A small favor before we get into it: For the Record by Shannah Game grows almost entirely by word of mouth. If you like what you read, like it, comment, or forward it to someone who should be here too.

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I have a secret bet I make with myself every time I start working with a new woman. I don’t tell her about it because that would make the first five minutes of our session unnecessarily strange, but before we even get to the money, I usually have a pretty good idea who she is.

She’s smart. Mostly in her 40s or 50s. High achiever. Capable. The person who gets shit done. She has her hands in twelve things at once, has built a career or a business — sometimes both — and is usually the one other people come to when something needs to be figured out.

Then we start talking about money.

This is when I make my bet: How long before she says some version of “I feel like there’s never enough” or “I really thought I’d be further along by now”?

Usually, I don’t have to wait very long.

And the woman saying this is almost never someone who knows nothing about money. Quite the opposite. She’s usually been trying very fucking hard.

She saves. She earns. She has a retirement account. She knows she should invest. She’s read the books, listened to the podcasts, and made the spreadsheet.

Dear God, has she made the spreadsheet?

Sometimes, objectively, she’s doing really well.

And still, underneath everything, there’s this low-grade hum: Is this enough? Am I okay? Should I have more by now? What if something happens? What if I can’t keep earning like this forever?

Somewhere around midlife, the volume on those questions seems to get turned up.

At 27, you could always tell yourself there was plenty of time. At 47 or 52, the math feels different. You can see retirement from here. Maybe you want to leave your job, change careers, build something new, take six months off, help your parents, help your kids or simply stop working quite so fucking hard.

And your brain immediately asks:

Yes, but can we afford it?

That’s when money stops being just money.

It becomes proof. Proof that you made good choices. Proof that you’re safe. Proof that you didn’t screw up. Proof that all the working, striving and being responsible was eventually leading somewhere.

Which is a hell of a lot to ask from a 401(k).

✦ THE POINT

Being financially competent and feeling financially safe are not the same thing.

I know because I’ve lived on both sides of that sentence.

I became a CFP. I taught money for years. I built businesses around money. I could explain retirement accounts, investments, and cash flow and all the things we’re supposed to understand in order to become Very Responsible Adults.

You know what all that knowledge did not magically do?

Make money emotionally neutral.

Knowing more didn’t automatically stop fear. Making more didn’t automatically create the feeling of enough. Understanding the numbers didn’t prevent me from attaching a whole bunch of meaning to them.

Because none of us experiences money as a spreadsheet. We experience it through our history, our relationships, what we watched growing up, what happened when money disappeared, what happened when we finally made some, and all the invisible rules about what someone our age is supposed to have figured out by now.

That’s why telling a woman who already feels behind to “just save more” can be approximately as useful as telling someone with insomnia to “try getting more sleep.”

Excellent suggestion. Hadn’t considered it.

The more interesting question is: What keeps happening with money even though you know better?

Maybe you spend when you want to feel something and hate yourself afterward. Maybe you avoid the numbers because looking feels like judgment. Maybe you check them constantly because checking gives you a tiny hit of control. Maybe you keep chasing the next income number because surely that will be the one that finally lets you exhale.

That’s the part I’m interested in now.

Not because the numbers don’t matter. They absolutely do.

But because a lot of very smart women assume they need another money strategy when what they’re actually caught in is a money pattern.

And patterns don’t disappear because someone hands you a prettier spreadsheet.

✦ MONEY SHIT YOU SHOULD KNOW

Here’s a question more of us in our 40s and 50s probably need to ask our parents:

“If something happened to you tomorrow, what would I need to know?”

Not exactly brunch conversation, but important.

Where are the accounts? Who handles the taxes? Is there a will? Life insurance? A safe-deposit box? What bills are on autopay? Where are the important documents?

This is why I love the idea of a simple legacy file — one place that gives someone a map of your financial life if you can’t explain it yourself.

Not every password. Not a 78-page binder.

Just enough that the people you love aren’t trying to solve a financial escape room while they’re also grieving.

And yes, after you ask your parents, ask yourself too.

Yeah, that’s my lovely parents with Jeff and me…and yes, I’ve asked the question.

✦ WHAT I’M WORKING ON

This is basically why I created Money Steady.

I spent a lot of my career helping people understand what to do with money. These days, I’m much more interested in the question underneath it:

Why aren’t you doing the thing you already know to do? And why do you keep doing the thing you swore you’d stop doing?

Money Steady is four weeks of private 1:1 work with me to figure that out. We look at the spending, avoiding, controlling, overworking, fear or never-enoughness that keeps showing up, figure out what’s driving it, and start changing what happens next.

This isn’t financial planning. It’s the emotional and behavioral part of money that tends to get ignored while everyone keeps handing you more math.

I have six September spots. Four private sessions, between-session experiments + voice support. $1,400, with payment plans available.

WORK WITH ME →

✦ CURRENTLY

THINKING ABOUT: How many things we call “money problems” are actually fear, shame, identity, or exhaustion wearing a little dollar-sign hat.

WATCHING: The Dog House New Zealand. If watching dogs find their people does not emotionally destroy you, I have questions. Grab popcorn. Also tissues.

MAKING: An unreasonable number of cupcakes while attempting to turn “maybe I should start a cupcake business” into an actual cupcake business.

READING: The Culting of America, co-written by my lovely neighbor. Fascinating, unsettling, and definitely not what I’d recommend opening nine minutes before bedtime.

REMINDING MYSELF: Wanting more doesn’t mean everything you already have is evidence that you failed.

Thanks for being here. For the Record grows almost entirely by word of mouth, which is a lovely way of saying: if this made you think, laugh, feel mildly called out, or immediately think of a woman who would get it, I’d be grateful if you liked it, left a comment, or shared it with her.

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Occupation: __________________

I stared at it for an embarrassingly long time. What the hell do I put there? Money expert sounds boring. Entrepreneur sounds vague. “Helping women understand the emotional shit underneath their money” is actually pretty accurate, but apparently doctor’s-office forms aren’t looking for a manifesto.

So I did what any perfectly capable 49-year-old woman with an MBA and several decades of work experience would do: I asked ChatGPT.

I eventually wrote Behavioral Money Expert. Then the doctor came in, saw it, asked what that meant, and I proceeded to ramble off approximately seven different things I do. Perfect.

Maybe that’s part of why Dolly’s death is hitting me harder than I expected. My whole life, I’ve been trying to figure out what box I belong in.

I’m a money person, but I’m also a writer. I’m an entrepreneur, a teacher, and a creative. I’ve spent years teaching financial literacy and talking about the emotions underneath money. I built a podcast, ran it for a decade, and eventually sold it. I speak. I make things. I love business.

And I also really, really love to bake.

In fact, here’s something I haven’t publicly announced yet: I’m building a pop-up cupcake business in Asheville. Gluten-free cupcakes, because apparently selling a podcast and then deciding at 49 that you should start slinging cupcakes is a perfectly reasonable career trajectory.

It makes almost no sense on LinkedIn.

Which may be exactly why I love it.

For years, I thought life would be easier if I could just be one thing. An architect. A librarian. A marine biologist. Something you could say at a dinner party without needing an additional three minutes to explain yourself.

I could have taken a much more traditional path in my own field. I could have built a financial planning firm, managed assets, made very good money, and had a perfectly respectable answer every time someone asked what I did for a living.

But that wasn’t me.

And that’s one of the things I always loved most about Dolly Parton. She never seemed particularly interested in making herself easier for other people to understand.

Imagine someone telling Dolly Parton to tone it down. Less hair. Fewer rhinestones. Shorter nails. Maybe ease up on the outfits. Pick a lane.

And somehow, her answer seemed to be: more.

More hair. More sparkle. More songs. More businesses. More generosity. More Dolly.

She could write a song that broke your heart and make a dirty joke five minutes later. She could be wildly glamorous and an incredibly sharp businesswoman. She could build an enormous career and quietly give away millions of books to children. She could be taken seriously without having to become serious.

That last part gets me.

Because I think a lot of women learn the opposite. Be smart, but don’t be intimidating. Be successful, but don’t talk about it too much. Be ambitious, but make it palatable. Be attractive, but not too much. Be different, but not so different that everyone gets uncomfortable.

And for God’s sake, eventually pick a lane.

I learned some version of that lesson early. In sixth and seventh grade, I desperately wanted to be one of the popular girls, so I started trying to become whatever I thought they wanted me to be. It didn’t work. I had short hair. Puberty arrived before I had approved the plans. I didn’t look like the tall, skinny girls I wanted so badly to look like.

Somewhere in all that trying to fit in, I stopped being myself.

I didn’t end up more popular. I just ended up lonely.

That experience has followed me into adulthood more than I’d like to admit. I can still walk into a room full of accomplished women and, for a split second, wish I were somebody else. More polished. More successful. More certain. More easily explained.

And then there was Dolly, a woman who made an entire life out of being impossible to mistake for anyone else.

I find myself thinking, too, about the Dolly we never saw. The woman behind the rhinestones. I wonder what she worried about. What scared her. What happened in her marriage that never became anybody else’s business. What aging felt like. What grief felt like. What her body put her through. What happened when the woman who seemed perpetually joyful didn’t feel joyful at all.

I think about that because I’ve learned firsthand that two completely contradictory things can be true at exactly the same time.

In 2022, I had my best financial year ever. My podcast was thriving. Speaking opportunities were coming to me. On paper, I was having the kind of year I had worked toward for years.

Behind the picture, I also spent part of that year with panic disorder, lying on my couch, barely able to function, trapped inside a body that apparently hadn’t received the memo that WE WERE DOING GREAT.

Success and suffering. Gratitude and fear. Confidence and insecurity. You can hold all of it at once.

Maybe that’s another thing I’m learning in midlife: we aren’t supposed to resolve ourselves into one tidy thing.

Right now, I’m in the middle of a massive reinvention. I’m figuring out what I want my work to look like. I’m figuring out what I want to say. I’m figuring out how I want to make money. I’m talking about menopause, money, women, and enough. I’m baking cupcakes. I’m building things. I’m changing things.

And I still have no f**king clue what I’m going to write in the occupation box next time.

Maybe that’s okay.

Because when I think about Dolly Parton, I don’t think her lesson was simply be yourself. That feels too tidy for a woman like Dolly.

I think the lesson was this:

Become so fully yourself that eventually the box has to get bigger.

That’s the piece of Dolly I want to carry with me now. More creativity. More generosity. More laughter. More ridiculous ideas. More sparkle. Less apologizing for the parts that don’t seem to go together.

Maybe the goal was never to find the right box.

Maybe it was to stop needing one.

So the next time someone asks me what I do, maybe I won’t rattle off seven job titles. Maybe I’ll answer the question I wish we asked one another more often:

Who are you?

I’m still figuring that out.

But I’m finally starting to think that might be the whole point.

Thank you, Dolly, for being gloriously, unmistakably, excessively yourself.

The world already had everybody else.

xx,

Shannah

It’s my birthday week. I’m covered in gluten-free flour filming Bake It Out. And somehow, in the middle of all of it, I can’t stop thinking about this thing I want to make.

It’s called: Not Hating Money.

Two weeks. Short daily exercises. Me right there with you. No spreadsheets, no shame, just finally understanding why money feels the way it does in your body, and what changes when it doesn’t anymore.

Late July, early August. Not sure yet. But I wanted you to know first.

👉 Hit reply. Say “I’m in” or “tell me more” or just “yes.” That’s enough to know I should create this thing.

I’ll take it from there.

xo, Shannah

P.S. The cocoa powder situation on today’s episode is either going to be brilliant or a disaster. Probably both.

When I was seven years old, I put on a full Madonna concert in my living room.

I had the lace gloves. I had the choreography. I had a setlist. And I had absolutely no shame about standing in front of whoever would sit still long enough to watch, family, neighbors, anyone, and performing like my life depended on it. (I’ve shared this with you before.)

Somewhere between then and now, I learned to shrink that part of myself down very, very small and call myself something safer. Something credentialed. Something with a gold seal of approval attached to it.

I became the money expert.

And for a long time, that fit. I built a podcast to 28 million downloads. I wrote a book. I helped women understand their relationship with money in ways that genuinely changed their lives. I am a Certified Financial Planner and a Trauma of Money Specialist. None of that was a lie.

But there was always something sitting underneath it. Something that kept tugging at the hem of the dress I wore on stages and podcast covers, whispering that this container was a little too small for everything I actually wanted to say.

About a year ago, I had an idea for a show.

The premise was simple. I’d bake something in my kitchen, and I’d talk about money. Not money like spreadsheets and savings rates. Money like the thing that lives inside your chest and makes you feel behind and ashamed and hopeful and hungry all at once. The kind of money conversations that happen at 2 am, or over wine with your closest friend, not the ones that happen in a financial planning office.

I knew immediately it was right. And then I spent almost a year not making it.

I told myself it wasn’t the right time. That I didn’t have the right equipment. That I needed to figure out the format first, the branding first, the strategy first. That a CFP shouldn’t be messing around in a kitchen talking about feelings. That I needed to protect my credibility.

What I was actually protecting was my ego. Because putting something this personal into the world is terrifying in a way that no amount of credentials can insulate you from.

A financial plan? If it doesn’t land, there’s data to explain why.

This? This is just me. In my kitchen. Brown butter on the stove, and thirty years of my own money, shame + expertise, sitting on the counter next to it.

Here’s what finally cracked it open for me.

I was making a batch of brown butter cupcakes on a Tuesday afternoon, not for any reason, just because I needed to do something with my hands. I was thinking about the question I get asked more than almost any other. I know what I’m supposed to do. Why can’t I just do it?

We keep trying to answer that question with more information. More tips. More frameworks. More plans. But that question isn’t a financial question. It’s an identity question. It’s a body question. It’s a question about what we were taught, and who we decided to be, and all the ways those two things are quietly in conflict with each other.

And I thought: you cannot logic your way out of something you emotionally ate your way into.

Which is, if you think about it, also true of cupcakes.

Food and money have always been tangled up together for me. Both are about survival. Both are about pleasure and deprivation and the stories we carry about what we deserve. Both show up in the body before they show up in the mind. And both, I have come to believe, can be healed in similar ways. Slowly. With honesty. With a lot of butter.

So today, I stopped waiting.

Bake It Out is officially live on YouTube, and the first episode is about the thing so many of us feel but rarely say out loud: I thought I’d be further along by now.

Further along in money. In career. In confidence. In becoming the person we were so certain we’d be by this age.

I made gluten-free brown butter vanilla cupcakes with salted honey frosting for this one. Apparently, when I need to tell the truth, I brown the butter first. They are DELICIOUS! If you do nothing other than bake these cupcakes, you will be very happy!

This show is the thing I have been quietly building toward for a very long time. It’s where money and shame and midlife and reinvention and hunger and dessert all get to sit at the same table. It’s the place where I get to stop being only the expert and start being the whole person.

The seven-year-old with the lace gloves knew something I forgot. The performing is the point. The showing up fully, in front of people, in real time, with something real to say. That’s not a distraction from the work. That is the work.

WATCH EPISODE 1 HERE →

If this stirred something up

Here’s the thing I always come back to. You can’t think your way into feeling steady. You have to come back to your body first, and the money stuff gets quieter from there.

I made a small, free thing for exactly this moment. It’s called The Steady Reset, and it’s a simple way to settle your nervous system before you make a money decision, open the banking app, or spiral about being behind. No spreadsheets. No shame. Just a place to start.

Grab The Steady Reset → heyshannah.com/#signup

Now, Let’s Bake

These are the cupcakes from Episode 1. Brown butter, a little honey, a pinch of flaky salt on top so every bite has that sweet-and-salty thing that makes you close your eyes for a second. Gluten-free, but nobody has to know unless you tell them.

Gluten-Free Brown Butter Vanilla Cupcakes with Salted Honey Frosting

Makes 12

For the cupcakes

• ½ cup unsalted butter

• ¾ cup granulated sugar

• 2 large eggs, room temperature

• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

• ½ cup full-fat sour cream or Greek yogurt, room temperature

• ¼ cup milk, room temperature

• 1 ¼ cups gluten-free 1:1 baking flour (King Arthur Measure for Measure is my go-to)

• ½ teaspoon xanthan gum (only if your flour blend doesn’t include it)

• 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder

• ¼ teaspoon baking soda

• ½ teaspoon fine sea salt

For the salted honey frosting

• ½ cup unsalted butter, softened

• 2 cups powdered sugar, sifted

• 2 tablespoons honey

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

• ¼ teaspoon fine sea salt

• 1 to 2 tablespoons heavy cream or milk

• Flaky sea salt, for topping

• Extra honey, for drizzling

Make the cupcakes

1. Brown the butter. Melt the butter in a light-colored saucepan over medium heat. Let it foam, then turn golden with little brown bits at the bottom. It should smell nutty and almost like caramel. Pour it into a heat-safe bowl and let it cool for 15 to 20 minutes. You want it liquid, but not hot.

2. Prep the pan. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a 12-cup muffin tin with liners.

3. Whisk the dry ingredients together in a bowl: gluten-free flour, xanthan gum if needed, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

4. Mix the wet ingredients. In a separate bowl, whisk the cooled brown butter and sugar until glossy. Add the eggs one at a time, then whisk in the vanilla, sour cream, and milk.

5. Combine. Add the dry ingredients to the wet and stir until just combined. Don’t overmix. Let the batter sit for 10 minutes before baking. This lets the gluten-free flour hydrate, giving you a softer cupcake.

6. Bake. Fill each liner about ⅔ full. Bake for 17 to 20 minutes, until the tops spring back lightly and a toothpick comes out clean. Cool completely before frosting.

Make the frosting

Beat the softened butter for 2 to 3 minutes until creamy and fluffy. Add the powdered sugar ½ cup at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the honey, vanilla, salt, and 1 tablespoon of cream. Beat another 2 to 3 minutes until light and smooth, adding more cream if you need it.

Finish

Pipe or swirl the frosting onto each cooled cupcake. Drizzle with honey and finish with a tiny pinch of flaky sea salt. For the dramatic moment, warm the honey for 5 to 8 seconds so it drips slowly over the top.

Before You Go

If you watch the episode today, will you do one thing for me?

Leave a comment on YouTube and tell me: what’s one place in your life where you thought you’d be further along by now?

I’ll read every single one. I promise.

Let’s Bake It Out.

— Shannah

P.S. If you like, subscribe, and comment on YouTube, it genuinely helps the show find more people. Especially in the beginning, that stuff matters more than you’d think. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t mean it.

P.P.S. And yes, I’m still learning, so these episodes will get better and better over time.

Money dysmorphia is what happens when the way you feel about money stops matching what’s actually true about it. Your bank account might tell you that you’re okay, that you have savings, steady income, a roof over your head, maybe a business or a retirement account, or even just enough to make it comfortably through the month — and yet some quieter, more insistent voice keeps whispering that you’re one bad day away from losing it all. On paper, you’re fine. Inside, you feel like you’re falling behind, and falling fast.

And honestly? It makes sense that so many of us feel this way.

When gas prices climb, and the grocery bill leaves you blinking at the receipt, when housing feels permanently out of reach and insurance costs more every single year, the ground beneath your feet starts to feel less stable than it used to.

Layer on top of that the endless scroll — someone closing on the dream house, someone boarding a flight to somewhere beautiful, someone announcing another income milestone as if it were nothing — and it becomes almost impossible not to draw the comparison. Slowly, a story takes shape in the back of your mind: I should be further along by now. Everyone else seems to have figured this out. I’m failing. I’m not safe.

But here’s the thing I keep coming back to, and the thing I want to talk about on Friday. Feeling behind is not the same as being behind. Sometimes that sense of dread isn’t a clear-eyed assessment of your finances at all; it’s your nervous system doing its best to make sense of a world that has genuinely become more expensive, more uncertain, and more saturated with comparison than at any point most of us can remember. The fear is real. That doesn’t mean the danger is.

So on Good Day LA, I’ll be digging into why so many people feel financially unsafe even when the numbers don’t fully justify the panic, how money dysmorphia quietly shapes our everyday decisions, and what it actually looks like to come back to what’s true.

Because money was never just math. It’s memory and identity, safety and shame, comparison and the long, complicated story we each carry about who we were supposed to have become by now. We rarely talk about it that way, but I think we feel it that way constantly.

If you’ve been feeling behind, or panicked, or frozen, or just a little financially wobbly lately, I hope this conversation gives you a moment to exhale. You are very likely not as far behind as the fear insists you are.

I’ll share the clip here afterward, but if you can catch it live, I’d love that — this Friday at 9:40 a.m. PT, right here.

See you on Good Day LA.

— Shannah

P.S. A few ways we can keep working on this together:

• 🎧 Grab my free 3-Day Steady Reset audio series to start calming the financial noise.

• 📖 Pick up a copy of my book, Unraveling Your Relationship with Money.

• 🎤 Or hire me to speak at your next event or company.

Every so often, I’m going to hand this newsletter to another woman and let her tell the truth about money in her own words. Because the whole point of our conversations here is that we say the things out loud — and sometimes it’s easier to hear it from someone who isn’t you.

This first one is from a reader I’ll call K. She’s 42. She runs her own jewelry line. She asked me to keep her anonymous, which, as you’ll see, is kind of the whole point.

I make things people wear to feel beautiful. Wedding rings. The necklace someone buys herself after a divorce. I have a real business — my name on it, my designs, my hands. From the outside, I think I look like someone who figured it out.

I have never once felt okay about money. Not for a single day.

When I was broke and starting out, I told myself it was a phase. Once the business is real, once I’m actually making money, I’ll stop feeling like this. So I built it. I hit the revenue I used to fantasize about. And the shame didn’t go anywhere; it’s still here every day.

Now it shows up when I price a piece. I’ll spend weeks on something — sourcing the stones, the wax carving, the failures I don’t show anyone — and when it’s time to put a number on it, my hand actually hesitates. I round down all the time, afraid of pricing myself for what I’m worth. I have literally apologized to customers for my own prices. As if wanting to be paid for my work is something I should be sorry about.

And here’s the part I’ve never said out loud to anyone: I pay myself last. Or not at all, some months. The business gets paid, the suppliers get paid, the booth fee gets paid, and I take whatever’s crumpled at the bottom. I tell myself it’s because I’m “reinvesting.” That’s a lie. The truth is, I don’t think I’m allowed to take money out of something just because I want to. Even when it’s mine. Even when I made it.

I have a friend, a man, who charges triple what I do for objectively worse work, and he sleeps like a baby. I’ve watched him do it. He just... names a number and waits. No apology. No little laugh after he says the price, the one I do, the one that means you can talk me down.

I thought running my own thing would make me feel powerful with money. Instead, it gave the shame more places to live. Every sale is a referendum now. Did I charge too much? Am I a fraud? Who do I think I am? I make beautiful things, and I feel like a thief every time someone pays me for one.

I’m 42. I’m supposed to be past this. And I genuinely don’t know how to stop.

— K.

Shannah’s Thoughts:

K., if you’re reading this, you don’t have a pricing problem. You have a permission problem wearing a pricing problem’s clothes.

Look at what you told me. Broke, you felt shame. Successful, you felt shame. The number changed completely, and the feeling didn’t move an inch — which means the feeling was never actually about the number. It can’t be. If money caused the shame, more of it would’ve cured the shame. It didn’t. So the shame is coming from somewhere older, and the business just gave it a new room to haunt.

Here’s what I think you’re really apologizing for when you round down and pay yourself last. It isn’t your prices. It’s that you wanted something — to be paid, to be valued, to take the money out and keep it — and somewhere along the way you learned that a woman who wants is a woman who’s about to get in trouble. So you make yourself small at the exact moment you’re supposed to take up space. The discount is the apology. Paying yourself last is the apology. The little laugh after you say the price is the apology.

Your friend isn’t better with money than you. He was just never taught that wanting was dangerous. That’s the only difference. He’s not more deserving; he’s less afraid.

You’re not a fraud, K. You’re a woman who built something real and still can’t believe she’s allowed to be paid for it. That’s not a numbers problem. No spreadsheet on earth fixes it. It’s a much older permission you never got, and the work isn’t charging more. It’s learning that what you wanted was never something to be ashamed of.

You’re allowed to be paid for what you make. You’re allowed to want the money and keep it. Say the price. Don’t laugh after.

xo, Shannah

—

Want More?

Have a money truth you’ve never said out loud? One you’d only tell a stranger? Reply and tell me — you can stay completely anonymous, like K. I read every single one, and with your blessing, I might share it here. The whole point is that we stop carrying these alone.

If K.’s story landed somewhere, forward it to one woman in your life who needs to read it.

P.S. — The Steady Reset, my free 3-day audio series for nervous systems that brace around money, K.’s working through it. So am I.

Pour something. Sit somewhere soft. Here's this week's.

The first year my podcast income hit a number my mother never made in her life, I cried in a Whole Foods parking lot.

Not the cute kind. The ugly kind. The kind where you sit in the car with the engine off and your forehead on the steering wheel, and you don’t know why you’re crying because by every measurable standard, this is supposed to be the part where you’ve made it.

I had just bought $312 worth of groceries.

I did not need $312 worth of groceries. I needed maybe $140 worth of groceries. The rest was — I don’t know what to call it. Permission food. I-can-afford-this-now food. Look-at-me-food. The kind of cart you fill up because some part of you is still trying to prove something to a woman who isn’t even in the building.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about earning more than your mother ever did:

You think the number will feel like an arrival. It doesn’t. It feels like trespassing.

There’s a part of you — the part that watched her clip coupons, the part that watched her decide between things at the register, the part that watched her say “I don’t need that” a thousand times in a thousand stores — that doesn’t believe you’re allowed to have this. So when you have it, your body doesn’t relax. It braces. Because surely something is about to come and take it back. Surely the number isn’t real. Surely you’re about to be exposed as someone who shouldn’t be here.

I had a Certified Financial Planner credential on my office wall.

I had a podcast that hit the New York Times’ top four list.

I had a savings account that would have made my mother weep with relief if she’d ever had one like it.

And I was in the parking lot of a Whole Foods, crying into the steering wheel because some part of me was still nine years old, watching my mother put the strawberries back because the price made her skin crawl.

My mom, dad, Jeff, and I are celebrating my New York Times Top 4 Money podcast article.

The numbers don’t fix that.

I want to say it again, because it took me twenty years of working in money to be willing to say it out loud:

The numbers don’t fix that.

We have been sold a fantasy by an entire industry that says if you just hit the next threshold, you will feel safe. If you just save more, invest more, automate more, you will arrive at some shore where the bracing stops. You will buy the strawberries without hesitating. You will stop checking the balance. You will stop running the math at 3 AM. You will stop feeling like you’re behind in a race you never agreed to enter.

This is not true.

I know because I have hit the threshold. I have hit several of the thresholds. I am a woman with a CFP, a sold podcast, and a savings account I have actually earned, and I still — still — felt like I was behind some imaginary line that some imaginary woman had crossed at 35 while I was still figuring out where she even started.

Behind whom?

This is the question I started asking myself in the parking lot.

Behind whom, exactly?

My mother? No. I had blown past anywhere she’d ever been, financially, by the time I was 32.

My friends? No. I’d stopped tracking that years ago, because I knew that game had no winner.

The woman in my head? Yes. Her. The imaginary woman who had it all figured out by 30, retired by 50, had the right house and the right partner and the right number in her 401(k) and never once, not once, cried in a Whole Foods parking lot.

She doesn’t exist.

I want to write that bigger, in case it didn’t land:

She doesn’t exist.

She is a composite of every magazine cover, every Instagram post, every “five steps to financial freedom by 40,” every well-meaning aunt who said “by your age I had…”, every article that named some other woman as the success story and asked, implicitly, why aren’t you her yet?

She is the woman I was measuring myself against in the parking lot.

And the brutal thing — the thing that took me a long time to admit — is that even if I had hit every benchmark she supposedly hit, I still would have felt behind. Because the bar isn’t a number. The bar is a feeling. And the feeling was put inside me a long time ago, and no amount of earning was going to dislodge it.

The feeling is: I am the woman who almost has enough. I am the woman who has to be careful. I am the woman whose mother put back the strawberries. I am the woman who can’t relax even when there’s nothing to brace against, because my body learned to brace before it learned to read.

That’s the thing the numbers can’t fix.

The numbers are just numbers. The bracing is older than the numbers. The bracing started when you watched someone you loved be quietly afraid of money, week after week, year after year, until being-afraid-of-money became indistinguishable from being-yourself.

And then you grew up. And you made more money. And the bracing didn’t go anywhere — because the bracing was never about the money. It was about safety. And safety, it turns out, doesn’t live in a bank account.

Safety lives somewhere else. Somewhere in the body. Somewhere in the nervous system. Somewhere underneath the math.

I’m still learning where, exactly.

But I can tell you this: I no longer cry in Whole Foods parking lots. Mostly. Sometimes. (Last month, once. We’re a work in progress.)

The shift didn’t happen because my account got bigger. It happened because I started naming what was actually going on. Oh. I’m not crying because of the groceries. I’m crying because some nine-year-old inside me is finally being fed, and she doesn’t believe she’s allowed to be. That sentence — said out loud, in the car, alone — did more for me than any spreadsheet ever has.

If you’re reading this and you have hit numbers your mother never hit, and you still feel behind — I want to tell you this:

You are not crazy.

You are not ungrateful.

You are not bad with money.

You are a woman whose nervous system learned to brace before you knew what bracing was, and the bracing did not get the memo when the numbers changed. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. There is nothing wrong with you. There is something old in you that doesn’t know it’s safe yet, and it’s going to take more than a bank balance to teach it.

The teaching happens slowly. In quiet moments. In parking lots. In kitchens. In the conversation you start having with yourself, gently, when the panic comes — oh, hi, I see you, you’re not in trouble, the strawberries are paid for, you’re allowed to have them.

That’s the work.

The numbers are just the numbers.

The work is the work.

— Shannah

What I’m asking you this week: If you’ve ever cried about money in a way that didn’t match what the math actually said, you’re not crazy, and you’re not alone. Reply and tell me where it happened. The parking lot. The bedroom. The shower. I read everything.

Three other things, in case you want more:

The book — Unraveling Your Relationship with Money — is the longer version of what I’m doing here. Same voice. Way more pages.

The Steady Reset is a free 3-day audio series I made for women whose nervous systems around money will not stop bracing for impact. It’s short. It’s free. It works.

And if you want to go deeper than anything I can do here — I take 3-4 women a month for private 1:1 emotional money coaching. It’s by application, not a hard sell, and it’s not for everyone. But if you’ve been reading me for a while and something keeps tugging at you, that’s usually a sign. Here’s the door.

Mine has: magnesium (three kinds, because the internet could not agree). Fiber. Protein powder. A probiotic that costs more than my first car payment. Hormones. Sleep gummies. A different sleep thing for when the gummies stop working. Cooling pajamas. A cooling pillowcase. A cooling mattress topper, because apparently I am now a small appliance. Skin stuff for the face that no longer recognizes me. Gut stuff. Mood stuff. A supplement that sounds like it was named by a woodland elf and costs forty-eight dollars.

This is not a wellness haul. This is evidence.

Every single one of those purchases had the same hope attached to it, the same quiet little prayer I muttered at checkout: maybe this one will make me feel like myself again.

I have started calling this the menopause tax.

It’s the money women spend trying to function through a transition nobody prepared us for. The supplements. The specialists. The second opinions. The third opinions. The functional medicine consult that isn’t covered by insurance. The bloodwork your regular doctor won’t order, so you order it yourself. The hormone test kit that arrives in discreet packaging, like you’re buying something shameful, instead of trying to sleep through the night.

But the financial part is honestly the easiest to talk about because it has a number. The rest of the tax doesn’t.

The rest of the tax is the 2 a.m. Googling while the person next to you sleeps the sleep of someone whose endocrine system has not declared open rebellion. It’s being told your labs are “normal” when your body feels like it’s been swapped out for a rental. It’s the mental load of running diagnostics on yourself in the margins of a life that already required all of you. It’s wondering, every single day: Is this hormones? Is this burnout? Is this depression? Is this my marriage? Is this capitalism? Is this just Tuesday?

It’s trying to work, care for people, earn money, hold relationships together, run a household, remember everyone’s appointments, AND somehow troubleshoot insomnia, anxiety, night sweats, brain fog, rage, weight changes, joint pain, and an exhaustion that no amount of sleep seems to touch, like it’s an unpaid second job. Which it is. We just don’t call it that.

Here is what makes me mad:

Women are not dramatic. We are under-resourced. Our bodies have not had enough money, enough research, enough training, or enough basic curiosity behind them — so when something this big happens to half the population, we are sent home with a pamphlet from 1994 and a vague suggestion to try yoga.

So we patch it together ourselves. We become unpaid medical research departments with credit cards and search histories that would alarm a stranger. We trade tips in group chats like we’re running an underground network of estradiol patches and ashwagandha. We test things on ourselves because no one else will. We pay, and pay, and pay, and the payment is not just dollars — it’s hours, mental load, and the dignity of being told it’s probably just stress by someone who hasn’t read a paper on perimenopause since residency.

That’s the receipt.

And the receipt is long because the bill has been deferred for about a hundred years.

So no, this is not just a hot flash. This is the cost of being a woman in midlife in a system that still treats our bodies like a niche interest. And if you are in this phase right now and you feel like you are falling apart in a hundred small expensive ways, I need you to hear this:

You are not crazy. You are not weak. You are not lazy. You are not “letting yourself go.” Your body is doing something enormous, and it is doing it inside a world that has not built enough support around the doing of it.

We need better research. Better doctors. Better training. Better insurance coverage. Better conversations at dinner tables, in break rooms, and in exam rooms. We need to stop whispering about this like it’s embarrassing, because the whispering is part of what built the tax in the first place.

So tell me — and I want the comments to be unhinged — what’s on your receipt?

What’s the most ridiculous, desperate, or weirdly hopeful thing you have bought trying to feel like yourself again?

I want to see the drawers. And no, I’m nowhere close to being done talking about this topic!

— Shannah

If this landed, send it to one woman in your life who has been quietly paying this tax. That's how this work travels. One real reader at a time.

Ways I can help, if you want them:

→ The book: Unraveling Your Relationship with Money. The long-form version of what I do here is available everywhere books are sold.

→ The Steady Reset: a free 3-day audio series for the part of you that has been bracing for impact too long.

→ 1:1 emotional money coaching: I take 3–4 women a month for private work. By application, not a hard sell. The door is here.

There’s a thing I used to do that I don’t tell people about often.

Every time I’d pull cash from an ATM, the little white receipt would print, and I’d fold it. Tiny. Triangle. Sometimes a square. Sometimes I’d fold it so tight it became almost hard, like a little paper stone, and I’d push it into the bottom of my purse without looking at it.

I had a Certified Financial Planner credential on my office wall.

I want you to picture this for a second, because I think it’s funnier than it is sad, and I have to start letting it be funny: there is a woman whose entire job is helping other women look at the truth about their money. And she’s standing in front of an ATM in a strip mall, folding origami out of her own receipts so she doesn’t have to see what they say.

I was not avoiding the number.

The number was fine. The number had been fine for years.

I was avoiding what I thought the number would say about me.

That I was reckless. That I was behind. That I had failed some invisible test of grown-womanhood that everyone else had passed in their twenties while I was distracted. That I was the kind of woman who buys herself a black SUV she has no business owning on the day her first marriage ends, drives to a strip mall, and folds the receipt before she can see it.

(Reader: I was that woman. The SUV is a true detail. I will tell you the whole story another time.)

My pup, Winnie, is giving me the side eye as I tell her this story.

Here’s what I want to say this week, and it might be the most important thing I say all month:

Most of us aren’t avoiding our money. We’re avoiding a verdict.

We’re not afraid of the balance. We’re afraid of what we’ve decided the balance proves about us. The avoidance is not about laziness or irresponsibility. It’s about a small terrified part of us who has been told, in a thousand quiet ways over a lifetime, that our worth is sitting in that number, and we cannot bear to look in case it confirms the worst thing we’ve ever thought about ourselves.

I stopped folding receipts a few years ago. Not all at once. Slowly. Imperfectly. With a lot of detours. (A LOT of them).

The thing that worked wasn’t more discipline. It wasn’t a better spreadsheet. It wasn’t a money mindset course or a financial planner — and I say that as a financial planner.

What worked was learning to look at a receipt and not let it tell me who I was. The receipt is information. I am a person. Those are two different things, and the financial industry has spent a long time making sure women get them confused.

What I’m asking you, this week:

Think of one piece of paper, or one envelope, or one app, or one balance, that you have very politely been not-quite-looking at.

Don’t fix it. Don’t open it. Don’t even decide.

Just ask yourself one question: What am I afraid this will say about me?

Then write the answer down, somewhere private, in your own handwriting.

That’s the whole assignment.

The looking comes later. The looking is easier than we think, once we’ve named what we’ve been so scared of finding.

— Shannah

Three other things, in case you want more:

1. The book — Unraveling Your Relationship with Money — is the longer version of what I’m doing here. Same voice. Way more pages.

2. And The Steady Reset is a free 3-day audio series I made for women whose nervous systems around money will not stop bracing for impact. It’s short. It’s free. It works. (I made it, and I use it, which is approximately the highest endorsement I can give.)

3. If you want to go deeper than anything I can do here — I take 3-4 women a month for private 1:1 emotional money coaching. It's by application, not a hard sell, and it's not for everyone. But if you've been reading me for a while and something keeps tugging at you, that's usually a sign. Here's the door.

Twenty-eight million downloads. The New York Times top four money podcast. The version of me that built it was who you probably know, if you’re reading this, the woman in your car on the commute, the woman explaining your 401(k) in a voice that didn’t make you feel stupid, the woman you sent to your sister when she was getting divorced.

That woman is still here. She’s just not the only one anymore.

Here’s why I sold.

I did something 99% of podcasters never do - I made good money with the podcast. It was my business. I was, by every reasonable measurement, the picture of a successful woman. And I was waking up at 3:14 in the morning doing math in the dark. Not new math. Math I had already done at noon. Math that had not changed.

The math was fine. The math had been fine for some time.

I am a Certified Financial Planner. I wrote a book about money trauma called Unraveling Your Relationship with Money that came out in early 2025, and right around the time it came out, I started to understand something I had been circling for a decade and refusing to land on:

The financial industry is built to help you with the wrong problem.

(My book in the wild sent by a reader from a local library)

You have been sold the lie that if you just budget harder, save smarter, invest earlier, automate everything, and color-code the spreadsheet, you will feel safe. You will feel done. You will feel like we’ve arrived.

You will not.

I am the woman the industry trained to teach you the lie. I am also the woman who built herself a beautiful spreadsheet in January and has not opened it since February. The woman who, for seven years, didn’t look at her ATM receipts. I crumpled them. Before they cleared the slot. I have a CFP on my wall.

If the credentials worked, I would not be doing any of those things. None of us would.

So that’s why I sold the podcast.

I didn’t have it in me to keep recording a show that lived inside the lie. I loved that show. I loved making it. But every episode was, in some quiet way, telling you the answer was more rigor — when I had come to believe the answer was more honesty. And I couldn’t carry the gap between those two things in my body anymore.

This is the year I find out what’s on the other side of that decision.

Bake It Out is what I’m making now.

It’s called Bake It Out because somewhere in the last few years, while I was unraveling my relationship with money and my career and the version of myself I’d been trying to become by 45, I started baking.

Turns out, I’m good at it, but you don’t have to be. (I am, by the way, gluten-free, which means most of my early experiments tasted like sand.) I started baking because the act of making something with my hands was the only thing I’d found that could shut my brain off.

Money never let me be present. Identity never lets me be present. The version of successful midlife woman I was performing did not include twenty minutes of just standing at the counter, folding flour into butter, and being a person in a kitchen. The performance demanded I be useful at all times. Optimizing. Producing. Earning.

Baking was the first thing I’d done in years that wasn’t useful in that way. It made me sit down. It made my hands move slowly. It made me eat the thing afterward, alone sometimes, in a quiet kitchen, and smile because I made that. Not for a client. Not for content. Not for a metric. For me.

And here’s the part I want to say out loud, because nobody else is going to:

Women have been kept in the kitchen and out of money for a long time. The kitchen has been used as a cage and a consolation prize. I am not interested in either of those things. I am interested in taking the kitchen back as a place where women can finally have the conversation about money we have never been allowed to have. Where we can stand in a room that the culture told us was supposed to be small, and let ourselves get bigger inside it.

The kitchen, it turns out, is one of the few places left where women are allowed to take up time without having to justify it. We are going to use that.

Here is the argument I’m making, and the thing I want you to decide whether you say yes to:

Money is not a math problem for women in midlife. It is a body problem. A cultural problem. A we were sold a version of adulthood that turned out to be an advertisement problem. The math is the easy part. The math is the part that the industry can teach you in an afternoon.

The hard part is what’s happening under your ribs while you look at the math. The shame. The panic. I should have figured this out by 35. Why am I crying in the Trader Joe’s parking lot? I make more than my mother ever did, and I still feel like I’m failing some test I cannot find.

That stuff doesn’t live on a spreadsheet. The people selling you spreadsheets are not equipped to talk about it because they do not have a product to sell you for it.

I don’t either. I wanted to create a place where we could talk about it in a format you prefer.

And I’d like you to bake with me.

I know. Some of you just exhaled and went oh god, I don’t bake. Stay with me.

You don’t have to be good at it. You don’t have to follow the recipe. If the cupcakes come out wrong — and they will, sometimes, that is part of the deal — you are allowed to shove your face in them and eat the good parts and call it a Tuesday. I have done this. I will do it again. The point was never the cupcakes.

The point is this: there is something that happens when you stand in your kitchen, alone, and make something delicious with your hands that nobody asked you to make. You start to remember you’re a person. You start to feel time slow. You start to figure out what you like — how much frosting, what flavors, which toppings, which versions of the recipe make you happy, and which versions you only ever made because someone told you to.

That practice — figuring out what you like — is the same practice we have to do with money. Nobody can tell you how often to check your account. (I don’t check mine three times a day, for the record. I give myself a game-day talk and look once, deliberately. That’s what works for me. You will find your own version.) Nobody can tell you what financially enough feels like in your body. Nobody can tell you whether to spend or save or want or have. You have to figure out your own rules. Your own frosting.

The kitchen is where I learned how to do that. So I’m bringing the conversation about money in here.

What you’ll get from this Substack going forward:

Twice a week, a short video, usually under a minute, always in my kitchen, always while I’m making something, where I say a thing about money or career or midlife or my body or my marriage, I’m not technically supposed to say out loud. Each one comes with a written piece that goes deeper than the video could.

Once a month, a longer essay. Sometimes a voice note that sounds like I called you from the kitchen, because that’s exactly what it is. Occasionally, a photo of the cupcakes I’m eating instead of doing literally anything else.

In a few weeks, there will be a paid version too, for women who want to be in a smaller room with me — live workshops, longer videos, and the conversations I cannot have on the open internet. I’ll tell you about that when it’s time.

For now, this is the front door.

If you came here because you read the book, or listened to the show, or saw me on TV and thought something is happening to me and I cannot name it, you are in the right place.

Pour yourself something. Pull up a chair.

The cupcakes are coming.

— Shannah

P.S.- If this landed somewhere, would you do me a favor and forward it to one woman in your life who needs to read it? Or restack it on Notes with a line of your own — I love seeing how this stuff hits different people. (And if you have thoughts, the comments are open. I read them. I’m a person.)

Two other things, in case you want more:

The book — Unraveling Your Relationship with Money — is the longer version of what I’m doing here. Same voice. Way more pages.

And The Steady Reset is a free 3-day audio series I made for women whose nervous systems around money will not stop bracing for impact. It’s short. It’s free. It works. (I made it, and I use it, which is approximately the highest endorsement I can give.)

She’s 47. Built a business from nothing. Last year it cleared $150K — solid, real, more than she’d ever made. By every external measure, she should feel free.

Instead, she’s been unable to open her banking app for six weeks.

(This is the look of someone who also doesn’t really like to open her bank account, despite knowing better :).

When we talked about it, she said: “I should be celebrating. I should feel free. Instead I feel like something bad is about to happen.”

Here’s what’s actually happening in her body:

Her nervous system has a set point for what feels safe to hold. Money, stability, visibility — all of it. And she’s exceeded it. The success registered as risk. More to lose. More to be responsible for. More visibility. More to potentially fail at. So her system started doing what it’s been trained to do her whole life — finding subtle, sophisticated ways to bring her back inside the lines where things feel familiar.

For her, that looks like avoiding her accounts. For another woman it’s the new expense that suddenly “had to” happen right after a strong month. For another it’s the way she keeps almost-but-not-quite raising her prices. For another it’s spending back down to the number that feels safe the moment she goes above it.

None of this is a discipline problem.

You cannot budget your way out of a capacity issue. You cannot spreadsheet your way into feeling safe with more. You cannot think your way through a nervous system response that lives below the level of thought.

What you can do — and what we do in Money Steady — is slowly, deliberately expand the amount your system can hold without triggering the old release. Not through forcing or shame. Through the kind of work that actually changes the wiring underneath.

Here’s what I want you to know if something just landed reading that:

You’re not failing. You’re regulating.

Your body is doing exactly what it was built to do. It learned somewhere along the way that more meant danger. More visibility. More responsibility. More to lose. So when more arrives, your system reaches for the familiar. The safe amount. The amount you know how to hold without flinching.

That’s not broken. That’s actually quite smart. It’s just no longer serving you.

And it can change. But it won’t change through another strategy or another framework or another attempt to discipline yourself into feeling differently. It changes through presence, through doing the work alongside other women in the same place, and through slowly — together — expanding what feels possible to hold.

That’s the room I built.

The specifics:

Money Steady starts Thursday May 14th at 7pm ET. Six weeks, small group, Thursday nights. The founding price is $997 — or use code STEADY at checkout for $200 off, bringing it to $797.

Doors close Monday May 11th at midnight ET.

If you’ve been reading my work and recognize yourself in what I just described — if you’ve hit a ceiling you can’t seem to break through, if you’ve made more and felt less free, if you keep almost-but-not-quite letting yourself have it — this is for you.

Join Money Steady here.

Questions before you decide? Hit reply. I read every one.

— Shannah

P.S. If you know a woman who needs to read this — the one who looks completely fine on the outside and is quietly white-knuckling it underneath — send this her way. The pattern I described is far more common than anyone talks about. And the women who are ready to change it are the ones who recognize themselves in it.

WATCH ME👇

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Nobody taught me to play small. Not in words.

They didn’t have to.

I watched it. I absorbed it the way you absorb everything that happens before you have language for it — in the way rooms went quiet, in who deferred to whom, in which ambitions got celebrated and which ones made people uncomfortable.

I learned, early and without a single explicit lesson, that a woman who wants too much, who succeeds too visibly, who takes up too much space, costs something. Pays something. Loses something.

So I learned to stay just behind the line.

And here’s what’s taken me decades to understand: that training didn’t disappear when I started building something of my own. It just got more sophisticated.

Now it shows up in my bank account. In the moments right before something works, I find a way to make it not work. There's a low ceiling I keep hitting. It has nothing to do with my ability and everything to do with what I've decided — somewhere beneath my conscious mind — that I'm allowed to have.

Money is visibility made undeniable.

You can downplay a lot of things about your life. But a business that’s working, a bank account that’s growing, a financial life that’s visibly, embarrassingly, unmistakably yours — that’s hard to make small. And if being seen has never felt safe, your nervous system will find a way to keep the money just out of reach. Not because you’re self-destructive. Because you’re still running an operating system that was built for a different era of survival.

The identity piece is this: I have known how to be the woman who is almost there. She’s comfortable. I know her furniture. Becoming the woman who arrived means becoming someone I don’t have a template for. Someone who is seen, who is enough, who doesn’t shrink the win to make the room more comfortable.

That’s not a money problem. That’s the bravest thing I can think of.

And I’m not there yet. But I’m done pretending the ceiling is made of something other than me.

I’ve been writing here for a while. This is the first time I’m doing it this way.

Some confessions will be mine. Some will be yours — anonymous, unnamed, just the truth of it. If something here cracked something open, hit reply. Tell me yours. Nobody will know it was you. But somebody will need to read it.

Where have you kept yourself just behind the line — and who were you keeping comfortable by staying there?

• Shannah

___________________________________________________________________

P.S. The ceiling I described? That’s what Money Steady is for. It’s my small group program for women who know what they’re capable of and keep finding ways to stay just behind it. If you’re ready to stop leaving, this is where we do that work. Learn more here.

The person who needs this most isn’t looking for it yet. If this cracked something open for you, share it, like it, leave a comment. That’s how we reach them.

Last Tuesday, I left the house without a jacket.

In my defense, it was Asheville in April, and the morning looked innocent. Blue sky, birds doing their thing, the mountains just sitting there being gorgeous and unbothered.

By 2pm, I was being personally water logged by the atmosphere.

If you’ve never experienced an Asheville spring storm, let me explain. It doesn’t build gradually, the way weather is supposed to behave. It just arrives. One minute you’re fine. The next, the trees — full-grown, ancient, deeply-rooted trees — are bending sideways like they forgot what they were. The rain comes from directions rain has no business coming from. Thunder moves through the mountains and into your chest. Lightning makes decisions. Everything that was still is suddenly thrashing.

And then, twenty minutes later, it’s over.

Sun out. Birds back. Mountains serene as ever, like they didn’t just run your life through a spin cycle.

(The calm after the storm)

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately — because this is exactly what happens to most of us with money.

Not every day. But you know the moment.

An unexpected bill. A slow month. A number on a screen that makes your stomach do something horrible. A conversation that starts about finances and ends up being about everything else. Suddenly you’re spinning. You can’t think. Everything feels urgent and permanent and like proof of something terrible about you.

Here’s what I want to say to you, and I want you to actually hear it:

That feeling is not evidence that you’re bad with money.

It’s evidence that nobody gave you an umbrella.

Because here’s the thing about Asheville storms — and about financial stress — that nobody talks about:

The goal was never to live somewhere it doesn’t rain.

The goal is to stop getting drenched every single time.

A reader wrote:

You’re not doing it wrong.

You’re doing it alone. In a culture that taught you that struggling with money means something is fundamentally broken about you. That other people — the ones who seem calm and competent and like they definitely have a budget they actually follow — figured out something you missed.

They didn’t. The class wasn’t offered.

Here’s the reframe I want to offer you: constant financial anxiety isn’t a character flaw. It’s a signal. Something in the system — the income, the spending, the emotions driving both — is creating more turbulence than your nervous system can quietly absorb.

And the answer isn’t to grip the steering wheel harder.

The answer is to figure out where the draft is coming from.

Because here’s the thing nobody tells you: getting ahead doesn’t always start with more money. It starts with more steadiness. And steadiness — this is the part that changed everything for me — is a skill. Not a personality type. Not something you either have or don’t. A learnable, practiceable, available-to-you-right-now skill.

You can build an umbrella. I promise.

Here’s a piece of information that is going to make you feel either deeply relieved or mildly furious at the entire personal finance industry:

Your brain cannot tell the difference between a financial threat and a physical one.

I’m not speaking metaphorically. When you perceive a money threat — an overdraft, an unexpected expense, a conversation you’ve been avoiding — your amygdala, the ancient alarm system living in the center of your brain, activates the same response it would if you were being chased by something with teeth.

Your prefrontal cortex — the part responsible for rational thought, planning, seeing options, and generally not making everything catastrophically worse — goes offline.

Which means: in the middle of a money storm, you are literally operating with a compromised brain. The fog is real. The paralysis is real. The impulse to buy something, avoid something, or catastrophize everything is not weakness. It is neuroscience.

This is why you’ve ever done something financially that you knew was a bad idea, while you were doing it, and did it anyway.

It wasn’t a character flaw. It was an amygdala hijack.

Now here’s the part that really gets me.

There’s a concept in psychology called distress tolerance — the ability to survive a painful moment without making it worse. It’s the skill of staying in the storm without doing the thing that makes the storm last longer.

Most of us were never taught this. Instead, we learned two moves: white-knuckle through it, or avoid it entirely. Neither one builds anything. Neither one gets you dry.

What actually builds financial steadiness — and this is backed by research — isn’t income level. It’s resilience. The capacity to take a hit, stay somewhat functional, and recover without completely dismantling everything you’ve built.

The people who seem effortlessly good with money aren’t living somewhere without storms.

They just have better gear.

And gear, it turns out, is something you can actually acquire.

I want you to try something this week that is going to feel a little strange.

I want you to get curious about your last money storm instead of ashamed of it.

Not to relive it. Not to punish yourself with it. Just to look at it the way a scientist looks at interesting weather data.

In your journal — or your notes app, or the back of an envelope, I don’t care — answer these three questions:

1. What actually set it off? The surface event AND the fear underneath it. Because there’s always a fear underneath it. It’s usually something like: I’m too far behind. I’m fundamentally irresponsible. I’m going to end up okay on the outside but quietly drowning forever. Name the fear. It’s much less powerful once it has a name.

2. How did you get through it? You did, by the way. The storm passed. How? Even if your entire strategy was “spiraled for four days and then it somehow resolved” — that counts. You survived it. That’s data.

3. What would have helped you feel 5% steadier? Not fixed. Not calm. Not magically fine. Just 5% less like you were in a spin cycle. Maybe it’s knowing one clear number. Maybe it’s having a single person to call. Maybe it’s having any plan at all, even a mediocre one, just so your brain has something to hold onto instead of spinning into worst-case scenarios.

Five percent is not nothing. Five percent is where it starts.

And your mantra this week — write it somewhere you’ll actually see it:

I’m not trying to be the person who never has storms. I’m becoming the person who knows how to stay dry.

What staying dry actually looks like in practice? We’re going there. Soon.

Hit reply. Tell me about your storms. I read every single one.

xo, Shannah

Sunday night, I watched the Oscars.

This is something I’ve done almost every year for as long as I can remember. Not casually, either — religiously. Somewhere along the way, I developed a very specific fantasy about being there myself.

Not just attending.

Winning.

The category was always Best Documentary.

In my mind, I could see it clearly. I would walk onstage wearing a deep Irish green dress — the kind of green that feels dramatic yet elegant. Someone very famous would open the envelope and read my name. I would try to look surprised but not too surprised.

Then I would give a speech that was emotional but somehow composed.

And afterward, in my imagination, I wouldn’t go to some glamorous Hollywood after-party.

I would go to In-N-Out.

Still wearing the dress.

Double-double. Fries.

Part of why this dream lived so vividly in my head is that I grew up inside the gravitational pull of Hollywood. My family moved to Los Angeles when I was nine, and I spent more than three decades there. In LA, ambition is just part of the air. You’re surrounded by filmmakers and writers and people carrying scripts through coffee shops like fragile artifacts.

Dreaming big doesn’t feel strange there.

It feels normal.

For years, the idea that I might someday make a documentary — something meaningful, something that helped people see the world differently — didn’t feel unrealistic.

Not easy, but possible.

Then something happens as you get older.

The dream doesn’t necessarily disappear.

It just becomes heavier.

Because midlife introduces a complication nobody talks about when you’re young.

You start to understand the price.

Not just the financial cost.

The emotional cost.

Momentum.

Time.

(This is one of my favorite Oscar speeches, inspiring you and me to keep dreaming).

The willingness to keep pursuing something long after the early excitement fades and the results still haven’t arrived.

And the currency is often invisible.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about this a lot as my own career twists into a new shape. I left Los Angeles when I was forty-three and moved to Asheville. In many ways, it was its own reinvention — a quieter life, a different pace, space to figure out what kind of stories I actually wanted to tell.

But reinvention comes with a financial reality nobody glamorizes.

When you build something new — a platform, a voice, a body of work — the effort shows up immediately.

The money often doesn’t.

Sometimes the numbers even move in the wrong direction for a while.

And that’s where the emotional side of money gets loud.

When income becomes uncertain, our brains don’t just read that as a financial shift. They read it as a threat to safety. A steady paycheck doesn’t just pay the bills — it tells our nervous system we’re competent, responsible, on track.

When that signal changes, it’s easy to interpret the discomfort as failure.

But sometimes it isn’t failure. Sometimes it’s the price of building something that doesn’t exist yet. The strange thing about midlife is that the math eventually flips.

When you’re young, dreams feel optional. Something you might pursue if the timing works out. When you’re older, they start to feel like unfinished conversations with yourself.

You start realizing the real risk might not be trying and failing.

The real risk might be never trying seriously at all.

Sunday night, the Oscars ended the way they always do.

Someone else walked onstage.

Someone else opened the envelope.

Someone else gave the speech.

And afterward, I sat there thinking about that nine-year-old girl who moved to Los Angeles believing dreams like this were possible.

I’m older now. More realistic. Much more aware of the cost. But in some ways, I’m also braver, because I understand something I didn’t understand when I was younger.

Dreams don’t come true because we imagine them.

They come true because we keep investing in them.

Time.

Energy.

Momentum.

And sometimes money.

The real question is whether we’re still willing to pay for them, even when the return hasn’t arrived yet, even when the path looks nothing like we imagined.

Even if the after-party ends up being In-N-Out (which it always should in my book).

Clara, 49, Chicago asks: How do you know when a dream is worth the financial risk?

Clara, I wish there were a clean formula for this. Something like a spreadsheet where you plug in the dream, run the numbers, and it tells you: yes, pursue this — or no, this is a terrible idea.

But dreams don’t work that way.

The financial risk is only part of the equation. The other part is the emotional cost of ignoring the dream. Some ideas fade over time and never bother you again. But others keep showing up every few years — in late-night thoughts, in moments when you see someone doing the thing you once imagined for yourself.

Those are the dreams worth paying attention to, at least that’s my experience.

That doesn’t mean you blow up your financial life to chase them. Stability still matters. Planning still matters. But sometimes the smartest move isn’t avoiding risk completely — it’s creating enough safety that you can explore the thing that won’t leave you alone.

One thing I often tell people to think about is this:
If you fast-forward ten years, which would bother you more — trying and having it not work out, or never finding out what might have happened if you had tried?

That question tends to make the answer a little clearer.

Because very few dreams come with guarantees.

But some come with a quiet promise of regret if you never try.

Why Dreams Feel So Expensive

One of the things behavioral researchers have discovered is that the hardest part of pursuing a dream isn’t usually the work. It’s the period where effort and reward are wildly out of sync.

Psychologists sometimes call this the effort–reward imbalance. When we work hard and don’t immediately see results—financial or otherwise—our brains start sounding alarms. Humans are wired to expect feedback that tells us our effort is paying off. When that signal disappears, it’s easy to interpret the situation as failure, even if progress is quietly happening beneath the surface.

Creative careers and reinventions are full of these invisible stretches.

There’s also something researchers call the sunk cost effect. Once we’ve invested years building a particular career, identity, or financial path, it becomes psychologically harder to pivot—even when the current path no longer fits. We don’t just see the future risk of trying something new; we also see the past investment we might be “leaving behind.”

So we stay where we are, partly because the past feels too expensive to walk away from.

And then there’s identity.

Studies in identity economics show that people make financial decisions based not only on money itself, but on how those decisions reinforce who they believe they are. If you’ve spent years being the stable one, the responsible one, the person with the reliable career, stepping into something uncertain doesn’t just feel like a financial change.

It feels like stepping outside the version of yourself that has made life make sense.

All of this is why dreams can feel so expensive.

Not just financially, but psychologically.

Because pursuing something new often requires a temporary period where the math doesn’t look impressive yet, the identity feels unsettled, and the outcome is still invisible. Which, inconveniently, is also the exact phase where most meaningful things are built.

Follow the Envy

This week, pay attention to one small feeling: envy.

Not the toxic kind—the quiet kind.

The moment you see someone doing something and think, I wish I had done that.

Instead of pushing that feeling away, get curious about it.

Envy is often just a clue pointing toward something we once wanted for ourselves.

Sometimes the dreams we’ve buried don’t disappear.

They show up disguised as admiration for someone else’s life.

If you’re brave enough, hit reply and let me know how this shows up for you.

xo,

Shannah

Three days after deciding I was going to reinvent my life, I was lying on the couch in sweatpants, googling, “Can the flu make your eyeballs hurt?”

This was not the aesthetic I had in mind for my big reinvention year.

Just a few weeks earlier, I had made a quiet but very serious decision: things were going to change.

Not in the “new planner, new me” way that fades by February, but in the deeper, slightly terrifying way where you look around your life and think, Okay… something here doesn’t fit anymore.

I had the notebooks. The long walks where you talk to yourself like a slightly unhinged CEO of your own future. The voice memos full of half-baked ideas and big declarations. I had a vision of what the next chapter could look like.

A media company.
A storytelling platform.
A bigger voice.

I wanted to talk about the messy middle of life—the things women whisper about money, identity, reinvention. The emotional undercurrent of the decisions we make. The receipts of being a woman that nobody ever tallies up out loud.

For a few weeks, it felt like momentum.

I signed up for a mentorship program. I started sketching out ideas for Bake It Out and Substack essays, street interviews, and all the strange, wonderful pieces of the ecosystem I could see in my head but couldn’t yet fully explain to anyone else.

I was fired up in the way you only are when something inside you has clicked into place.

And then, almost immediately, life happened.

First, my dogs got sick.

If you’ve ever had a sick dog, you know the entire house becomes a low-grade emergency room. You’re googling symptoms at 2 a.m., texting the vet, trying to decipher whether that noise they just made means “I’m fine” or “please rush me to the animal hospital immediately.” Let’s just say there were a lot of sleepless nights and dog poo combined. Sorry, TMI.

Then I traveled to Los Angeles to visit my family.

Which sounds glamorous until you remember that travel is mostly airports, bad sleep, and snacks that are somehow both stale and $12.

However, this view in Malibu made it all the more worth it.

And then, right in the middle of all of this, I got the flu.

Not the polite, “I’m a little under the weather” version. The real one. Flu B. The kind where your body stages a full rebellion. The kind where your sinuses feel like someone filled them with concrete, and your brain can’t form a complete thought.

The kind where you look at your beautiful, ambitious reinvention plan and the only task you’re capable of completing is drink more water, barely.

There is nothing quite like getting violently sick in the middle of a personal reinvention to make you question everything.

When you’re lying on the couch with a fever, your brain gets philosophical in a very unhelpful way. You start thinking things like:

Who the hell cares what I have to say anyway?

Why am I trying to build all this?

Wouldn’t it be easier to just go back to something normal and predictable?

The internet makes reinvention look very tidy. Someone announces a pivot. They post a few aesthetic photos of a notebook and a latte. Six months later, they have a book deal and a Netflix show.

But the real version of reinvention is much less cinematic.

The real version looks like trying to start something new while your dogs are throwing up and you’re coughing so hard you can’t finish a sentence. It looks like feeling deeply certain one week and deeply ridiculous the next.

Some days I feel completely clear.

Like yes—this is exactly what I’m meant to be doing. Telling the stories women whisper about money and identity and starting over. Building something around the messy middle of life.

On other days, I go to an event, someone asks what I do, and I freeze.

Because what’s the answer?

“Money expert” feels too small.

“Media company owner” feels too vague.

“Helping women feel more like themselves” sounds like something printed on a lavender candle.

So I usually stumble through some awkward hybrid answer while silently wishing there were a word for the thing I’m actually building.

Maybe there isn’t yet.

Maybe that’s the point.

Reinvention, I’m realizing, isn’t a clean break from your old life. It’s a strange hallway between identities. You’re not who you used to be, but you’re not fully who you’re becoming either.

You’re in the middle.

Which is uncomfortable. And humbling. And weirdly fertile.

Because the messy middle is where the real stories live.

It’s where women start asking bigger questions about money, work, identity, marriage, purpose—sometimes all at once. It’s where you realize the life you carefully built might not be the life you actually want anymore.

It’s where reinvention actually begins.

Even if you also happen to have the flu.

So no, the year didn’t start exactly the way I imagined. I thought I’d be launching things faster. Publishing more. Feeling clearer about who I am and what I do.

Instead, I’ve spent a surprising amount of time in sweatpants, drinking tea, and trying to get my lungs back. As I’m publishing this, they still aren’t back, and I’m still coughing every single second, it feels like.

But somewhere in the middle of all that, something clicked.

Maybe reinvention isn’t something you announce.

Maybe it’s something you slowly become while life keeps happening around you.

Dogs get sick.
Flights get delayed.
Bodies break down.

And you keep writing anyway.

You keep telling the stories.

You keep saying the things that feel slightly too honest to say out loud.

Because the truth is, I don’t know exactly what this next chapter looks like yet.

But I do know this:

There are a lot of women out there standing in the same hallway between who they were and who they’re becoming.

And if I’m going to build something new, I want it to be for them.

Flu and all.

Sadie, here’s the part about reinvention that nobody tells you: it feels almost exactly like failure while you’re in the middle of it.

Your income drops. Your confidence wobbles. You go from being the person who knows what she’s doing to someone staring at a spreadsheet thinking, Did I just make a terrible life decision?

And the reason it feels so intense isn’t just about the money.

Money is emotional wiring.

When our income changes, our brains don’t just read it as a financial shift—they read it as a signal about safety, identity, and worth. A steady paycheck can feel like proof that we’re competent, responsible, contributing. When that changes, even temporarily, it can feel like the ground under our feet has moved.

But here’s the tricky part: what feels like safety is often just familiarity.

Many women remain in careers or lives that no longer fit because the paycheck provides emotional security. It tells our nervous system, Everything is under control.

Reinvention interrupts that signal. And when the numbers dip or become unpredictable, our brains immediately jump to the worst conclusion: You’re failing.

But sometimes you’re not failing.

Sometimes you’re just early.

The messy middle of reinvention almost always comes with financial uncertainty. It also comes with emotional noise—old stories about worth, productivity, and contribution suddenly getting very loud.

So the real question isn’t whether things feel uncomfortable right now.

The real question is whether the life you left still felt honest.

Because sometimes the scariest financial move isn’t trying something new.

Sometimes it’s staying somewhere that no longer fits just because the paycheck makes us feel safe.

Why Reinvention Feels So Financially Terrifying

When women change careers, start businesses, or step into something new in midlife, the emotional intensity around money often surprises them.

But there’s actually a lot of science behind why reinvention can feel so destabilizing.

First, our brains are wired to react strongly to income loss or uncertainty. Behavioral economists call this loss aversion—a principle discovered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Their research found that losses feel about twice as painful as equivalent gains feel good. In other words, losing $20 triggers more emotional stress than gaining $20 brings happiness.

Translate that to life transitions: even a temporary drop in income during a reinvention phase can trigger a powerful sense of danger in the brain.

Your nervous system doesn’t see “a new chapter.”

It sees loss.

There’s also a deeper identity component. Economists studying identity economics have shown that people make financial decisions based not only on money itself, but on how those decisions align with their sense of self. If you’ve spent years being the responsible earner, the high performer, or the stable one in your household, a shift in income can feel like more than a financial change. (Yes, read that again!)

It can feel like an identity disruption.

And then there’s the cultural story we’ve been told about success. Most people only hear about reinvention after it works—the founder who sold her company, the writer who landed the book deal, the creator who “blew up overnight.”

What we don’t see is the phase researchers sometimes call the liminal stage—the psychological and professional in-between where someone is no longer who they used to be, but hasn’t yet become the next version of themselves.

Anthropologists originally used the term to describe rites of passage, and it’s surprisingly accurate for career transitions. In the liminal stage, the usual signals of progress disappear. There’s no promotion. No raise. No clear title change.

Progress becomes invisible.

Which is why so many people misinterpret reinvention as failure.

But historically, this messy middle shows up in almost every major career transition. Studies of entrepreneurs show that many experience several years of unstable or reduced income before their ventures stabilize. Even creative careers—from writers to filmmakers to media founders—often include long periods where progress is happening behind the scenes but isn’t yet visible financially.

The uncomfortable truth is that reinvention often requires a temporary mismatch between effort and reward.

You may be working harder, learning more, and building something new—while the numbers temporarily move in the wrong direction.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re moving backward.

Sometimes it simply means you’re standing in the part of the story where change is happening, but the results haven’t caught up yet.

A Small Experiment to Try This Week

Here’s something simple you can try that often reveals more than you expect.

Take a piece of paper (or open the Notes app) and write down three sentences:

1. The life I thought I would have by now.

2. The life I actually have right now.

3. The life I might be building next.

Don’t overthink it. Just write whatever comes up.

Most people notice something interesting when they do this. The first sentence is usually very neat and predictable—steady career, stable income, a clear sense of identity. The second one tends to feel messier. More complicated. Maybe even disappointing.

But the third sentence—the one about what might come next—is where curiosity usually starts to sneak in.

That’s the part we often ignore when we’re busy worrying about whether we’ve fallen behind.

Because reinvention rarely feels like progress while it’s happening. It often feels like confusion, uncertainty, or starting over.

But sometimes that third sentence is the first real clue that your life isn’t falling apart.

It might just be opening up.

xo,

Shannah

Welcome to Hey Shannah — thoughtful essays on money, emotional wiring, and becoming who you were always meant to be. If this resonates, pass it along, join the discussion below, or reply and introduce yourself. I’m listening.

When I was seven years old, I used to dress up like Madonna and put on concerts for anyone willing to sit still long enough to watch.

It was 1984. Like a Virgin had just come out, and I was absolutely certain I was headed for a singer-songwriter career.

I’d tie a lace ribbon into my blonde hair, stack jelly bracelets up my arms, grab a hairbrush microphone, and fully commit to the performance. My brother was often cast as the backup guitarist, whether he liked it or not.

Sadly, I don’t have any pictures of me from that age, but here’s one from San Francisco, MANY years ago, doing my best album-cover impression.

Were we talented?
Debatable.

Was I serious about it?
Completely.

My favorite song was “Material Girl.” I looked up the lyrics recently, and let me tell you, they land very differently as an adult woman than they did when I was seven.

‘Cause the boy with the cold hard cash
Is always Mister Right…

Wow.

We didn’t call it cultural messaging back then. But looking back, it’s hard not to see how early many of us were taught that money meant safety… and that safety might need to come from someone else.

No wonder our relationship with money can feel so complicated.

For most of my life, I tried incredibly hard to be someone.

The best.
The most accomplished.
The one who figured it out first.

Sports, school, business - I chased excellence like it was oxygen.

Spoiler: chasing “best” is one of the fastest routes to exhaustion, because eventually you realize you aren’t running toward your life…You’re running away from yourself.

Last year, after I sold my podcast, right in the middle of launching a book, which plenty of people thought was wildly questionable timing, I had a quiet but unmistakable realization:

What if I just stopped trying to be anyone else?

What if I let myself have sharp edges?
Say what I actually think.
Outgrow expectations.
Disappoint people if necessary.

What if I were just… me?

So that’s what I’m doing here.

Let the chips fall.

Here’s what I know to be true about humans — and especially about women in midlife:

We’re not who we used to be.
We’re not exactly who we thought we’d become.
And we’re often not sure what comes next.

So we soothe.

With spending.
With food.
With wine.
With productivity.
With relationships.
With careers that look good on paper but quietly drain us.

Nearly every coping strategy has a financial footprint.

Which brings me to something I believe with my whole heart:

Money isn’t math. It’s emotional wiring.

And once you see that, you can never unsee it.

Subscribe now

A reader, Shelly 46 from Philadelphia, recently asked me a question that I hear in some form almost every week:

Here’s the answer most people don’t expect:

You’re not failing. You’re regulating.

Your nervous system has a set point for what feels financially safe. When you earn more than your system is used to holding, your body looks for ways — often unconsciously — to return to familiar territory.

That can look like overspending.
Taking on new expenses.
Helping others financially.
Avoiding your accounts.
Sliding back into debt after a strong season.

Not because you’re irresponsible, but because your system is trying to restore equilibrium.

If you grew up around financial stress, instability, or unpredictability, more money didn’t register as freedom.

It registered as a risk.
More responsibility.
More visibility.
More to lose.

So when money starts to accumulate, your nervous system quietly asks:

Is this safe?

And if the answer feels uncertain, the money is released.

Not logically.
Biologically.

That’s why budgeting alone doesn’t fix this pattern.

The issue isn’t discipline, it’s capacity. You don’t break the cycle by trying harder. You break it by expanding your ability to feel safe with more — more income, more stability, more ease.

That “ceiling” you keep hitting?

It isn’t financial (at first).

It’s emotional.

Here’s something we don’t talk about enough:

Women are relatively new to financial autonomy.

For much of modern history, women weren’t encouraged to build relationships with money, only dependencies. Not long ago, women couldn’t reliably open credit cards, secure mortgages, or establish credit without a male co-signer.

Money wasn’t framed as a tool for freedom. It was framed as protection. Survival. Marriageability.

So, of course, many of us internalized the idea that money equals safety, and losing it equals danger.

That messaging doesn’t disappear just because laws change.

It lives in the nervous system.

It gets passed down in subtle ways:

“Don’t depend on anyone.”
“Make sure you marry someone stable.”
“Money doesn’t grow on trees.”
“We can’t afford that.”

Even silence teaches. So if part of you still reacts to money with fear, hypervigilance, guilt, or urgency…You’re not broken. You’re patterned. And patterns can be rewired.

But first — they have to be seen.

Pocket Pep Talk (A New Member’s Feature)

I’m introducing something new for paid subscribers called Pocket Pep Talks — short, powerful Sunday messages designed to help you regulate your nervous system, shift your money patterns, and move through life with more steadiness.

Think of them as the voice in your ear, reminding you that you are not broken… You are wired. And wiring can change.

You can grab a snack, and watch it, or pop on your headphones and listen for 5ish minutes.

I’ll be sending out a preview of what members receive in their inbox every Sunday, this Sunday - so look out for that.

Inside each Pocket Pep Talk, we focus less on financial strategy and more on the emotional capacity required to actually hold the life you’re building.

Because knowledge alone doesn’t create change. Safety does.

Try This Now

Before you rush past this section, give yourself five quiet minutes.

Exercise: Identify Your Financial Set Point

Ask yourself:

👉 What is the amount of money in my account that makes me exhale?

Not the number you want to feel calm…
The number that actually does.

Now the deeper question:

👉 What number starts to make me uncomfortable to hold?

Many people don’t realize they have an internal “upper limit” until they repeatedly cross it — and then unconsciously move back below it.

Awareness is where rewiring begins.

Journal Prompt

Write this at the top of a fresh page:

“If it felt completely safe to have more money than I’m used to… how would my life expand?”

Don’t edit yourself.

Notice what comes up — excitement, skepticism, fear, grief, possibility.

All of it is useful information.

In the full Sunday Pep Talk, I walk you through how to gently expand your capacity so that more money doesn’t trigger more stress — it creates more space.

If you’re ready for that kind of support in your life, you can become a member below.

Subscribe below to receive Pocket Pep Talks every Sunday.

Subscribe now

Thanks for being here — truly.

👉 If this essay made you think of someone, feel free to pass it along.
👉 And if you want to spend more time together, you can find me on Instagram or my website, too.

Subscribe now

This post is part of a 30-day experiment I’m documenting here.

For the next month, I’m paying attention to who I am when I stop using money, productivity, and “having it together” as proof that I’m okay.

Some days I write about it.
Some days I talk about it on video.
Mostly, I’m just noticing what comes up.

If you want the real-time tools I’m using to steady myself — the Pocket Pep Talks — those live in the paid version of this space.

No pressure. Just here if you want it.

Happy New Year, my friend! It’s taken me a few days to figure out what I wanted to say to you. The New Year is always a weird time for me, so thank you for letting me catch my breath.

On paper, things are fine.

Actually — more than fine.

The bills are paid. There’s money in savings (finally). Nothing is actively on fire (just yet).

And…

I keep walking around with this low-grade sense that I might somehow ruin everything if I make the wrong move. Not a dramatic panic. Not a spiral you can see from the outside.

Just… a quiet, internal don’t fuck this up running in the background.

No one really talks about this part.

We talk about money stress when things are bad.
We talk about hustle when things are tight.
We talk about manifesting when we want more.

But no one really talks about the fear that shows up after stability.

The fear that says: Okay, things are finally okay. So now the stakes are higher.

Let me be honest for a minute, last year was good to me. Not flashy-good.
Not “I cracked the code” good. Just steady-good. I haven’t felt that way in a long time. I had a few “wild” business years filled with perimenopause at its peak and all the joys that come along with that.

I wasn’t bracing for disaster.
I wasn’t doing mental math at 2 a.m. (at least not every night).
I wasn’t living in that familiar hum of what if something goes wrong?

And honestly, when January rolled around, I didn’t feel energized. I felt protective.

Like I finally built something solid — and now I was afraid to touch it. Which is confusing, because this is supposed to be the part where you go bigger, right?
Set the goals. Raise the bar. Optimize the plan.

But instead, I noticed myself hesitating.

Second-guessing.
Overthinking.
Waiting for clarity that never quite arrived.

Not because I’m lazy. Not because I don’t want more. Because I remember how hard it was to get here and ugh, I don’t want to do that again!

So, I do what I love and what grounds me. I bake cupcakes. Really f’cking good gluten-free cupcakes. P.S. If you don’t follow me on Instagram, you should.

This is the part that doesn’t make it into money advice.

Being “good with money” doesn’t automatically make you feel safe. It just gives your anxiety something more sophisticated to chew on.

You don’t stop worrying — you just worry more quietly.

You start asking different questions:

• Is this the right move?

• What if I mess up something that’s finally working?

• Should I be more grateful instead of wanting more?

On paper, everything adds up. Emotionally, you’re still unsettled.

And if you’re a woman in midlife, there’s often this added layer of pressure:
- You should know better by now.
- You should feel more confident.
- You should be past this.

So instead of saying, “I’m kind of freaking out,” you say, “I’m just being careful.”

Here’s what I’ve come to believe:

Most money anxiety at this stage of life isn’t about irresponsibility. It’s about protecting the version of yourself you fought hard to become.

You’re not afraid of failing. You’re afraid of losing ground.

You’re afraid of waking up one day and realizing you traded safety for momentum — or momentum for safety — and now you’re stuck with the consequences.

So you pause.
You wait.
You think a little more.

And the waiting quietly turns into tension.

This year, I’m not interested in pretending confidence fixes this.

I don’t want another productivity system!
I don’t want a louder mindset!
I don’t want to force myself into bold moves just to prove I’m not scared!

I want to understand what’s actually driving the hesitation.

Because money isn’t just math.
Its identity.
It’s self-trust.
It’s the nervous system remembering every time things weren’t fine.

And until you work with that — no amount of “doing the right thing” will feel settled. Bam…that’s what I was trying to say :).

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On another note…

In February, I’m opening Midlife Money Reset — a small (10-15 women max), intentional group cohort for ambitious women who are good on paper but still quietly on edge.

Not women who need to learn how money works.
Women who are tired of carrying the emotional weight of being responsible, capable, expected to have it figured out by now, but not feeling together financially.

It’s not a January reset.
It’s not about fixing you.

It’s about finally naming what’s been running in the background — and learning how to move forward without abandoning your sense of safety.

I’ll share more soon.

For now, I just wanted to say this:

If things look fine from the outside, and you’re still kind of freaking out on the inside —you’re not broken.

You’re paying attention.

And that’s a much better place to start than pretending you’re not scared.

—

Paid subscribers: this week’s Pocket Pep Talk is about the specific thought that keeps capable women frozen after stability — and a simple way to interrupt it when it shows up. It will change how you move forward this year - it will be in your inbox on Sunday!

PSST- If you’re not subscribed, you’re missing out.

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Your only homework today:
Stop treating this year like proof that you failed at money.

That story is officially expired. Let’s clean out the fridge.

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On the last weekend of the year, I do the same thing every time:

I clean my kitchen.

Not in an influencer way. Not in a “new year, new me” montage with a matching set of containers.

I mean the real kind. The kind where you find a sticky jar you swore you’d use. The half-bag of flour that smells a little… off. The spice you bought for one recipe and never touched again.

This year, I was elbow-deep in it—wiping the counter, stacking bowls—when I decided to bake something simple. Comfort baking. The kind where your body exhales because it already knows the steps.

And then the dough looked wrong.

Too sticky. Too loose. The kind of dough that makes you stare at it like it personally betrayed you.

And without even realizing it, my brain did what it’s trained to do—what it does with money, too:

- I messed this up.
- I should know better.
- What is wrong with me?

I’ve made this recipe a hundred times. I teach people how to build better relationships with money. And still, my first instinct wasn’t curiosity.

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It was SHAME.

That’s when I caught myself and thought: this is the whole thing.

In baking, we treat “wrong” like information.
In money, we treat “wrong” like identity.

Sticky dough isn’t a character flaw. It’s just… sticky dough. You add flour slowly. You adjust. You keep going.

But money?

Overspent becomes I’m out of control.
Debt becomes I’m bad with money.
Behind becomes I’m failing.

And the end of the year pours gasoline on it.

Because December turns money into an annual report card, everyone’s tallying wins, losses, glow-ups, and glow-downs. Your nervous system is already fried, and then the internet is like:

“So… did you become your best self or what?”

No. We’re not doing that.

This is your reminder: money is not a moral scoreboard.
It’s a tool. A story. Sometimes a trigger. Often a mirror.

And that’s what we’re digging into next year: The Emotional Economy—the place where money meets identity, nervous system, shame, desire, grief, hormones, ambition, and that very human need to feel safe.

But first, before we sprint into next year like it’s a self-improvement Hunger Games, I want to give you something better:

A year-end recipe for releasing money shame

(With actual steps. Because you’re not here for vibes only.)

Step 1: Do a “fridge clean-out” of your finances (10 minutes)

This is not budgeting. This is not “fix your life.”

This is opening the door and taking inventory—without dramatizing it.

• Look at your checking account balance.

• Look at your credit card balances.

• Look at one month of transactions (just one).

Then write down three neutral facts:

1. What came in: $_____

2. What went out: $_____

3. What’s lingering: debt / subscriptions / expenses you avoided

No lectures. No spirals. Facts only.

If shame shows up, say: “This is information, not a verdict.”

Step 2: Find your “sticky dough” category

Pick the one category where shame likes to live.

For a lot of us, it’s one of these:

• food / delivery

• shopping (hello, late-night carts)

• beauty / wellness

• gifts (and the pressure to be generous)

• convenience spending (because you’re tired)

• programs / coaches / “maybe this will fix me” purchases

Circle just one.

Now answer this question—honestly, gently:

“What feeling was I trying to create or escape when I spent here?”
Relief? Control? Confidence? Comfort? Belonging? Numbness? A reset?

This is Emotional Economy work. You’re not “bad.”
You’re trying to meet a need.

Step 3: Separate money from identity (one sentence that changes everything)

Write this somewhere you’ll see it:

“My money choices are not my character.”

And if you need the more extended version:

My net worth is not my self-worth.
My spending is not a personality test.
My pace is allowed to be human.

Step 4: Make one small “mise en place” move for January

In professional kitchens, mise en place means “everything in its place.”

Not because chefs are morally superior, but because chaos makes everything more complicated.

Pick ONE simple, repeatable action for January:

• Check your accounts every Friday (2 minutes max)

• Automate $25/week (or whatever amount) into savings

• Cancel one subscription you forgot you had

• Add a 24-hour pause before nonessential purchases

• Set one “easy dinner” budget line so you stop shaming yourself for feeding yourself

One move. Not a makeover.

You’re not trying to become a new person on January 1.
You’re trying to make yourself a safer place to live.

Step 5: Close the year like dough rests—not like a panic attack

There’s a reason recipes say: let it rest.

Because forcing it ruins it.

So if you only do one thing today, let it be this:

Put a hand on your chest and say:

“I release the story that money makes me good or bad.”
“I can learn without punishment.”
“I can change without shame.”

That’s the reset.

What’s coming next year: The Emotional Economy

Next year, we’re going deeper—not into “how to be perfect with money,” but into:

• why shame drives spending (and avoidance)

• how identity gets tangled with income and worth

• why “discipline” doesn’t work when your nervous system is screaming

• how to build wealth without self-abandonment

• how to stop using money as proof you’re okay

We’re going to talk about the stuff people whisper about. The stuff that lives under the receipts.

Because every dollar has a story, and I’m here for the real ones. No more traditional financial advice that only leaves you feeling MORE SHAME.

(A few years ago, I sat on Santa’s lap in Dublin and asked him to help us all get rid of shame…I’m still a work in progress, I would imagine you are too!)

A personal ask (and the why behind it)

If this Substack has helped you feel more seen, more steady, more human around money… I want to invite you to support my work next year.

Not in a “please fund my personality” way, but in a let’s reach more people way.

Paid subscriptions are what allow me to keep writing like this—honestly, creatively, without watering it down—and to make more of this work accessible to women who need it.

If you’ve been meaning to upgrade, this is a beautiful time.

And if you’re already a paid subscriber: thank you. You’re not just supporting me.
You’re supporting the kind of money conversation that actually heals people.

Because we don’t need more financial advice screamed at us.

We need safety. Language. Permission. Tools.
We need a new story.

That’s the Emotional Economy.

And next year? We’re building it together.

PS: If you need permission: go enjoy the holidays, ignore the “new year, new you” crowd, and absolutely do not download a color-coded life overhaul on January 1.

I thought this would be the year everything took off in every way possible.

After selling my podcast in April, I pictured momentum. A loud next chapter. The inevitable glow-up that’s supposed to happen when you finally “make a move.”

Instead, this year got quiet.

Uncomfortably quiet.

Not the kind of quiet that feels restful. The kind that asks you questions you’ve been skillfully avoiding.

Here’s the first one that stopped me in my tracks:

How do I talk about money again without wanting to vomit?

For more than a decade, money was my language. Budgets. Saving. Debt. Plans. Strategy. Advice. I said all the right things. I helped a lot of people. And at some point — without a breakdown, without a dramatic exit — my body stopped believing that information alone was enough. I couldn’t have one more conversation the same way.

Here’s the truth I couldn’t unsee anymore.

Most people don’t struggle with money because they’re ignorant.
They struggle because of what money touches emotionally.

Fear. Shame. Desire. Control. Scarcity. Safety. Power. Worth.

And once you see that, it’s impossible to go back to pretending spreadsheets are the whole story. Spreadsheets are essential, but let me tell you: they are FAR down the list of things you need to achieve your money goals.

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So instead of scaling something I suddenly felt disconnected from, I slowed down. I questioned my own work. I let myself get awkward and uncertain again. I let myself not know how this next version of me was supposed to look.

And something unexpected happened.

I started craving mess. Texture. Heat. Timing. Presence.

I started baking again. And sipping yummy local ciders.

Not as a hustle. Not as a pivot. Not as a “don’t worry, I still have a plan.”

But as a language my nervous system trusted.

Flour doesn’t care about your personal brand. Butter doesn’t perform. Ovens don’t care about your five-year plan. They respond to attention.

And slowly, quietly, I started to wonder:

This year didn’t give me the storyline I expected.

It gave me the awkward middle — the part where the old identity no longer fits, and the new one isn’t fully formed.

No applause. No headline. Just the strange relief of not lying to myself anymore.

Strangely, in the midst of the mess, I unlocked a secret code and finally got featured on morning news shows and major news networks, like my appearance last week on ABC World News. One thing I learned this year is that I LOVE being on camera.

And if you’re reading this with that familiar ache in your chest —
Because this year didn’t turn into what you were promised…
Because you worked for a version of your life that hasn’t arrived…
Because you quietly outgrew a dream without ceremoniously replacing it…

Let me say this clearly:

You are not failing.
You are shedding skin.

There is a grief that comes with outgrowing your own momentum. With realizing that what once thrilled you now exhausts you. With wanting something truer but not yet knowing how to name it.

That grief doesn’t mean you’re lost.

It often means you’re paying attention for the first time in a long time.

You don’t need to hurry this part.
You don’t need to brand it.
You don’t need to prove that the pause was productive.

It already mattered.

✦ A SWEET THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

What part of your life feels quieter than you expected right now?
And what might that quiet be making room for?

You don’t have to answer it.
Just notice what your body does when you read it.

That’s enough for today.

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A Closing, Before You Go

If this year cracked you open instead of launching you forward… If you expected fireworks and got fog… If your ambition went quiet and your curiosity got louder…

You’re not doing it wrong.

You’re standing in the part of the story where the old rules stop working, and the new ones haven’t introduced themselves yet.

That space isn’t empty. It’s fertile.

And I don’t know yet exactly what this next chapter will be called — but I know it will feel more honest than the last one.

That feels like enough for now.

✦ Hey Shannah, A Question for You

If you’re willing, I’d love to hear this:

What are some of the highlights and lowlights of 2025 for you?

You can hit reply, leave a comment, whisper it to yourself in your car, or scribble it on a sticky note you immediately lose.

All versions count.

P.S.

I did not sell my podcast to end up emotionally flirting with cookie dough and existential questions, but life is nothing if not wildly unserious about our plans. I’m going to emerge next year doing some fun things - things that hopefully help you and me at the same time.

Stay tuned.

Debt, avoidance, overspending, panic-checking your bank account, guilt, shame, procrastination — none of these problems actually start with money.

They start with emotion.

And here’s the wild part no one tells you:

Debt is emotional before it’s financial.

Overspending is emotional before it’s behavioral.

Avoiding your accounts is emotional before it’s “irresponsible.”

Feeling behind is emotional before it’s mathematical.

If you’ve been trying to “budget your way out” of emotional money patterns, of course, it hasn’t worked.

You don’t fix an emotional problem with a spreadsheet.

This week, for the next 48 hours only, I’m opening two final coaching options before I retire this entire 1:1 format in 2026.

These sessions are where we deal with the real stuff underneath the money chaos — the emotion that’s been running your financial life.

If you want a reset, this is your moment.

✨ OFFER #1 — 48 HOURS ONLY

The 75-Minute Money Reset Intensive — $497

+ free 15-minute bonus (90 minutes total!)
+ 7 days of email support

This session is perfect if you’re dealing with:

• Debt anxiety

• Emotional spending

• Avoiding logging into your bank

• Constant fear you’re “behind”

• Money shame

• Starting over (again) every month

• Stress about bills or credit cards

• Feeling like you “should know better” but don’t know where to start

In 90 minutes, we will:

• Regulate your money nervous system

• Identify the emotional drivers causing your money patterns

• Build a simple plan that feels doable ASAP

• Interrupt the shame that’s been running the show

• Give you one full week of guidance so the shift actually sticks

👉 Grab your Reset Intensive (48 hours only):
https://stan.store/shannahgame/p/emotional-money-11-coaching-package-3-sessions

✨ OFFER #2 — 48 HOURS ONLY

Emotional Money Coaching — 3 Sessions for $847

(Regularly $1,247 — this price will not return.)

This is for you if you’re tired of:

• Carrying debt shame

• Feeling behind everyone else

• Repeating the same spending cycles

• Avoiding your money because it feels overwhelming

• Feeling guilt every time you spend

• Being the only responsible one

• Constant financial anxiety

• Feeling like you “should be further by now”

Across 3 sessions, we:

• Unpack your money story

• Dissolve the emotional patterns keeping you stuck

• Build new habits you can actually maintain

• Reset the way you think + feel about money

• Create emotional and financial momentum that lasts

This is the deepest, most supportive transformation I offer — and this is the last time it will ever be available like this.

👉 Get the 3-Session Coaching Package (48 hours only):
https://stan.store/shannahgame/p/emotional-money-11-coaching-package-3-sessions

Why these 48 hours matter

Most people wait until money is on fire before getting support.

But the truth is:

Your money isn’t the problem — your emotions are the bottleneck.
And the second you address the emotions, money stops feeling impossible.

These two offers are designed to help you break the emotional cycle you’ve been stuck in — and finally get relief, clarity, and direction.

After the next 48 hours, these 1:1 options disappear. I’m shifting how I work in 2026, and I won’t be offering private coaching in this format again.

If your financial life feels heavy, unclear, overwhelming, or full of shame… let’s fix that. Together.

**Also, payment plans are available at checkout.

Why Me?

Because I’m the CFP®, Trauma of Money Specialist, and a financial educator of 20+ years who will talk to you about your spending triggers, your survival mode money habits, and the emotional swirl behind your Amazon cart—and never judge you for any of it.

I’ve coached thousands of humans, hosted a NYT-recognized podcast with 28 million downloads, and I’ve seen every money meltdown, spiral, and “WTF did I just buy?” moment under the sun.

I know how to take the shame out, put clarity back in, and help you make money decisions that don’t feel like punishment. If you’ve tried everything except dealing with the actual emotions behind your money… I’m your girl.

With clarity and no judgment,
Shannah

P.S.

If your first instinct was, “I should wait…” Just know: waiting is the #1 emotional money pattern that keeps people stuck.

Money changes when you do. And this is your window.