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Are you struggling to build wealth despite earning a good income?

In this episode of Wealthy Wellthy podcast, we dive deep into the often misunderstood world of money mindset and financial literacy. We explore the three-legged stool of money: mindset, relationship, and literacy. I share my personal journey from financial struggles to building wealth, and how these experiences shaped my approach to money

The main focus of this episode is debunking common money myths and introducing the three-legged stool of money: mindset, relationship, and literacy. Krisstina emphasizes that financial freedom isn't just about earning more, but about understanding and managing money effectively.

Additional topics covered include overcoming money trauma, the importance of couple alignment in finances, and practical strategies for building generational wealth. Krisstina also discusses the balance between health, relationships, and money in creating a fulfilling life.

Ready to transform your relationship with money and achieve true financial freedom? Listen to this episode for actionable insights and a fresh perspective on wealth-building that goes beyond just making more money.

WW Live Event Website - https://krisstina.com/live

Key Takeaways

5:55 Three pillars of the money stool explained

18:25 Freedom is the ultimate goal, not money

25:55 Three master categories of money: earn, spend, invest

41:35 Balancing family, business, and wealth building

50:20 Money journey has ups and downs, not linear

Memorable Quotes

"More money doesn't solve the problems. More money can even create more problems. But more money, when we're good stewards and we understand it, actually makes life easier."

"Money is a journey and it's a lifelong journey. When we get real clear that we don't want to be in these situations, the balancing came from gaining more time over our life the more assets that we have."

"Money is to underwrite a good life. When we're in control of our money, when we're in harmony with our money, then we don't have to sacrifice our health for wealth."

Resources Mentioned

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel - https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Money-Timeless-lessons-happiness/dp/0857197681

The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino - https://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Salesman-World-Og-Mandino/dp/055327757X

Connect with Krisstina

Website - https://wealthywellthy.life/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/krisstinawise

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@krisstinawise

Krisstina's Book, Falling For Money - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692560904/

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Podcast Production & Marketing by FullCast

The answer to all my money problems is to make more money. And so it's just this belief that money's not working for me. I don't have enough or something, so I need to go get more. And again, money's out there somewhere. We haven't brought it in or attracted it. We're chasing it. Something out there that we have to chase and go get more of it, and that creates that hustle and that creates all the things like, oh my God, I need more money. But that's the earning category. And. And yes, we need to earn money. Hello and welcome back to the Wealthy Wealthy podcast, where we explore the intersection of wealth, health, and entrepreneurship. I'm your host, Christina Weiss, and this week I'm the guest, not the host, sharing the mic with Andrew Biggs and Mike Abramowicz on their brilliant podcast, the Better Than Rich Show. In better than Rich style, we unpack the myths and false beliefs that keep so many stuck in their endless chase. And thinking more money means more happiness, more success, more freedom. We challenge the cultural programming that says money is the ultimate goal and explore what it means to choose a life that's better than rich. I share how that shift changed everything for me. From growing up in financial struggle to building wealth through entrepreneurship and real estate, I learned that the answer isn't make more. It's know what enough looks like. We talk about redefining wealth through clarity, values, and intentional living. How minimalism, mindset, and money literacy come together to support a life where money is simply a tool. Not the point. If you've ever questioned whether the grind is worth it, or if you're craving a more grounded, meaningful relationship with your money, this conversation is for you. It's a deep dive into what real wealth looks like. When you're no longer trying to impress or prove. Just live fully and freely. Please enjoy my conversation on the Better Than Rich Show. More money doesn't solve the problems. More money can even create more problems. But more money, when we're good stewards and we understand it, more money actually makes life easier like it really does. And it can bring in more happiness and more meaning when we have a meaningful relationship with our money and we're not just spending it to keep up with the Joneses and consume and these different things. So again, it's very simple when we just kind of get underneath it. But again, my belief is we really have to learn these things. We need to clean up our old traumas and messes and just learn these very basic, simple to follow principles and rules. And put them to work. And life is hard. All the things. Parenting is hard, marriage can be hard, but money doesn't have to be. That's the thing. Like money. Money just makes so much of life even more difficult and complex. And by learning these things, we can take that hard out. And that hard out makes life overall a lot easier.

Welcome back, listener, to the Better Than Rich show. Today we have Christina Wise. And as I'm leaving this episode, I'm thinking, was this an episode of the podcast or like a financial therapy session for me? We got into so many interesting things about money and we talk about limiting beliefs around money. You know, where those come from. This sort of conflicted relationship sometimes we all can have with money. Maybe that's not you, but I know for a lot of people it is. So we talk about money mindset, we talk about financial strategies that are going to help you. We talk about how do you get assets and all those different things. But before we even get into all the cool strategies that ultimately people want to jump to, we talk about what are your beliefs around money and could it be that you're actually creating a little bit of a self fulfilling prophecy around that? So spoiler alert, probably. And she talks about how to break free of that. She has her book Falling for Money. She does courses and all these sorts of things to help people overcome their money blocks. She's got some amazing stories in this podcast that I won't spoil you on, but listen to the end and you'll hear some amazing stories about people overcoming their money blocks. And not just so they can become rich and whatever, but so they can really, in some ways heal some interesting wounds in their lives and you'll hear those stories. So I hope you enjoy this episode. Obviously, I can go on and on about Christina's background and what she brings to the table, but I will let her speak for herself in this episode. So let's get on with the show with Christina Wise.

Welcome to the Better Than Rich show with your hosts, Andrew Biggs and Mike Abramowicz. The Better Than Rich show helps ambitious leaders who are on a mission to leave the world better than they found it, change their perspective on what's important, increase their income and impact, and systemize their life and business. If you've ever struggled with finding your purpose, have felt disconnected or distracted or found yourself going through the motions, this show will remind you that what you do matters and will reinspire you to chase your highest dreams. It's time for you to become better than rich.

Welcome back, everybody. To the Better Than Rich show, I'm Andrew Biggs and today I have my special guest of Christina Wise. Christina, how are you today?

Great. I'm so happy to be here.

Yeah, I'm super pumped about this. I love that your last name is Wise and you talk about making wise choices with your money. Obviously you're somebody who's a money expert. And as somebody who's kind of like, I feel like I'm pretty good on a lot of things, I don't feel like I always make the best financial choices for whatever reason. So maybe you can psychoanalyze me and tell me why I have all these money blocks and why I always seem to screw up my finances here today. I'm only half joking, but you have this idea of falling for money, and I'd love to start there and obviously then pick your brain about some specifics. But falling for money, what does that mean to you and why did you choose that as a title?

That's actually a fun question, a fun story. So when I wrote my book, have you written a book or anybody that's written a book? You write the book. But coming up with the title is not an easy process, one you need to research to make sure there's not the same title out there in the same genre. And my first name for the book was I heart Money. And it was like, I heart money. I love money. And I think there was maybe other things out there close to that. But I got so much pushback from those when I wanted to name my book I Heart Money. And then I came up with Falling for Money. And still I got a lot of pushback that my editors, agents are saying, you can't say that. Like, you can't say falling for money. People are not going to like that. You're going to get a lot of resistance. And at first I was thinking about taking that advice and I thought, no, because that's really the whole premise of the book. Is that what I believe to be true? Now there are basically these three stools, what I call the three stools of money. The three legged stool of money. So when we know a chair can have four legs, but you can have a stool with three legs and it's sturdy, it's all you need is three legs, but you can have two legs and it'll fall over. So. So when I've really worked my entire career to learn money, to understand money, to build wealth with money, and listening to all the different experts and authors and podcasters and distilling all that down I really landed on these three legs of the stool. And one is money mindset. So we hear that all the time, money mindset. And what mindset really means is our mind around money, like our consciousness with money, how we think about money, our narratives with money. But money mindset, limiting beliefs around money. And our money mindset is really comes from our childhood. So it's understanding that most of us have unresolved issues and trauma around money based on how we grew up. And we either grew up with money in a household like mine where it was argued about all the time and parents fighting and money wasn't a safe topic and there was never enough for me. That was my upbringing with money. And I really grew up with this belief, this mindset that there was never enough money and rich people lived over there and that wasn't available to us. And that was my mindset growing up that I carried for a long time and that I was less than because rich people were better. And so all of those things. But that's that first leg of the stool. And all of us, we start with some type of programming when it comes to money, other households, money wasn't an argument, but it was never discussed. So it was this thing that wasn't ever talked about, that was a topic that was not taboo. And if you're a certain type of family, you just wouldn't talk about money. Money's like, it's a secret. So we tend to grow up with one of those programs every once in a while. I hear stories now that, oh yeah, my family talked about it, it was a dinner table topic. But for most of us, that's not the case. It's still a taboo topic. So that mindset, based on how we grew up, we are programmed to really believe that money's not safe or we have these limitations, these limiting beliefs. And so as we come into adulthood when we have money problems, meaning we just aren't making enough, we don't have enough, we're month to month, we're in debt, we have financial stress, anxiety, whatever the case is, the first place we want to look is what is that? Childhood programming. And just clean it up and start working through those beliefs. But a lot of those in my space just say, hey, if you fix your mindset, you can be a millionaire or you can be wealthy, you can be financially free. And I don't believe that to be true. It's just one of the legs of the stool. The second leg is our relationship with money. And a relationship is that is what type of relationship do we have? And it means kind of the time we spend with money, how we feel about money, our behavior with money. And it's either a healthy relationship or it's unhealthy relationship. A lot of that might come from our mindset, but it's still distinct. And that's where the title of the book came from, Falling for money. It was this encouragement that we want to fall for our money in a healthy way, meaning we want to love it, we want to respect it, we want to enjoy it, we want to get close to it. And I put it like any relationship, that if we had a relation, if we're married and we neglect our spouse, and we always complain to our spouse and our spouse is never enough and we don't want to spend time or attention, that marriage is probably going to suffer. But if we all of a sudden wake up one day and start giving our spouse gratitude and love and time spent and want to go on date nights and propose, have different conversations. I've talked to so many relationship experts and they said one person can change relationship just by changing their their relationship to the relationship. So that's the same thing with money. That if we don't spend time with money, if we're afraid of money, if we have these money stories that money's bad or I'm too busy or I'm not good with numbers or whatever, these stories we tell ourselves, then that's going to develop in a relationship usually where we abdicate money or we ignore it, or we put it in somebody else's hands. So that's where that title of the money the book came from. And then the third leg of the stool that is also in my book, Falling for money is money requires literacy. Money is a game. It has rules, it has strategies, it has principles, it has laws, it has these mechanics. After all this time as a population, most people, the large majority, over 80%, have not spent any time learning like the skill of money. And what are the different categories of money? What are the different laws of money and what do I need to do when it comes to money behaviorally with my actions that are going to guarantee that I'm on the track to financial freedom as opposed to being in habits and practice and beliefs and relationships that are self sabotaging any real opportunity to build this wealth and freedom that ultimately we're all after, especially as entrepreneurs.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so awesome that you were able to break that down into the three legged stool of money. I think a lot of people want to at least a lot of people think what they want is they want to learn those strategies. They want to, okay, I really need to give me the goods. Tell me where to put my money. Tell me the rules, the laws, the mechanics that you were speaking to. And oftentimes they're trying to do that from a foundation of what you talked about earlier. Maybe they have these limiting beliefs. They have this financial trauma, whatever we want to call it, it kind of sounds crazy, but it's really not. And because it can be a charged subject for people, and it's a charged subject. When you think about what causes the most fights in marriages, in relationships, it's how to raise the kids and money. Those are the two. And probably money might be number one. So, yeah, probably a fair amount of the fights that you witnessed or the fight didn't happen in front of you as a kid, but it happened behind closed doors, and it was a tense environment in the house. There's probably some money issues going on. I think that's so key. And then maybe ask you a question about that, and then we can jump to the other two legs of the stool as well. How does somebody identify even their beliefs around money? And I think we have to obviously start with the understanding of where our money mindset is. And then, of course, the more difficult part, how do you transform it? You mentioned transforming your own belief, so I'd love to hear more about that.

Yeah. There's a peer of mine, his name is Scott Donnell, and he really works with kids and money. That's his. And he has a whole conversation around. It's called dinner table. His mission is to where parents can have dinner table conversations with their kids so that our children don't grow up with the same money traumas most of us did. And it's up to us as parents. I mean, this is what he says, and I agree with it. It's up to us as parents to change that. Because if we don't intentionally and consciously change the legacy of what our parents Parents passed on and what our parents passed on to us, we're going to pass on those same things to our children, and it's going to go on and on and on forever. So that's his entire mission. And he says a couple things that I think are just really powerful thoughts to spend a little time thinking about. But one of those, he says there's such thing as called money trauma. And money trauma means we are traumatized. Many of us, if not most of us, are traumatized one way or another around money. And then it's the one trauma we chase for the rest of our lives. And to think about that when we have these unresolved issues with money, we're chasing this thing that has traumatized us. There aren't any other traumas that we're typically chasing for the rest of our lives. And so that's why it's just so confusing and can be damaging and we can be so mixed up that we want money. But at the same time, maybe we have these unconscious beliefs or subconscious beliefs that money's a bad thing and that lack of reconciliation just causes a lot of havoc in our lives. So we have to get rid of that. And I'll talk about that in a second. Things to do. But another thing. So what he does is he's researching thousands of families. That's all he does now. He started his research projects and now he's turned it into his business to help kids and money to start changing some of this generational money trauma, if you will. But he said out of thousands of kids they've interviewed, and they're usually kind of middle school age children, that all the research is money is the one thing. They don't want to talk about it, they don't want anything to do with it. Because money is that thing in the household that causes so much hurt and anger and fear. I mean, these are thousands of families. So again, it's just these are from the mouth of babes. And so in their heads they're like, I want nothing to do with these things. And that's children today. We were probably the same children. So my point is that this is just carried over from generation to generation. It's not like we're making any headway. Even though there's more money, financial abundance in the world than ever before, the statistics are showing we're not really getting any better with it. So the first thing really to do on the mindset piece and that relationship is a simple exercise is just spend some time. And I do this in my money school. But that's the first week of what we do is we write down like, what are all the things you heard and saw as a child? And really start thinking about what are some of these beliefs or things you heard as a child over and over and over again. And even if you're a parent, the next part of that exercise is what are you repeating that you heard your parents say? It's just eye opening. I mean, my students that go through the school, they're like, I had no idea I was carrying on that same thing and saying, those things to my children. And, wow, I just had some really deep programming. And I'll tell you just a quick little story that just. Man, it shook me to my core of a student that just recently graduated from my school. And we do a closing conversation, like, kind of, what are your biggest transformation moments? Ahas in the 12 weeks, what really stood out to you? And she said, christina, it had to do with my money story because I have my students write this letter to money. And she said, I wrote this letter to Money, and I've done so much trauma work in my life because of my upbringing and all the things and so much therapy and thought I'd made all this headway, but I've just had all this struggle with money. She said, when I wrote this letter to Money, I realized that, oh, my gosh, like, what we believe to be true, we could never prove it. That. But my dad had killed my mother for insurance money. And so I'd always held money responsible for the death of my mom, thinking money's a bad thing. That's why my mom's no longer with us. And she said, writing that story, it just all came out. I was blaming money instead of really, this had nothing to do with money. It had to do with my parents and my dad sort of thing. So it's just like, we don't know even what's going to come out. She said, out of all this work I've done, I never knew that was still in there. And she said, just uncovering that and being able to let money know, like, oh, I know it's not your fault. This has nothing to do with you. I just already feel the shift and that I don't have to subconsciously hold money as a bad thing, and I'm already making more money. She's an artist, and she said, I've already started selling paintings and all these things that I realized is clearing that block so there's just work that we can all do. Another thing just, I'll finish up by saying that no matter where we are in our money journey, there's always that next block that we resolve things. We can burst through that one and we can make more money or create more wealth. And then all of a sudden, we reach the next block and there's something there. So I'm just saying there's always continual work to do. But what I believe to be true is if we do have financial angst in our lives, the first place to start is start uncovering what some of these subconscious beliefs are and start there to do the clearing. And it's not. It doesn't take a lot of time. You could spend probably a couple hours and really just clear these and rewrite the story.

Wow, that's quite the story that you were bringing up about this individual. And obviously it makes a ton of sense. I love what you said about we have this trauma around it, and yet we're chasing after it. Normally, we're running away from our traumas, which obviously isn't necessarily a great thing either. We got to look into them, but we're in this double bind. It's like I have this trauma from the past, and yet I'm compelled to chase after it. Maybe because I want a better life for myself, for my family, that I want to change the trajectory of my family lineage or whatever the reason. You would love to have more money in your life, and so you're caught between these two worlds, and it's got to be confusing. I love what you're sharing there, Christina. I love the idea of writing a letter to money. And you brought up the idea of a relationship to money. And imagine writing this love letter to money, if you will. In this case, it was an apology letter, or at least a letter of acknowledgement. What's the word? Anthropomorphizing money, in a way. Right. Like giving it this character. Do you have a healthy relationship with it? Do you spend time with it? I can definitely identify as the guy who's like, I really don't want to check my bank account, Christina. I'm just like, every time I click the button, I'm just a little nervous that it's going to say something lower than what I think I should say. And what does that say about my relationship to money? And shouldn't I want to spend time with it? Shouldn't I get to know it more? Shouldn't I check in on it more often? Send it a little text? So, anyways, I want to hear your thoughts on the relationship to money and build out that side of the stool as well.

Yeah. And that's just. It is that, I mean, one of the money principles. So I think at the end of the day, I mean, again, I've worked with thousands of students that have gone through my programs, and everybody says they want freedom. I've not had one person that hasn't said, I want freedom. So it's something that we want. We want freedom, we want autonomy, we want agency. We want freedom of choice, freedom of time, freedom of being able to do what we want to do and not do what we don't want to do. It's not money we're after. Ultimately, it's freedom. But we get really confused in this culture and society we live in. We get confused thinking we forget that freedom's what we want. And now we're making money and spending money and we're spending money to be able to look good to our friends, to have the right emblems on our cars and the right size houses and right types of vacations and the right school for our kids. And so that's where it gets confusing. We start making it and then we keep chasing it. We keep chasing this thing called more. And then we're not really looking at it. We don't understand it, and we don't have a good, healthy relationship with it. And that's where it starts wreaking havoc. And then we're chasing even more money because there seems like there's never enough. And we're never getting any closer to freedom because again, it's just we're. It's so confusing in the grand scheme of things. So it's the relationship piece. Well, even these all three coexist together. But how we get freedom, how we build freedom is we build financial freedom, which gives us the time freedom by learning to really get good with money. So we have to get good with money. We have to gain this skill set and understand, like I said, some of these basic principles and then live our lives. If we truly want financial freedom, we have to live our lives in accordance or in alignment with financial freedom principles. Right? We can't betray those, otherwise we're not going to get it. One of the money laws is that if we want freedom, we need assets, and assets are what create income. And so once we start studying to understand some of these basic principles, it kind of starts shifting. When we can start shifting our understanding of money and how it works, and we can then start shifting our behavior, then that's where things start changing for the direction of the trajectory that we want. But if we don't have, if we've not cleared those really, really bad, deeply limiting money beliefs and mindsets, and if we don't develop this healthy love relationship with our money, we're not going to change our behaviors, we're not going to manage it prudently, we're not going to watch it, we're not going to do the work that's required to create that financial freedom opportunity. So that's where it's. But we have to learn what those principles are. And then we have to sometimes clear money blocks just to go open us up to the desire to learn money. Because if we're always putting it out there and something that in the future, someday it'll happen if I work hard enough or I build my business big enough or something, again, money's out there. We're chasing it or we're putting it out there. It's like I don't want to look at it. And that's pushing money away. But we want to bring money close. We again, we want to develop this relationship. And when we're in touch with our money and we give every dollar a job and we appreciate everything that's there, we can always aspire to the next level of money. But we want to be grateful for what we have while we're building into that next phase of the life we want and the freedom that we want and have those things coexist. But that's not possible if we don't have a relationship with money. So these principles go together that if we're going to learn the principles, we have to desire to have a healthy relationship. Because a healthy relationship causes the behaviors that have us want to look at our money and spend time with it, et cetera, et cetera. So one doesn't really exist within without the other. And that's why I call it the three legged stool. Because it's all three of these. When we're working on them as a unit, then we can create financial safety, financial security. It's stable and we know if we sit on it or we can stand on it and we can sit on it to sit or we can stand on it. I'm 5:2, so I have to stand on stools to reach things places. But I can always trust that stool. It's going to perform like I need it to perform. And that's what we want to do with our money. So money. There's a big rigged system out there when it comes to money. And we don't understand how rigged this system is and how we're just naively and ignorantly in most cases because we're not financially literate, we've not been taught money. We've adopted these bad, maybe not bad, but maybe unhealthy behaviors and subconscious beliefs from our parents. So we're just never in that place to be able to turn this money into something that's a tool. This money's an energy. Money is something that we use to fuel our lives. But again, we want to bring it in so we can use it as a tool and fuel. But if it's something out there. Then again, we can't put it to work. We can't use it in a way that's really going to fulfill our lives.

I wanted to celebrate a win with you. We have a new member of our community who came down to St. Augustine, Florida, hung out with me. We helped them with their high end lighting business and in the last 90 days have eclipsed over $27,000 in new cash collected in free business that they wouldn't have had if they didn't get stuff done. Gsd and we're still building upon that, but it's very short and early in the stages. But one of the things I want to do is help other, other individuals that listen to the podcast like you do the exact same thing. So I'm doing these free, private, one on one GSD sessions. What we're going to do is we're going to figure out what is your lead domino that can help you buy back 10 hours of your time each week while 3xing your revenue. And maybe like Molly and Jeff, it might be your client maximization journey on repeat business. Maybe it's in your attract phase, maybe it's in your convert phase, maybe it's your arm more onboarding phase. Maybe it's in developing more detailed playbooks. Maybe it's in creating stronger boundaries or communication in your schedule. I don't know. But let's find out. Go to betterthanrich.com 90day plan or if you go to betterthanrich.com and click on free call, either way, that will take you directly to my calendar. I'll hop on with you and we will get shit done together. GSD time, baby. Let's go.

Let's talk about that then. This third pillar of the stool, the third leg of the stool you mentioned the literacy, you mentioned assets, you mentioned giving every dollar a job and the laws and the principles. And you can go as broad or specific as you'd like here. I think it'd be cool to maybe get a few of both in terms of broad principles that you love to teach. When you talk about assets and these conceptual things and then, I don't know, is there any tangible things that you think is like a really good idea right now or what you're seeing lately in terms of types of assets that are working for people. Obviously the economy's not the best and with inflation and everything like that, people are, they're hurting a little bit more at least than they're used to. And maybe they're not getting as big of an ROI on some Things and money's a little bit more expensive to get in certain cases if you get a loan or a mortgage or different things like that. So anyways, I know that's a bit long frame for you, but I'll let you kind of swim in there and see where you'd like to take it.

Well, I love that, Christina. And if you have a healthy relationship with money, you won't be trying to get the lottery away and you won't be chasing that shiny object and trying to get rich quick. So that's like a fling with the secretary versus a long lasting, loving relationship with money. Good analogy, but you get the idea. All right, so I love all this. I love that you just laid it all out there. I would love to ask you one question before we ask the questions that we always ask our guests, but one of the things that people in our community are always asking is how Do I do it? All right. And you're somebody who raised a family as a single mom and had a seven figure business. And I gotta imagine that keeping all the balls in the air and also creating this generational wealth for you and your family couldn't have been the easiest thing. I would just love to hear, like, is there any tip you have for like work life balance or maintaining your health through that process or just staying sane? I guess, as you're raising children and running a business and building your real estate empire, like, what would you say to that?

Yeah, well, I'll tell that with a little story. So, like I said, I grew up pretty entrepreneurial because I had to and put myself to college, all the things. My parents didn't have any money. They divorced over money. It was chaos. Anything to do with money. After college, I got into real estate accidentally, not by choice. And I kind of was accidentally good at it. And the great thing about real estate, it was because I worked hard and I was very motivated to make money and studied sales and got really great at sales because I just wanted to be rich and I just wanted to make money. And I was all out. And I did well, like, because of those things. I mean, I got up to the office before anybody else was there. I would leave before anybody else, after everybody else had left, and I would cold call and do all the things and just those behaviors. I started. I made a lot of money a handful of years later after having two babies. And I wound up a situation where I'd made hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for a handful of years. This is from a kid that didn't have anything and literally lived off powdered milk and rice for most of her life, even in college, because that's all I could afford. I thought I won the lottery because I'd seen more money than I'd even knew what was possible. But then somehow, like five years into this now, I was making all this money behind closed doors. It was ugly, fighting about money all the time. And it really was no different than my parents that didn't have money. And now I had all this money, yet I'm fighting about money all the time. And, like, there's never enough. And I'd have to go work harder, I'd have to sell another house. And so it was confusing because here, behind closed doors, the conversations and the arguments and the yelling, embarrassing to say, were exactly the same, yet loads of money difference. So that was interesting. It ended up getting divorced over money, of all things, probably other things also. But so again, just confusing. Like, more money didn't change that situation at all. It almost amplified it in a way. So then I'm divorced. What do divorced people that have what they think is a lot of stuff fight over? They fight over all this stuff. And I wind up after a year and a half, divorced, divorce, fight, fight, fight. It was horrible, ugly. I'm just ashamed. If I have shame in my life, it's just ashamed over my behavior and that behavior and probably what we put our kids through in that. And it's all this fighting over this money stuff. I mean, it just, it was ludicrous. And the sad thing, after all that, I ended up divorced, single mom, two kids, and 100% commission job, and I had nothing. I had to ask for help. And I had peers that work that actually helped me get into a teeny tiny place after the big old house in the suburbs. And my. I lost my car because I couldn't pay my car payment. And we didn't. I didn't have enough money to turn on the electricity. So thank God I had peers at work that chipped in and all the things. But now I'm so full of the shame. I'm like, I'm having to take handouts and all this secondhand stuff that I had to take as a kid. I was number one at everything in my firm and all the things. It's like, you know, how was I number one in sales? Got all the medals, all the trophies, all the plaques, all the awards. Was on all the number one stages in my citywide. And I am totally broke and I literally don't have a car to get my kids to school. I don't have the money to put groceries in the fridge, and I don't even know what to do. I mean, it was horrible and I'm full of so much shame. But again, this question was, how did I wind up here? I made all that money and I'm totally broke and I don't even know where to go from here. But that really became. I just like, well, Christina, nobody can save you but you. So that's when I started studying money and started reading the books and started going to workshops that became the beginning of this. But really what I learned through all that study is that I was like hundreds of thousand dollars in debt and I was a primary wage earner. So I had in tax liens because I didn't pay the taxes because I didn't understand that. But when I started studying money, kind of what I really learned was how you balance all this there's no real such thing as balance. But what I realized is that I had to all the things we talked about clear this relationship, understand everything that I just talked about. But understanding that money is a journey and it's a lifelong journey and when we get real clear that we don't want to be in these situations that it can't, the balancing came from, oh, I'm going to gain more time over my life the more assets that I have. And that's really what got me into that understanding that I kept buying back more of my time by having assets for would provide additional cash flow, small amounts in the beginning, that extra $300 a month that might come from real estate cash flow that would help out. And that just kept growing over time. So yeah, hard work, single mom built the things. But it really came around this kind of primary concept and this is what I really recommend everyone to do is I think this is the work that every one of us should do. And it's called the exercise of how much money is enough. And it's this exercise of getting complete clarity of first of all, it's making this declaration and commitment that I want to create financial freedom and I want to become financial free over the course of 10, 20, 30, 40 years, whatever your timeframe is, and just get clear. And when you get that clarity and understand that this is journey between earn and save and invest, that you build more freedom in these small increments by doing all these things. And then that 300 would turn to $600 a month and that 600 would turn to $1,000 extra per month. And so each one of these iterations versus having to go work harder in my job and go and have to chase more money, it just started balancing out that as I was working harder over here, my assets were working. And as long as I just spent less than I made and was clear on that formula, that I just kept buying more of my time back. So how we get more time and get out of this hustle and manage all these things is just knowing how much money is enough, how much money do I need to earn, how much money do I need to save, how much money do I need to invest over time? How do I stay on track and just knowing that each little bit that I do that well, I'm going to get more time back. And as there's some rough years when your kids are really young and all the things. But when we get this clarity and we know we on track, it just reduces so much of this anxiety and Tension that comes from the dono, dono or do I have enough or all these things that it's that financial lack of clarity and that financial stress and anxiety by not understanding and not knowing if we're going to be okay, that's a majority of the weight that we feel. So when we can get rid of, that's very simple. It's really interesting just how much easier it is to manage the life when it comes to how busy it is. But it's to understand money is a tool and money is a partner that we have this relationship with. When we have money as a true partner that we work in alignment with by all these things we've talked about, that's what helps balance out the overwhelm in these other parts of life.

Well, thank you so much for sharing your story. And I think you had to go through that to learn the money lessons you needed to learn. So many people can relate to that. Maybe they were talented, they were rock star in sales, or they were super successful in business, or maybe they did fall prey to Parkinson's law, right. Of money. Even though they were making a bunch, it turns out they look at their bank account or they have a situation or they have a little bit of a down year, one year, and all of a sudden they are in a situation like you were in. They realized, oh my gosh, even though I earned so much and did check that box, I didn't get to where I really wanted, which was the freedom that you talked about earlier. So just thanks so much for opening up and sharing your story and giving more context there. That's super helpful.

Yeah, you're welcome. One final kind of closing thought too, Andrew, is another myth is we believe that we kind of start here with money and we go straight up. And we're always chasing that straight up arrow. But money is like this. We have higher years and lower years. There's high economies and lower economies. And so it's just understanding that when we really understand money, we just get good at riding that wave. Money goes up, our spending can go up, but it still has to go like this. But if our money and income goes down because things change, we have to change our spending, but we always want to keep this. But when we're living in this type of cycle with this difference between spend less than you make and you're okay, like, hey, one year was really expensive vacations because there's economy and the different things. But you know what, we're okay adjusting down a little bit because things are changed. But we know it's going to go back up. So when you just know that money is this journey over time and we're just following these principles, you're on track. You just ride the wave. But it's out of this chase, it's out of the hustle, it's out of the, oh, my God. How do I make more money to solve all these problems? Because my story and all the others, it's like more money doesn't solve the problems. More money can even create more problems. But more money, when we're good stewards and we understand it and we do all the things that I've talked about, more money actually makes life easier like it really does, and it can't bring in more happiness and more meaning when we have a meaningful relationship with our money and we're not just spending it to keep up with the Joneses and consume and these different things. So, again, it's very simple when we just kind of get underneath it. But again, my belief is we really have to learn these things. We need to clean up our old traumas and messes and just learn these very basic, simple to follow principles and rules and put them to work. And life is hard, all the things. Parenting is hard, marriage can be hard, but money doesn't have to be. That's the thing. Like, money just makes so much of life even more difficult and complex. And by learning these things, we. We can take that heart out. And that heart out makes life overall a lot easier.

Thank you so much. I love that rapid fire. We always ask our guests three quick questions at the end of each episode. Curious to hear your thoughts on these three questions. The first one is, what do you think the world needs most right now?

More connection. More love and connection, even with money. You know, when we're chasing money and thinking money is going to solve our problems, we're just becoming more disconnected. We're chasing, I don't know, more risky things. Just remember, money is to underwrite a good life. And again, back to three buckets. I think there are these three buckets of life. We can't opt out of one. We can't opt out of health. And if we're sacrificing our health for wealth, there's going to be consequences. But when we have money, and it doesn't have to be a lot of money, it's just when we're in control of our money, when we're in harmony with our money, then we don't have to sacrifice our health for wealth. We don't have to get three hours A night we don't have to do these things. Money can really help fulfill a lot of our wellness categories. The more money we have, we can take care of our health even better, for example. So. But money is to kind of support our wellness, not to chase it to where it has the opposite effect. When the second one is relationships, especially marriage, but all relationships and back to connectivity is that money when we, especially as a couple, when we're in alignment on the same page. And money can enhance our relationship, money can enhance our family versus wreaking havoc in it. But money can underwrite that when it's part of that narrative and woven into our lives. And third thing we can't opt out of is money and learning money because it does uplift these other things. It either drags them down or uplifts them. But at the end of the day, I think we're missing love and connectivity and interaction, like loneliness. I had somebody on my podcast guest and like 86% of the global population feels lonely and scared and depressed and thinking that money's not going to solve that. So go back. That money can be part of the fuel, can be a tool, but ultimately it's just to underwrite the cost of a good life.

I love that. Second question, what one to three books do you recommend?

Everyone check out my thing's money. So I just go to money. But I love my money, my book and they're falling for money. But my book's not the best book. But there's just great money books. I love one by Morgan household, it's called the Psychology of Money. And so much of money is psychology. So I think that's just a must read when it comes to money. There's a great book when it comes to earning about value creation. It's again, it's probably a century old and it's the greatest salesman in the world. It's just such a good book about value and money and success, but based on these timeless principles. And then one that anybody that maybe not everybody, but I'd say most people that I know that got woke up and realized that so much of what we believe to be about true, about money isn't true. Have read the book Rich Dad, Poor dad by Robert Kiyosaki and that's where I started and it was just this big wake up of like oh my God, all these things I've been told aren't true. I believe this to be truth now. And as a result I can change my life when it comes to money.

Great recommendations. I'm Literally reading the Psychology of money right now. So I was like, that's over here on my shelf. So I'm liking it so far and certainly something that I'm getting a lot of value from and great recommendations across the board. So thank you so much. Final question. What does it mean to you? And I think this will be a fun one coming from the money expert. What does it mean to you, Christina, to be better than rich?

I think it just goes back to everything we've talked about is that money is not the goal. Life is the goal. Life that's full with healthy bodies, healthy minds, and healthy spirits. Like, that's the goal. To have really good, solid relationships with lots of love and connection and affection and conversation. That's the goal. Money is not the goal in the freedom category, but it's the financial freedom is the goal. So we have time to spend with those that we love and so spend time doing what we want and spend time to be able to fully experience life. That when we're in the hustle and we're in the grind, we're just again chasing to have that in the future. So better than rich is that in those three big buckets that we have time and we have great love and relationships and we have a healthy body, mind, and spirit.

Great answer. Thank you so much. Christina. This has been an awesome convo. You mentioned some of the things that you do. I know you mentioned a course. Obviously you have your book that I think people should check out. But if people want to learn more and they want to follow you and get in touch with you, what would you recommend they do?

You know where I really, where I point everyone is my YouTube channel where I just teach little 15 to 30 minute segments on all these money principles and frameworks. And there's lots of YouTubes out there on money. But I really start to break it down to these very practical chunks with some story in there that just makes us realize that money's not as complicated as we think. And if you watch all my YouTube videos, you'll start to see a theme of how all these things we talked about today work together. So that's just ristinawise on YouTube and I reply to the comments and all the things. So, yeah, I'd say start there. And if anybody's listening wants a free copy for my book, you just go falling for money dot com. And that's kind of where I started this journey of wanting to share what I've learned about money over the course of my life with others.

Awesome, guys. Go check that out. I certainly will as well. Christina, thank you again for your time. This has been awesome. I got pages and pages of notes and also it was just awesome to get to know you, hear more about your story and pick your brain on what you know best. So thank you so much for your time audience. Thank you. If it wasn't for you, we couldn't put this show on. If you enjoyed this episode, let us know in the comments. Let us know what you took away from this. If you have any questions for Christina or myself, you can drop them in there as well. Also, we encourage you to share this with a friend or leave a reading or review on it. Since Spotify and Until next time, on the Better the Rich Show, Leave Today Better than you found it. We'll see you then. Thanks everyone. Bye.

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