Welcome to the inaugural episode of Mindful Moolah, the podcast dedicated to holistic financial well-being. Hosted by University of Idaho Extension professors Luke Erickson and Lance Hansen, this series goes beyond basic budgeting and investing advice to explore the interconnected dimensions of wellness and how they impact your financial life.

In this kickoff episode, Luke and Lance set the stage for Mindful Moolah by diving into what it actually means to have holistic financial wellness. They recount personal stories (including the perils of forgotten postage stamps on bill payments!) and connect real-life challenges to the "eight dimensions of wellness": financial, emotional, environmental, intellectual, physical, occupational, spiritual, and social.

Key discussion points include:

1. The importance of habits in financial health—why automation and consistency matter more than box-checking
2. How stress and emotional factors can trigger financial mishaps, like impulse spending or late payments
3. The influence of social circles (“keeping up with the Joneses”) on our money decisions
4. How nutrition, lifestyle, and physical wellness tie directly into your financial stability
5. Practical strategies for starting out: automatic savings, understanding employer benefits, budgeting basics, and being intentional about spending
6. The crucial role of intellectual and occupational wellness in long-term financial security

Key Takeaways

1. Financial Wellness Isn’t Just About Money:

Every aspect of your life—from physical health to your relationships—can affect your finances. Managing stress, building good habits, and making thoughtful choices are just as important as knowing how to budget.

2. Habits are the Foundation of Success:

Consistency trumps one-time efforts. Automate your savings, schedule regular budget check-ins, and use tools to track subscriptions and spending.

3. Emotional Spending is Real:

Stress, fatigue, and social environments often drive financial behavior. Recognizing these triggers helps replace costly habits with healthier alternatives.

4. Social Influence Matters:

The people you spend time with impact your habits—financially and otherwise. Being intentional about your social environment can help maintain strong financial boundaries.

5. It’s About Balance, Not Perfection:

There will be setbacks and life events that derail even the best plans. Focus on incremental improvement—the “1% rule”—and avoid expecting perfection.

6. Invest in Yourself:

Explore your employer benefits, seek opportunities for growth, and don't be afraid to negotiate. Occupational and intellectual wellness can be pathways to higher income and greater satisfaction.

Ready to take your financial wellness to the next level? Subscribe to Mindful Moolah for future episodes diving deeper into each dimension of holistic financial well-being and stay tuned for Episode 2, where Luke and Lance explore emotional wellness and its intricate relationship with money!

You can learn more about holistic financial wellbeing in this bulletin, published by the University of Idaho Extension: https://www.uidaho.edu/extension/publications/bul-1104.

Plus, watch Luke and Lance make Financial Wellness fun and simple in episode 1 of the Moolahed digital series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-Okk7baJjM

Welcome to Mindful Moolah, a podcast about holistic financial well being. And this is our official episode one. And I would like to introduce my co host, Lance. You might remember him from our trailer as well as our pilot episode. We are both professors with the University of Idaho Extension, and we're just going to talk, you know, a little bit off the cuff about the things that we know about financial well being. Let's just go for it. Lance, what do you think?

Yeah, I mean, there's so many things and our whole podcast about these eight dimensions, we're on that financial one. And it's all going to come back to how these other dimensions or things that happen in our life can derail, improve, or however it affects us in our lives. And I just think, I just go back to thinking when I was in my early years being married, how tight the finances could be and just having, having a plan makes life so much better. And my wife's gonna kill me. But I'm gonna share this story anyway. You know, I just one of the things too about financial, holistic financial health, if you're your spouse, your partner, or whatever your situation is, it's a shared responsibility. So back in the day when we actually wrote checks and had to put stamps on envelopes and mail payments in the mail. Yeah, we don't do that anymore.

And that's okay by me. I thought I'd like newly married. I'm like, I'm gonna have my wife do this. She did the checks, filled out the, the statements and put them in the mail. They came back a couple days later without the stamps. So I had late payments and that just those little things, a late payment, man, that derailed us big time. That, I mean, I had to make major adjustments. And Mac and cheese and top ramen were on the menu for a couple of weeks to make up the difference.

I did ask the credit card companies and stuff. I'm like, hey, she forgot to put stamps on 50 of them. Took mercy on me and did not charge me a late fee and just charged me a transaction fee to do it over the phone with a, with my routing number and checking account number and all that. But that's the kind of stuff that happens and it's not anybody's fault. We just learn from these things and roll forward. Right, right, right.

You know, I, I love that story because it, it starts to illustrate exactly what we're trying to get at in this podcast. It's how you may know your financial, you know, the ABCs, how like what you're supposed to do to be on top of your finances. There are all sorts of plans out there. I like to refer to Dave Ramsey because he's pretty popular. He's got baby steps, right? So you go through the baby steps like, you know what you should do, right? You know, you should save some money, you know, you should eliminate your debt, you know, you know, you should save for long term goals, you know, pay your, whatever, your bills on time, all that sort of stuff. Right. But the problem is we're not robots. So even though we know what we should do, sometimes it's hard to actually execute it.

And one of the, where I should say like a handful of reasons why it's hard to execute that is because life is a balance of so many things. So that is kind of really in a nutshell of what this podcast is about. It's like the other things that don't seem financially but actually can end up impacting your finances. Right. So in your case, Lance, you're talking about, okay, well, why didn't the stamps happen? It could have been a number of reasons. Maybe you're in a time crunch. Maybe you just were. Maybe, maybe your new place was a little bit cluttered and you couldn't find the stamps.

Or maybe, you know, a variety of reasons. Maybe kids were distracting you and so.

Process, just a new process. Right.

So, yeah, so like stress in one area of your life can actually throw off your finances and vice versa. Right. So, yeah, we're going to dive into that concept quite a bit as we, as we go further into this podcast and the various episodes that we have. I, I wondered if we can just really quick, just go over the eight dimensions. We did it in our pilot episode, but I think it'd be helpful to go over it again. Yeah. Do you want to do that, Lance, or do you want me to?

Yeah, we'll just hit on these real quick. We have the financial. That's today, right? Today's episode, just that financial. How all these other dimensions come back to that. And like I said, you're going to hear about all these dimensions, or at least the majority of them each podcast. But so we have financial, emotional, environmental, intellectual, physical, occupational, spiritual and social. So those are the eight dimensions. And we'll talk about a few of these in depth a little bit, how they apply to our financial well being and absolutely just that environmental.

It was a new thing, clutter, a new process and that emotional thing. It's like, you know, I, I can only imagine my wife is thinking, this is new to me. Rethinking that process. A little panic involved, making sure that they get mailed out on time so the bills get paid. And that, that emotional pressure, that seems to be a big one for people and that. Golly, man. Emotional pressure. Stress.

Let's just call it what it is, stress.

Exactly. And I love how you're talking about the emotional side because that is something that, that we're going to cover in depth in its own episode. And of course, there were the other dimensions that you talked about as well. So today, a little bit of an overview, but we're bringing it all back to finance because that's really the core topic that we teach, that we have done for a good handful of years, right. Finances. And we've learned along the way, not only professionally, but personally in our own experiences, how just real life events, circumstances, can throw off your financial plan even when you know what you should be doing. I think it's safe to say, Lance, that you and I have a pretty good grasp on, you know, how finances work. And I mean, we've been teaching it for years.

We know the theories, we know the nuts and bolts of how it's supposed to work. And then even us, we go about our lives and it's like, oh, wait, what just happened? I didn't even follow what I'm teaching because a life circumstance just like, kind of threw us off a little bit. Right. Whether it's stress, pressure, emotions, just like. Yeah. Any one of those dimensions that we've, that we've mentioned.

Yeah, I think, you know, we talk about all of these theories and methods and rules of thumb, and they just don't always work in every circumstance. I mean, there's always something that can derail you and just make things a financial mess if you're not mitigating and taking steps along the way to be prepared. And, you know, I mean, the basics, it's the basics. You got a budget, you got emergency savings, you're. You'd be a spend, you'd be a saver instead of a spender. You know, all those little basic things, those habits that the, the sooner we learn them and the sooner we implement them, the better off financial we are to withstand those unexpected disasters that happen, whether it's a physical disaster related to your health, an emotional disaster related to losing a job, or, I mean, there's just tons of stuff that just happens in our lives. Life can be messy sometimes.

Right. You, you mentioned a key word, started with H. The H word, Habits. Right. When it comes to financial wellness, well, being that is such A huge part of successful finances. One thing that I like to say is like, you can't just check a box. You can't just say, oh, you know, I budgeted this month, therefore I'm done. Check that box and be like, I don't ever have to budget again.

No, it's not the way that it works. You have to make that a habit. And one of my favorite financial books, I don't know if you've read it, Lance, is called David Bach. You know which one I'm talking about. The name is escaping me. It's the Automatic millionaire. That's what it is. And so he basically talks about like automating as much of your financial steps as possible.

But what he's really saying is let's make this habitual, let's make this happen. The things that, you know you should be doing, let's make them a regular habit. And one of the easy ways to do that is by automating transfers either from your paycheck or your checking account to bills or that type of thing. And that's kind of his main, you know, premise of the book is let's just make sure that we're setting up our money to go exactly where we want it to go for our long term plans. Now that's good to a point, but the concept there when it comes to what we're talking about, holistic financial wellness, is that everything that we talk about is not a box checking. It's let's find a way to balance this holistically and make it a habit that not just the finances, Right. But it's the other aspects of our lives that could end up affecting our finances as well. So anything you want to say about habits, Lance?

Yeah, they're just so important. And one of the things too is part of that, back to that occupational bit. If you're new out of college or wherever you're at in your career, part of those habits are understanding what your employer has to offer. I mean, golly, having a pension, a 401k, taking advantage of the matching, and do that right from the first day, first day you go into hr, you're like, yes, I need to do this. And you adjust your lifestyle to make that a habit. Make that retirement planning or retirement investment a habit in your life so you're prepared. I mean, it's, there's no downside to saving up and investing in a 401k and make that a habit. Knowing what those benefits are super important.

First thing you should do, first day of work, go in get that done. Get that set up. Don't leave money on the table.

Yeah. So we were talking about rules of thumb earlier, and one of them that's really key when it comes to finances is pay yourself first. So pay yourself per first principal, which basically means make sure that you're setting money aside for your long term goals. And retirement is a huge one of those. Right. And so the easiest way to do that is by setting it up. If you have an employer that offers a 401k, you just go into your HR office and just say, hey, I want to, you know, automatically deduct X amount of dollars from my paycheck, put it into my retirement account. You do that and then it starts to grow and you.

And after a while, you don't even miss that money because it's, it's a habit. Right. So back to that habit thing. If we look at the other dimensions, I always like to use the physical because it's a really easy example. But it's that idea that, like, okay, I signed up for a gym membership and I went for a month, but then you just kind of fall off. Right. And so. And how often does that happen? Right.

And so the idea there is again, you can't just check a box and say, oh, you know, I worked out for a day or a week or a month, I'm good to go. No, it's like you have to make sure that you're doing that on a regular basis. Otherwise what are you really accomplishing, really, in the grand scheme? You're not really accomplishing much. Right. It's a great place to start, but you got to keep it going.

Yeah. So. Oh, golly. I don't know if you've seen this guy, Ryan Hamilton, not endorsing or anything. He's a comedian from Ashton, Idaho. Small town here.

I know. Yeah.

Yeah, he's got a great little. It's, it's, it's been around on Netflix for a while. It's called Happy Face. But he's got a thing about talking about his gym membership, Right. And how hard it is to cancel it. So, I mean, that's another thing, man. Once you get into something, knowing how to get out of it, that can be its own challenge. And like, yeah, I, I went into the gym two times.

I paid 1200 bucks over the year. I went in twice. I mean, man, you just paid 600 a visit right there. I mean, things to think about. I mean, it's the tone all. Have you seen the tone? All things? They're 25 to $5,000. Right. And then you have a monthly prescription, it hooks to your wall.

Go on Facebook and look that one up, man. Everyone's trying to sell those things because they used it three times. I mean, step down.

But it only works if you use it.

Yeah, right, right. I mean, those push ups and sit ups, you know, start there, right. And then build up. But stay healthy. Absolutely.

So we wanted to take a few minutes and talk about how if you're not staying on top of the other dimensions, how they can derail your financial health. And we just got a few examples here. So first one that I like to talk about is emotional and, you know, kind of stereotypical thing that can happen here is people might end up shopping to cope with stress. And this, this can happen to anybody. Right? You're just feeling stressed. I know I've done this, right. It's like I'm feeling stressed, like, tough day at work, tough day with kids, whatever. And it's like I'm, I'm driving past the, you know, the milkshake shop and I'm just like, I deserve that milkshake, you know, because I'm stressed.

And here's the thing. It's not, it's not the end of the world if I give in to that, you know, that little craving or whatever. But there, there definitely is where, where you make that negative action a habit. Right.

The pre dinner Whopper baby.

Right. And those things can really start to add up. Maybe a better example is the latte factor. This is also something that's in the book the Automatic Millionaire by David Bach. You can tell I love that book. Anyway, it's that idea that like, you make it a habit to stop at the coffee shop for a latte and honestly, they, they used to cost like three or four bucks. Now there's like six, seven, eight bucks are like so expensive. So if you're doing that every day, how much does that add up to? Right? Like, that is what I think is what, $240 or something.

240 bucks? Yeah. 6 bucks. 30 days. I mean, yeah, yeah.

I mean, what else could you do with 240 bucks? Like the opportunity cost of that. Right. So anyway, so that is, that is one of those things. Emotional and there are many other examples. Right. But we, we got to make sure that we're taking a good hard look, not only how we're spending our money, but why we're spending it. That way. We can say, oh, we don't want to spend that much on at the coffee shops or whatever, but Then.

But then it's like, well, why are you doing it in the first place? It's an emotional response. You have to kind of dig into that and understand why it's happening in the first place. You can't just say, well, I'm just going to stop that because what you'll end up doing is start emotional spending on something else. Right?

Yes. So, yeah.

Any other examples you want to talk about?

No. That's a great one. I mean, we've talked about the good and bad habits. I mean, it's really hard to eliminate the bad ones. They kind of cling to you. I mean, holy cow, I spend a lot of money drinking soda pop and I shouldn't because it's not healthy. I mean.

Right. So they started to dig in. Well, why are you doing that? What's. Because I'm tired because I have this craving. Well, why are you tired? It was up because I was whatever, I was stressed or I was working with kids or whatever. So then you start to solve those problems and it can really help that. That eliminate that need for that emotional coping mechanism. Right.

Yeah. And it's all about coming back to what is driving that habit.

Right.

And trying to tackle those problems. And that could be a bunch of different things. Like I said, all those other emotions come into factor.

I. I like to call it the questions behind the questions, because it's, it's easy to say, oh, why am I spending, you know, $240 on. At the coffee shop? Well, because I like coffee. Well, that's not the end of the. This is not the end of the story. Right. It's like, well, well, why do you like it? Because it wakes me up. Because it makes me feel good.

Well, why do you need that? Well, because I'm up too late, you know. Right. Yeah, exactly. So you have to start to solve these. Basically, we'll answer these kind of like deeper life questions if you're really going to get into the holistic financial wellness. Right. So there's these others I think might be fun to hit. It's.

It's how physical can affect our financial health, social, environmental. Do you want to hit on any of those, Lance?

Yeah, I think we hit it. You know, I mean, the sugar, caffeine, whatever. I mean, sugar, you gain weight. Right. It can lead to poor health. Golly. I've spent a lot of money on braces and dentist stuff because my kids don't brush their teeth because of the sugar and the diets we have. So, I mean, it's starting to change some of those habits.

And one of the cool things that when my wife was raising our kids at stay home, being a stay at home mom, she called them dinosaur meals. You know, it was all about carrots, ranch dip. And I mean, that's probably. My kids have a healthy addiction to ranch because, you know, you can't do anything without ranch. And don't even get me started on fry sauce. If you're from Idaho, you get it. If not, it's a staple. We.

Yeah, it's a staple. If you don't know what fry sauce is, go Google fry sauce. You. I don't know fry sauce, man. It's. It's the greatest thing for french fries. And we know potatoes. I mean, it's.

We're in Idaho, we looked at fries, and we said, how can we make this less healthy? And we add mayo and ketchup to it.

So let's. Let's deep fry these things because, I mean, everything's better fried. And then let's. Let's do some ketchup and mayonnaise, mix it together. That's what fry sauce basically is.

Yeah.

If you're on our arctic circle in Idaho or Utah, ask for the fry sauce anyway. But, yeah, it just leads to. My wife tried to change that up, and she called them dinosaur meals. Lettuce, broccoli, carrots, which was a healthy alternative to some of the other things that they could have been eating at lunchtime and just trying to help instill those good habits. And, you know, my kids are now, what, I think they're 17 now, and they're good eaters, they eat healthy, and I'm just glad they're doing that. And it's just a habit we've instilled with them, and it's something that we've just learned along the way. Healthy habits eliminate bad habits.

Right. So really, we call this podcast Mindful Moolah, but we could have called it healthy Habits because it's basically the same concept. Right?

Yeah.

Yeah, I love what you're saying. Like, I thought when you're talking about the dino dinosaur diet, I thought you're gonna throw in some dino nuggets in there.

Dino nuggets.

Oh, my gosh. Like, those are so not good for you.

Yeah, we ate a lot of those growing up. Hey, it's all right. Fish, right? Yeah, yeah. Dinosaur made sure. If chickens are dinosaurs. Yeah. But, hey, dino nuggets are dope when you're a kid. So is fish sticks.

So the physical, that's a really great concept that we're talking about right here. So it's what you eat. The nutrition definitely matters. And, you know, in the extreme, if you're really eating unhealthy, if you're really not moving, taking care of yourself, exercising, then the result of that could be much higher medical bills and all sorts of other complications that can come back and affect your finances again. Right. Have poor physical health, that's definitely going to end up affecting your finances. And so, again, it's that concept that's all interrelated. Right.

I always like to talk about when we talk about the social elements, like the keeping up with the Joneses, because that's a pretty easy one to wrap our minds around. But.

And, yeah, and that. I mean, that physical what we eat. I mean, keeping up with the Joneses, I mean, those social media environments we're in, those groups that we hang out with. I mean, golly, if you're hanging out with your buddies that go to the gym, you're gonna be more like them. Make sure the people we socialize with are healthy for us. As far as habits of financial habits, you know, all the other stuff too, you know.

Yeah. And, you know, there's. There's research out there about, you know, the. The people that you hang out with, you actually end up adopting their habits in a lot of cases, including financial habits. So the people that you. That you choose to, whatever, you know, live near, hang out with, spend time with, that type of thing, do end up in a sort of subconscious, indirect way, end up affecting your financial habits. And again, that Keeping up with the Joneses thing, Right? That's a huge. That's a huge thing.

I forget who said it. There's this quote. It's like, comparison is the thief of joy, Right? So you're just sitting there with people you hang out with. You're like, start comparing yourself. It's like, well, I don't have this. I don't have that. Well, no, maybe, you know, you don't have enough money for that.

Yeah.

So it's really important to pay attention to who you're hanging out with and what their financial habits are as well.

I mean, go. Going back in the good old days here, the Berenstein Bears, the gimmes, you know, I want, I need. Give me, give me, give me.

Right.

Because so and so has that. I want that, too. Yeah. So, no, there's no need to get caught up in. In all of that. That needs versus wants. And it all comes back to numbers. You know, the latest data or research pulled on retirement planning.

It's crazy. It's like 45% of the United States has little or nothing for retirement. I mean, that's pretty staggering statistics right there. It's because we put what we want above what we need, or we forego what we need to get something we don't need. That whole needs versus wants is a crazy thing to think about. And a lot of it comes down to who you do, who do you associate with. Are you hanging out with somebody that's probably bad for your financial well being because they're out there spending money on things that just aren't necessary. And I mean, we're not saying don't have a hobby and don't have something that you enjoy, but budget for it and plan for it.

Right, Right.

So we just spent some time talking about how not balancing or paying attention in some of these other dimensions can affect your finances. But let's switch gears a tiny bit, Lance, and talk about how these other dimensions can boost our financial health. So if we do get things right in some of these other dimensions, how that can actually end up helping our finances and make them basically accomplish more of what we want to accomplish or reflect our values more precisely, more accurately.

I mean, intellectual. We've talked about just having those good intellectual habits. Talked a lot about that. And it's. They're basic things. We always go back to the budget. We always talk about tools that you can use to pay off debt. And there's a lot of options out there.

I mean, we can go into a whole hour on how all that works, but you got to find out what works best for you. But learning how to make automation work for you by setting up, setting up an investment. The 401ks we talked about with our employers, setting up a monthly budget so you know where your money's going. So you're not leaving something out on the table or paying for a subscription you don't need anymore. I mean, that's, that's a big one. I mean, I think. What are they the statistics on that each household has 10 subscriptions they're paying for and they don't even know about all of them.

It's astronomical, honestly.

Yeah.

I forget which financial tool it's out there. Maybe you know, Lance, but there's one that will actually help you eliminate subscriptions that you don't, that you don't.

Karma through Internet. Yeah, yeah. Credit karma will, they'll pull that up for you. There's probably some other apps out there, but yeah, just knowing where your money's going is part of the. It's that's a huge part of the battle, knowing where it's going. Right?

Yeah. So that's, you're hitting on the intellectual dimension. It's like making sure you know your stuff. You know, it's like making sure that you understand thing tools that are out there that can help you. There's, there's, there's all sorts of investing and budgeting apps. There's all sorts of other tools that can really help you streamline your finances. The actual like nuts and bolts of how to make managing your finances easier.

Well, and the crazy thing is none of this is rocket science. It really isn't. It's pretty basic financial education that you can learn from a podcast that specializes in that. You know, if you're near an extension office, they probably have some programming they can provide to you. I don't, I don't think we talked much about extension, what it is, but each state has a land grant university. They have extension offices in your county. They probably have some free resources for you.

Absolutely. So that knowledge piece, huge, that intellectual dimension, if you don't, if you don't really know what you, you know, what are the most effective tools out there for finances? How to go about them. Yeah, you're, you're definitely going to struggle. Let's talk about occupational a little bit. This is one that I, it's a little bit of a soapbox of mine because as a financial educator, like we're constantly, you know, teaching people, okay, spend less than you make, you know, make sure that you're keeping track of your money, where it goes. But I have worked with individuals where they just flat out need to make more. Right. It's just like, yeah, it be below a certain dollar amount, you're just gonna struggle.

And that's just the way that is, no matter how good you are at pinching pennies or stand on top of things. So let's talk about occupational a tiny bit. Yeah.

You can only do the step down method so much before there's nothing.

Right.

And that's not living, that's, that's hard and that, those are sad circumstances. And there's different programs out there to help people like that. But sometimes they don't qualify.

Right?

Yeah, I mean it's, it's not, it's not cheap to live. It's really not. Especially in certain parts of the United States, certain parts of Idaho, you just need to work. And it comes back how that intellectual piece can help us in our occupational. We're not stuck in the jobs, we're in we, there's, I, I was working for one job for 14 years. I went out, I got my master's degree, transitioned here to the university. I've been here for eight years. And I always had that financial background.

Just took me getting over the fear to go out, get that higher education that I needed to get to this next level. So I had extra funds, I mean, because I was doing all the things right. But man, months, it was really tight. It was really tight. And I learned a lot from that period of my life. I'm in a part of my life where I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm good. I can, I can buy that pre dinner Whopper if I want, but once again, that's a bad habit and I don't do that. You only see that on King of Queens with Kevin James buying the pre dinner Whopper man.

That's the only way he gets his vegetables. Yeah, it's on his Whopper.

Yeah, he only gets his Whopper. He gets, got to get that lettuce and tomato and that flame broil there. All right, we need an endorsement from Burger King now, I guess. Right.

And we do not endorse any particular business.

Yeah, we don't product. I don't, I, I just, I, I good. There's just nothing wrong with a good Burger man.

Right, whatever.

But comes back to that intellectual piece. You're not stuck where you're at. You can always, and this is a big one. When I'm talking with youth about financial literacy or occupational, the answer is no. Unless you ask or try. No matter where you're at in life, if you're a good, valuable employee, they're going to reward you. But if you don't ask, the answer is no. And that's part of that negotiation.

But don't be afraid to ask, right? Because there might be a better opportunity for you.

So we'll dive a little bit deeper into this in the episode that we, we cover on occupational well being. But I think it's really important to understand what it is that you enjoy doing and what pays the bills. Sometimes those things don't, don't align. Right. But as much as possible, you want to find ways to align those different, you know, circles, I guess, like in a Venn diagram. You want to find the overlap in there. Find a job that you really enjoy because then it won't feel like work, but it'll also pay the bills. Right? So yeah, we'll spend some more time on that in a future episode.

But, and you know, you're I'll just let you keep going because you're, you're heading right into the next one. That's really good as far as satisfaction, that whole spiritual true north. I mean that really valuable if you're.

It'S understanding your values, understanding what makes you happy, and aligning not only occupational, but also the way you're spending your money with your values. Right? Yeah. So that's, that's, that's spiritual. We'll dive deeper again, we'll dive. These are just examples. We'll dive deeper into those future example or future episodes.

All in all, all your financial stuff, all the budgeting, all the things we do, if you got a good support, a good social support to lean on, they can help you through the hard times and, and get you through. Gotta have your group of people you can talk to to help you make some. Because sometimes, I mean, things are new. There are certain financial things that happen that are new and it's good to talk to somebody that's been through it. Right.

So even though we're couching this whole conversation around the topic of financial wellness, really what we're talking about is just holistically being well and happy. It is being successful at life in general. So. And we're not, here's the thing, we're not Hearsay and me and Lance, we got it all figured out. Definitely not, you know, we're works in progress. And that's just exactly the point that we kind of wrap, want to wrap up with. It's, we're talking about like balance but not perfection. Like understand what it is you should be striving for and try to find a balance in all of these dimensions because they, as we've been discussing in this episode, they can either pull your financial wellness up or down.

And so what you want to make sure that we're shooting for is a balance in all these dimensions. I think it's incredibly difficult to keep all dimensions high at all times. But being aware that some of these other dimensions, other aspects can affect our finances is where the whole conversation start. Starts with financial well being and overall holistic well being.

And it's not about perfection. It's about striving to do better in each of these. The 1% rule, do 1% better each day, climb that ladder, get to where you need to be financially and math matters. You know, it comes down to those dollars and cents putting some money away here. It's, it's hard to be, as Luke mentioned earlier, in a situation where having to replace your car tires or having a flat tire, your one emergency spending emergency away from financial disaster. And that's not. That's a hard place to be in. It's hard to dig out of that hole.

It's easy to get into debt. It's hard to get out of it. Right?

Absolutely. So that is more or less our first episode. Our next episode is going to be where we take a deep dive on emotional wellness and how it is interrelated with financial wellness. We enjoy chatting and sharing our chats with you, and so we just urge you to subscribe and share this episode, this episode and the podcast. And yeah, share it with friends. If you have questions, you can always send them to either Lance or I. My email for the university is just my last name, Erickson E R I C K S O n@uidaho edu. So just in the subject line, put podcast questions and what's your email, Lance?

It's my first and last name. You should be able to see it on the screen. Lance Hansen EN@UIDAHO EDU.

Perfect. Yeah, we'd love your listener feedback and your questions, stories, what whatnot. We will try to work them into our episodes when we can. I suppose that's it for now. I just, yeah. Any parting words, Lance?

No, just keep working at it, you know, so you're going to learn more each time you, you jump in, jump back to one of our podcasts. Re. Listen, we're, we're happy to help you out, you know, with anything we can, but yeah, keep plugging away. You're fine.

Well, thanks for joining us for this first official episode of Mindful Moolah. We look forward to having you join us next time. Take care.

Have a good one.