retirement savings, saving for. college buying a home, all that kind of big financial decision making.

And how we work together is we each have a session with the client and we’re doing some assessments, and then we have a group meeting with all of us, plus the client, and we establish some kind of treatment plan. Usually it’s some kind of cadence where let’s say most of the issues that they’re need, Working through require therapy they’ll be working mostly with me, so maybe every other week with me once a month with a financial counselor in two or three sessions with a financial planner to get a financial plan in place.

The idea here is that we’re all talking to each other and so if something comes up in a therapy session, That feels number heavy that they need someone like that. I would then say, Hey, financial counselor in your next session, like, just be aware that this came up in our session. Might be worth talking about.

Or if they’re building a budget and a big emotional outburst or expression comes up around maybe some specific line item in their budget, that would be something that I can then approach in therapy. Like, Hey, like What do you think was happening there in that moment? It’s really cool.

We get to talk about really fun stuff in our regular meetings. And we get to help clients, I think, on a deeper level than they’re used to. 

Josh: Yeah, you’re getting me excited about this idea. Like the collaborativeness of it, I think can’t be understated even as a financial planner myself a lot of times it’s referring to the C P A or the estate planning attorney, and there’s not a lot of conversation between us. Certainly not on the level that you’re talking about.

And I wanted to circle back to financial therapists on the team, financial counselor financial planner. So maybe for someone listening I know for me in my graduate studies, I was like, wow, like mind blown. Like I had been a financial planner already for 10 years and I didn’t know there was financial therapist or financial counselors.

So, you know, to the average person listening who maybe has. Never had experience with a financial counselor or a financial therapist. Can you speak to like, what does that process entail? What normally gets covered? 

Nate: The way I think about financial therapy, ’cause it’s a big broad term. It’s almost an umbrella term where it can describe quite a few different processes. How I think about it is looking at all the human sides of money. Honestly, how I approach financial therapy is very similar to how I approach normal therapy. 

We’re gonna talk about your experiences around money. are gonna be looking at your past because I think that is a huge piece of information of why we’re experiencing the present the way we are. We’re gonna talk about emotions. I’m a big emotions guy, in more ways than one.

You know, our emotions hugely dictate our financial behavior. And that’s not necessarily bad. But what it does mean is that we need to be aware of our emotions and we need to have lots of different responses to them. So for example, If my go-to response to stress is to buy something we need to be able to start recognizing when am I feeling stressed?

What does it feel like in my body what are lots of different things I can do when I’m feeling stressed? I do a lot of work around financial trauma stuff, so some people have very significant. Financial experiences. I grew up in poverty. My parents got a divorce and money was really tight for a while.

My parent was a gambling addict. doesn’t even have to be childhood stuff. I lost a job or there was some major change in my financial situation. You know, trauma is one of those things that. We think we understand, but it can look like a whole lot of different things. It’s, it’s not just, combat veterans and car accidents.

It’s a tiny build up of stressors that we haven’t fully processed or dealt with, and it shows up in our day-to-day life. When I describe what financial trauma is to clients, A lot of ’em say, oh, I, yeah, that’s something I recognize and relate with.

Josh: Yeah, it’s so common and I think a lot of people don’t even realize a lot of times until they start talking about it. Oh yeah. You know, I do get extremely stressed every time I open my budget or try to have this conversation with my partner. Would you be able to share. Obviously with no client names or anything, but maybe a success story of, hey, I came in to meet with this couple and the issues they were having. These are some of the things that we tried and did, and, you know, six weeks later this is where they were able to get to.

Nate: Yeah, well six weeks is a very fast therapy growth. You know, there’s a lot of different types of scenarios. A lot of times when couples are coming in, they wanna get somewhere maybe if they want to save for a house or they want to get out of debt and they, take the stress, the concern, and maybe some of it is, you know, their behavior or their partner’s behavior, but they make their partner the bad guy.

We don’t get very far if we are antagonistic towards our partners. One of my first jobs is how do we help this become a team project? Even if you both have different sides to it, it’s kind of like parenting, like you’re, there’s gonna be some things that one of you excels at that the other doesn’t do as well.

But this is a team project. And if both of you aren’t engaged in it, it’s gonna cause resentment and it’s not gonna get done in the way that you need it to. So, some of the things that I’ve tried with lots of couples and generally works. So we start with some communication skills. I really like what we call the speaker listener technique.

It’s a very common couples communication intervention. You can Google it and find out everything that you need to know about it. It’s essentially a talking stick. You know, like ones we use with kindergartners, but it’s extremely effective. And when I’m holding the stick, I get to speak. But I have certain rules when I speak.

I’m not blaming, I’m not saying you did this or you did this. I’m gonna talk about myself, my experience, my feelings. I felt sad when you went over the budget or I felt angry when you were yelling at me, but I’m talking about me. And then if I don’t have the talking stick, I’m the listener. I also have certain rules.

I’m repeating back what I hear them say, and the goal of this whole activity is understanding. It’s not agreement, it’s understanding. And so working on things like couple communication, working on emotional expression, no emotion is good or bad, they also can’t run the show either. So how can I honor my feelings?

How can I recognize my feelings and validate their needs without them being the thing that determines how I behave? That’s easier said than done for sure, but that kind of works. It does take time and everyone comes in at a different level. Often. Unfortunately, women are socialized more around emotions than men are.

So they tend to be better communicators around money or around emotions. That doesn’t mean that men don’t have emotions. Men are very emotional, just like women like it. We’re all emotional people. But we have to learn to use a shared emotion language, otherwise we’re gonna be missing our connecting points. When we have those things in place, that’s when we can start getting into money and like, okay, we’re gonna talk about how we are gonna divide money or how we are gonna approach money in your family. But in order to do that, well, we need to recognize that we’re on the same team.

We need to be able to communicate and we need to be able to talk about our emotions around money without it becoming our partner’s problem. My problem isn’t with you, it’s with the problem. I’m giving broad strokes to what can be a very deep process, but these things tend to help a lot of people feel differently with their money and therefore behave differently with their money.

Josh: Couldn’t agree more let’s say someone’s listening. Let’s say a couple is listening and they’re resonating with us right now, and they’re saying, geez, you know, we’ve been fighting for. Years about money and we’ve never been able to get on the same page. Is there an exercise or a tool or an assessment of some sort that they can do at home?

Maybe just to gauge where they’re at, if it would be beneficial to speak with a financial therapist. Or to just kind of determine, where they’re at on a scale of, you know, communicating around money.

Nate: Sure. Yeah. Some starter ones that I use with a lot of couples. One is what we call the money timeline. The basic prompt is to think about emotional highs and emotional lows around money that you’ve had. It doesn’t just have to be about your money. For example, you could be a kid but still have negative financial experiences based on maybe the social class that you grew up in, or a major emotional experience that your parent had around money.

But just start mapping it out on a timeline and here is a high point, here is a low point and makes a little zigzag. You know, here’s a neutral point. do some basic introspective work. Like, why do I feel the way I feel around money? I think that’s important because a lot of times couples get stuck in their financial life.

As it relates to their partner, but you had a financial story. You had financial emotions long before you got together with your partner. So start there and then share it with each other. See if there’s anything that surprises you. You look at your timeline, as you look at your partner’s timeline, you have a discussion on is any of this past stuff affecting the now? How so? That kind of activity can go a really long way in building empathy. Like, oh, okay. My, either myself or my partner, we’re not stupid, we’re not bad with money. Let’s say a pet peeve of mine. We’ve been through life and that life has impacted us, so let’s make sure that we’re aware of that impact and, you know, maybe there’s some things we want to change. That can be a huge start as far as more of a financial heavy assessment that I like to do is I ask them to list out all their expenses but create kind of a yours, mine, and ours category. What are the things that directly benefit both of us?

These are things like our rent or our mortgage, our groceries. You know, utilities, house cleaning, if you pay for those kinds of services. Like what are the things that, so my partner’s name is Shelby, that Shelby and Nate both benefit from, what are the things that only Nate cares about or only Shelby Caress about?

And have them be separate categories. And then you can have more discussions about like, okay. Shelby really loves Legos, and she does love Legos, and I love Legos too. But I don’t want to spend as much money as she does on Legos. Let’s come up with some kind of system where she feels like she can still get her needs met, because it’s that important.

It’s important to have autonomy in our financial relationships, but in a way that’s also responsible and respects our mutual financial interests. Right. And I have things that she doesn’t care about. I really like video games and so that’s something I want to spend money on that she doesn’t. And so this is how we do it, but maybe there’s a certain dollar amount that we both get to spend X dollars a month on our personal interests.

And that allows us to be ourselves in a couple relationship. So, yeah, E, either of those activities is a really great starting point for couples, I think.

Josh: That’s huge and what I’m hearing is communication in both of ’em, right? It almost forces you to be put in a position where you have to talk about some of these uncomfortable things that maybe have never been brought up. Bring them out into the light. Hey. You are spending a fortune on Legos, let’s get on the same page, you know, and, and choose a dollar amount that we’re both comfortable with which I love.

And I wanted to revisit the timeline because I think in most cases it’s probably inevitable that a traumatic event is gonna end up on the timeline. How do you cover that as a couple, or is that something that really should be tackled with a financial therapist?

Nate: It depends, which is my non-answer for everything. there are gonna be some traumatic events that if you don’t have the skills, if you don’t know how to move forward from it, yeah, you need professional help and that’s okay. I think even just starting with. Acknowledging that a traumatic event happened, acknowledging the emotions that I felt then and acknowledging how the emotions I feel now as I think back to it I kind of think of emotions like this river, the river is constant, it doesn’t have a dry spell. We always have emotions. When we don’t know how to direct the river, we build dams and the dam makes the water build up, and then eventually it comes over the top of the dam. It breaks through the dam sometimes violently, and we are like, holy crap.

I had so many feelings about this and I never realized it. Healing from trauma is kind of like picking apart your damn bit by bit, so that you are not gonna get, you know, smacked with a big emotional disturbance. Some of that picking or like breaking down of that damn can be done by yourself. Some of it might require a jackhammer that maybe a therapist has access to.

I think, you know, journaling is a great exercise. Exercise is a great exercise. Talking is a hugely important exercise. But that’s, yeah. How we heal from trauma is a long road. Sometimes it requires therapy. Sometimes it requires time, but it always requires effort.

Josh: What about mindset? My, I can’t help but think hear this all the time. I’m sure you do as well. People have sort of blocks, you know, I can’t save or I can’t stop spending. You know, and there’s a million iterations of this. Is there an exercise people can do, whether it’s meditation or something else, to improve their mindset around money?

in a way that maybe cultivates abundance or know, the ability to kind of change their habits or behaviors? I’m curious.

Nate: mindset is one of those things that I have feelings about. Honestly, I think it’s one of the things that we overuse. And the reason I say that is people’s reality is based on data points that they have. it is important that when we have a belief, okay, like, I, I can’t save money or, you know, I’m gonna take that one. It is important that we look at our data points and we say, are there alternative data points? Have there been times when I’ve been able to save money, or have there been times where I’ve been able to keep my spending in check, even if it’s just for a day? That kind of alternative data is actually really important because even though there might be a trend of like, This is something I struggle with.

I’m not gonna tell my client no, you’re not struggling with this. I’m not going to invalidate their truth. I do think it’s important on a critical thinking lens that we’re able to say maybe there’s more to this than just the belief. We call it a cognitive distortion.

a thought pattern that causes harm and one of the most common is what we call black and white thinking. So anytime you’re dealing, sorry, this is a Star Wars reference, only a STH lives in absolutes. Right. But anytime you’re thinking, I am bad at money, it’s like maybe we can change them. I’ve made some decisions that aren’t great with money, but they don’t define me.

We’re not our worst days, we’re not our mistakes. And I may struggle or have struggled with money. I’m struggling with money, but that isn’t a death sentence of what our relationships with money are gonna be like. I need that psychological wiggle room. I do think it’s important to acknowledge. Societal factors outside of a person’s control. and I’m like, yeah, you’ve been living in poverty for a long time, or you’ve experienced sexism or racism or some ism that is impacting how you experience the world. It isn’t my place to say, no, that’s not it.

It’s a piece of how you’re experiencing this. Some of the things we can change, we can change our thought patterns. Absolutely. There’s some things that we can’t change and we need to acknowledge that too, but none of it is black and white. Like there’s always something that we can do I am a firm believer that small changes over time add up to a lot.

You know, how do we change our mindset? Our mindset is fluid, and if we can find fluidity and avoid rigidity, or avoid the, this is how it is and always will be, I think it gives us more options, which helps us feel better. At the very least,

Josh: It seems like reframing plays a big part there, kind of where your focus goes, plays a big part in your emotions.

Nate: Yeah. And in order to reframe effectively, we have to validate where they’re at. It isn’t our job to argue with our clients or say, no, you’re not experiencing that. we don’t want to do, but we want to do, yes. And. Right and say, yeah, it sounds like it has been really hard to save, or it sounds like it’s been really hard to get your spending under control.

And you showed up here and you’re getting some help. You’re doing some homework that I ask you to do, you’re checking in with your emotions we’re challenging maybe some of the effects that trauma has had on your life. You’re taking this damn down brick by brick that is gonna feel very different than, no, it’s all in your head. We don’t want to gaslight our clients either.

Josh: What about things people can stop doing? I gotta imagine there are common things that you see maybe related to mindset, that people are doing, that is, that’s actually harming them from a financial or emotional wellbeing standpoint.

Nate: Stop not talking about it. It’s a double negative. It’s really hard to do things alone. It’s hard to change our relationships if we’re not talking about it. It’s hard to change our sex life if we’re not talking about it. It’s hard to change our money life if we’re not talking about it. Bring in people. the isolation, I’m gonna validate is a normal response to stress isn’t helpful. So can we open up our resources a bit more our our people resources? in the effort of avoiding black and white thinking I don’t like telling people, don’t make this financial choice, or do you make this financial choice I think there’s very few universal bad and very few universal good financial choices. Most of the time we’re just doing the best we can with what we have and can we be focused on doing a little bit better? 

Josh: keep thinking of the analogy of the river and the dam and you just taking blocks off of this dam. You know, you’re uh, in the dam deconstruction business. So I wanna switch gears a little bit. I didn’t wanna miss talking about this sort of professional development. You’ve worn so many hats and started the clinical institute and help other therapists upskill in this area.

So can you speak to kind of the business development side of things and what that’s been like for you?

Nate: The dream is a dream come true. The doing it has not been, if I’m being honest, I don’t love every part of the tasks that I have to do, but I’m really happy with the goal that I’m moving towards. So that is something that’s really important to me is I do want financial therapy to be more easily recognized in the public sphere.

But I also really need therapists and financial planners to. I know that it’s a thing too. So how I’ve been trying to do that. We have some training courses. They’re just on demand recordings essentially that people can get CE for continuing education credits on, you know, couples and money, financial trauma.

We just finished one on family financial trauma. I’m currently building a course entirely on how to start a financial therapy business, so Who are the legal experts you need to be talking to? What are the ethical things you need to keep in mind? How do you wanna market yourself? All those kinds of things. It’s not fun. I, I don’t love being a business owner and developer, but I really care about the goal, and so I’m willing to put up with some crap if it means that I get to go where I want to go, and be the change I want to see in the world. 

Josh: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I’ll just chime in. As a financial planner who’s gone through the financial therapy curriculum, it was life changing for me, changed how I interact with clients, what we talk about, the order that we talk about things. So I mean, I would recommend that for any planner listening and then I can really relate to what you’re saying about the business development side of things, having launched my own firm.

I love being a financial planner. Do I love marketing or compliance or all these other things that come along with it? No, not really. But you have to do those things to carry out the vision. 

I guess if someone’s listening and they’re saying, well, hey, I am interested in financial therapy, or starting a financial therapy business, what would be their first step?

Where would they be, what would they do next?

Nate: A lot of this I think, falls in line with maybe more traditional business advice of what’s your business plan? What is your goal? How are you gonna make money? That is important? How do you want to spend your time? it’s really important. ’cause I think especially for new business owners, we do a lot of stuff that we don’t want to do.

But we have to, maybe that’s important for a certain time, but eventually we need to get to the point of are there tasks that I need to offload or outsource because I don’t have the mental capacity to be like my own office assistant. I don’t have the mental capacity to do all these other things.

Are there certain things that’s better to pay someone else to do? It was probably a solid year into having my own business, but I did end up getting an office assistant, a virtual office assistant, that was hugely helpful and beneficial. It just gives me back the head space that I needed.

Other things you know, to think about is when you’re marketing yourself, what am I comfortable doing and what am I not comfortable doing if I’m not comfortable doing something? Don’t market yourself as that. That’s something I see a lot of people do is I, I’m a generalist, but they don’t do anything particularly well.

Stick to the things that you’re really, really good at and if something else comes up, acknowledge that it might not be your forte, and see if the client still wants to continue meeting with you or if you need to find a referral. That doesn’t need to be a hit to your ego. None of us are perfect at everything.

And I actually think it’s the ethical thing to do is to send a referral or send them other places if you don’t have the skillset to handle it. The other thing I will say specifically about financial therapy is it’s a relatively new field. it has been around for 15 years, but that isn’t long compared to most.

Professions. It’s easy to be a big fish in a small pond. If you even just start talking about financial therapy concepts and you put content out there. For me, my main platform is LinkedIn, but if you put stuff out there, people will resonate with it because it’s not talked about. And so if we can, Do what you’re doing, Josh, like putting content out there, meeting with financial therapists, putting the good word out. I think it’s easy to rise in the ranks, whatever that means in the financial therapy world. it’s not like you have 30,000 other financial planners that you’re trying to find space in.

You’ve got maybe 50 of us that are doing this work as practitioners and so it’s easier than you think to start a financial therapy business. I will say that.

Josh: Yeah, and I want to add in, I think for the financial planners listening, I have had conversations with quite a few who are, I won’t say skeptical, but unsure. You know, they don’t have experience in the therapy space. They’re not sure how their clients could benefit from it. My own personal experience was that my wife and I communicate much better about money now just going through the curriculum of financial therapy and doing some of those exercises.

So, I mean, I’ll just echo what you said. It’s worth dipping your toe in the water and starting in that process. I do want to transition, there’s three questions that I like to ask everybody, you know, towards the end. The first one is, what does living a wealthy life look like to you?

Nate: Authentic. Because of these dams that have been built, most of us aren’t acknowledging our emotions the way they need to be acknowledged. When we talk about wealth and money, yes, our dollars and cents absolutely impact our mental health and our happiness, right? if we can be able to identify emotions, express them effectively with others, Build relationships that feel safe. You’re as wealthy as you’re gonna be. And I think that authenticity of the way I am feeling on the inside, thinking on the inside is how I’m behaving in the real world. That is, that can be a really beautiful thing, really healing thing. ‘ cause most of us are masked. We’re hiding our emotions, we’re hiding our hurts.

We’re shells of who we really are because of these dams that are built up over time. So let’s take down some dams and be authentic people, and I think that’s the greatest wealth we can have.

Josh: A wealthy life is an authentic life.

If you could give one message to someone working to gain financial freedom, who isn’t there yet, what would it be?

Nate: Be kind to yourself. It’s cliche, but it works. Rome wasn’t built in a day. you don’t have to either. Just a little step. Goes a very long way if we’re consistently doing it, even if we’re not consistently doing it. But we’re consistently trying and that goes a huge way. And while you’re in the process, which every human is, I don’t think financial freedom is ever, it’s not exactly like a goal where we cross the goal and then we never have to deal with it again.

In this human journey. Just remember to be kinder to yourself than you probably are. I think most of us are harder on ourselves and it’s helpful or useful. We don’t really kick ourselves up. It’s not the direction we go when we’re getting kicked.

Josh: That’s a good point. Now, final question is just around if you were starting over completely from scratch with no resources besides a thousand dollars what would be the first thing you do with that money?

Nate: Hmm, that’s a good question. I have a thousand dollars. Is this like post high school? What’s, what’s the idea?

Josh: Yeah, just graduated college, I’ll say.

Nate: Well, just graduated college and I have a thousand dollars. I think I’d wanna set some of that aside to celebrate where I’ve already come from. I think celebrating, including with money, is important.

Of course I would want to save some of it, and then I’d want most of it to go to work somehow, whether it’s, whether it’s investing, whether it’s I’m putting it towards, Opening my business or getting my business license, whether it’s, it’s doing something for me that, that’s a good use of money.

I think it’s really easy to, especially if you come from a place where you haven’t had a lot of money, it’s really easy to kind of hoard onto it. And we don’t, we don’t like spending any money, but sometimes spending money on things that are worthwhile. Like that’s the point. Like money is only as valuable as we think it is, let’s put it towards things that matter to us.

Josh: Yeah, invest that money back into yourself in a way.

Nate: Yeah,

Josh: Where can listeners find you online?

Nate: I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. I. So you can just search Nathan Astle, financial therapist. My two private practices, one is called Relational Money and that’s the one that’s just me. And then my collaborative practices, the Financial Therapy Clinical Institute. And we have, you know, blogs and podcasts that have been on and different content you can engage with there.

But I’m happy to respond to anybody. Reach out. Just email me and I’m here.

Josh: I will make sure to put those links in the show notes too so people can find you easily.

What. Haven’t we talked about? What did I miss? What is a topic that you love that I did not ask you about? Is there something that we overlooked?

Nate: I, you know, Legos are definitely up there. I am a bit of a Lego nerd and it’s been just so fun. I think, and it kind of goes with my last point, like, money can be fun. A lot of us have trauma, we have the dams that right now it’s hard to think of money as fun. But being able to put money into things that you love can be incredibly joyful.

one thing that I would encourage people to do is find your inner child, spend money on stuff. At least once that you always wanted as a kid. Whether it’s an ice cream cone or Legos or a video C, but like, just ’cause you’re an adult doesn’t mean you’re not a kid anymore. I would say that another part of a wealthy life is don’t lose fun.

Fun is important. Just think about the things that you liked as a kid. You probably still like them now. if you could throw away the social rules that say you’re not allowed to like it anymore, you probably would still like it. So that’s the last nugget of wisdom for the world.

Josh: That’s a really good nugget. And I think it’s funny when we go through these exercises with clients, like those things typically don’t cost a lot of money, right? You can go buy a Lego kit and, and build a dam right at home, you know, if you want to, and it’s not gonna cost you that much money. So I love that.

I think that’s a perfect place to wrap.

Nate: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me, Josh.

Josh: Yeah, absolutely. So this has been The Wealth In Yourself Podcast, where we help people to design their ideal life and take control of their time and money. Our guest today was Nate Astle, founder of the Financial Therapy Clinical Institute. We’ll see you next week, and thanks for listening.