[Ep. 377] From Never Enough to MoneyZen with Manisha Thakor

Manisha 

Just get such an honor to be here. Thank you.

Jessica 

You’re welcome. So you have a brand new book out called Money Zen escape the cult of never enough and reclaim your life. This really intrigued me once it hit my inbox because that is something that, you know, I talk a lot about on the show I talk to people about all the time is this scarcity mindset, this idea that most of us have likely due to a bunch of factors that we’ll we’ll talk about, that I know are in your book that we don’t have enough or we didn’t have enough or there isn’t enough for all of us. And you know, if you have that mindset, it’s obviously going to drive a lot of your financial decision making for the rest of time unless you are, you know, more aware of it and conscious of it. So I want to kind of start first before we really really dive in because I’m so interested in this topic is, you know, tell me a little bit about yourself. You have a ridiculous resume. You have several designations. You’re a CFA, you’re a CFP, you have an MBA with all of that and all of your experience in the financial end. History and as an educator and writer, why did you really want to focus on this aspect? Instead of doing you know, there’s a million prescriptive how to finance books? Why did you want to have the focus on this idea that we’re all kind of in this cult of never enough.

Manisha 

So, I have worked in financial services for 30 years. And I’ve actually written to personal finance primers for young women in their 20s and 30s. And in doing that, I really, truly believed if I could just give the factual information to people that I would transform their financial lives. And what I came to learn not only with the young women I encountered with the financial literacy work that I do around that age group, but even in my professional life, where I work with large institutions, and corporations, and so forth, and I’m meeting C suite executives, what I’m realizing is you may know the solutions to your money problems. But if you have not addressed your underlying money, worries, it almost doesn’t matter, you don’t you will not get the full benefit of having that financial health. And that’s what really got me intrigued, broadly speaking. And then when I had kind of a come to Jesus moment, myself, and realizing that I actually, despite all of that, thinking, I found myself in the same place trapped in a never enough mindset. So I had to research it. And I was fascinated what I found, and I thought I gotta share this.

Jessica 

Yeah, well, I’m curious to learn a little bit more about your, your kind of experience. And the moment that you discovered, oh, my gosh, this is, this is my issue to what, what did you discover when you were doing some introspection about your own, I guess, relationship with money that maybe wasn’t as healthy as you thought it was?

Manisha 

Well, first of all, I’m 53. And since I was about 23, I’ve been fairly cognizant that my relationship with money and work is toxic. By that, I mean, I was living my life to optimize the equation, self worth equals net worth. A big part of that probably came because, you know, my, my early work was on Wall Street, and kind of high finance type environments. But a lot of it was social. And I really believe that how much I had, how much I was earning was a measure of who I was as a person. And it really started to have negative effects across, you know, the totality of my life, whether it was getting divorced or losing friends, or missing out on special events, or waking up at age 50, and realized I was a human doing, not a human being. So I knew, but it wasn’t till a very pivotal meeting that I had with a prospective client, where I just had tears streaming down my face. And we could talk about that a little more, if you’d like, where it just hit me that I have got to do something, I have got to understand how I landed in this place, and how to get out. Okay, so

Jessica 

you mentioned something right there, which is something I haven’t heard of, but I actually think that’s a great way to describe it human doing, versus human being. And that really strikes me just because I feel like often we do value ourselves or value others based on their output, their productivity, What have you accomplished, instead of who you actually are, as a person, you want to kind of share a little bit more about how you were able to kind of, you know, label those things when you were, you know, doing your research and interviewing experts for your book.

Manisha 

It was fascinating to me. And I think, you know, at the surface level, I think most of us are aware that, you know, if you meet someone new in the United States, at least one of the first three questions will be what do you do? And it’s you know, and we even asked young children this, what do you want to be when you grow up? And we don’t mean be from a standpoint of your character or your values? We mean, what do you want to what profession Do you want to follow? And what I came to realize was that so indoctrinated into our culture is this belief that if we do certain things, we will then have certain things, and then we will be happy. And it’s sort of this convoluted way of arriving at happiness. Because you can, I mean, doing and having that’s endless Where’s where’s the end line on that when You get to the part where you get to be happy. And so that was one of the well, there are a number of very striking things that came to hit me. But if I had to summarize one that I feel is fairly universal. It’s that subtle, oftentimes not even conscious belief that so many of us have that that’s the right formula to have life satisfaction to get happy.

Jessica 

Yeah, I mean, when you honestly look at some of the kind of top performers, whether they are, you know, athletes or entrepreneurs or just like really wealthy people, it’s interesting to really kind of take a look and and do a deep dive on what is driving them. And ultimately, I think it is, comes down to that, that question of self worth versus net worth. And the more I have, or the the more accolades I have, the more credentials I have, etc. The more people, the more I will feel enough, the more you know, people will value me. And unfortunately, it’s not kind of you know, untrue, because we do kind of value people like that. So I’m curious when, even though this is, you know, we don’t want to live in this society where you know, you are more valuable, the more you have, or the more accomplishments you’ve made, we really should value people based on Are you a good person, you know, are you doing good in this world? How do we make a shift, not just mindset wise, individually, but as kind of a greater society? I know, that’s a big question. But have you kind of tried to kind of figure out what what is the answer to this?

Manisha 

I think the answer to this is understanding that we arrived as a society and as individuals in this place as a result of a variety of different factors. And I’ve clumped them into for personal, cultural, societal and evolutionary biological. And I think the more each of us individually understand the series of circumstances that led us to fall into never a never enough mindset, then in our personal interactions, the way we think about ourselves, the way we treat other people, but also the way we we engage with businesses and products and the way in which businesses act because businesses are composed of humans, people. And you know, you mentioned something that I think is really powerful, when you talk to just mind blowing ly successful people. Studies have shown and I’m just, I’m somewhat shocked, but then also not shocked, because it I think it’s true in so many of our lives that many, many of these people are driven by what I’ll call small t traumas, things that happened in their formative years. I mean, our brains don’t fully develop until we’re 25 things that happen in their formative years that drive them into a scarcity mindset, or I’m not good enough, or I have to prove myself to others. And, you know, in my case, that was very true. And on the surface, what my small t trauma was, we’ll look ridiculously small. But I grew up in a small town in the state of Indiana, and I’m mixed race and I was kind of chubby and I had coke bottle glasses and a skin condition called psoriasis, which left me with visible scaly patches and on my skin and I just didn’t fit in I was you know, the cool kids made fun of me and called me things like thunder thighs and Kel. But and, um, you know, it hurt. Now, mind you, this is all going on between kind of fourth grade and sixth grade. Yet honest to goodness, I think it drove me until probably age 45 I used to not even be able to talk about it in my 30s 20s and 30s without tearing up. And so what happened to me the link with money and success and work became I am going to, I am going to earn enough money so that I will never be trapped in a situation where people hurt me like that again. And you know, that’s an understandable thought. But it crawls deep into your your psyche and your body and so many of us that it can keep driving you from a somewhat healthy reaction into a very toxic relationship. And I think that’s how we end up so many of us whether we, you know, end up being the super high flying one percenters or where the rest of us who just become consumed and trapped in this 24/7 treadmill, small t traumas cannot be emphasized enough and that probably was my biggest insight in the book about that driving factor. And often often it’s so subconscious it’s not the it’s not something that that we know, and we’re thinking about daily, I think

Jessica 

so many people can relate to that. I mean, so many people have experienced something that you carry for the rest of your life, unless you are able to become aware of it. I think the complicated thing, and maybe this is something you recognize, too, because you again, you have a great resume, you’re very successful, to then take a look at what has been the driving force for you to to accomplish all these things. And but then also, you know, at the end of the day, you because of that kind of traumatic experience, you were able to accomplish a lot of good things. So it’s kind of like, is this a bad thing? Is this a good thing? You know, it’s hard to kind of let go of something that has been a driving force to a path that will look at you now is, have you ever kind of, like, that’s kind of I think the probably the conflict for a lot of people is like, well, this is, I mean, I don’t mind having these bad things that happen to me, because look at where I am now.

Manisha 

Just like it’s hard, right? Because, um, you know, if I look at my own circumstances, and I want to emphasize this was just one of the factors that drove me. But those painful recollections drove me to become on the outside what one would consider successful like, Rose very high in my career, I earn a really solid income, I was able to practice all the kinds of financial advice that you share and give, then, you know, find myself in a place at age 50, where I had the ability to retire if I wanted to, or take, you know, if I didn’t want to retire, which I don’t want to retire, I’m too young, to be able to do any work, I want to simply because I want to, and I enjoy it not because I need to earn a certain amount of money. So on one hand, you can look at that and be like, Wow, Manisha, you nailed it. But on the other hand, when I, you kind of woke up to this realization that I had hit this point of financial health, I’ll call it, I realized I had zero emotional wealth. I had no I mean, I was a shell of a person, I had no hobbies, no real close friends, I had missed family events that in retrospect, I look back and think what kind of human being misses, things like my grandmother’s funeral, you know, things that I thought were not important enough, or that I felt I was too busy to go do because I was chasing after these things that I thought were going to make me safe. And so it’s a double edged sward. And so I’m certainly not telling people not to try and succeed, but rather to broaden your definition of what it means to have a rich life. And the definition I like to use it’s is it’s the combination of financial health and emotional wealth, and you have to build both. And together, they turbocharged your life satisfaction, but one in the absence of the other, you can have the most amazingly emotionally wealthy life. But if you have no money, now, that’s a deep source of stress and problems, and you’re not going to have money then either. So

Jessica 

so what you’re kind of saying, and this makes a lot of sense, because I think a lot of people who experience something traumatic or you know, some difficulties especially growing up, they have this idea that okay, fine in adulthood, then I’m going to be successful, I’m going to get accumulate a lot of money, I’m going to get rich, that is going to counteract all the kind of trauma and difficulties that I experience, it is going to be the solution to the problem and make everything okay, and I think a lot of people still have this idea that money is the solution to all of life’s problems, it can solve a lot of problems, just not all of them. And what you’re saying is you can reach that level of success that you’ve been working your whole life towards reached that kind of peak, and then you know, be at the top of the mountain and look down, you’re like, oh my gosh, I’m here alone, I’m unhappy. My demons are still here. It didn’t solve everything. And I thought it would and I don’t know, it’s like, there’s this kind of concept of like, wouldn’t you rather be rich and unhappy than poor and unhappy, it’s like, I’d rather not be unhappy. So I guess that’s just like, you know, just a reminder, it’s not just about having the money there. It’s deeper than that.

Manisha 

It’s so much deeper. And the whole reason I wrote money Zen is I wanted to give people a blueprint to do exactly what you just said, be happy. Um, and what I found is certainly small t traumas can can affect you. But then there are other circumstances that even if you didn’t have small t traumas can put your head in the same vise for example. When I think about societal influences, I call it counterfeit financial culture where we’re exposed to me judges and people around us living lives that they can’t technically afford because they are doing it on debt. Or it’s, you know, on TV, this is one of the most glaring examples where I’m watching a police or medical or legal drama. And you know, there might be a paralegal on a legal drama. And she’s got the most amazingly, you know, I’m gonna pick on suits Donna, who’s one of my favorite characters on suits, and you just got she’s beautifully coiffed. Her hair is never frizzy. Even though theoretically, the show is taking place in a humid city, her clothes are exquisite. And it’s not just the styling, I mean, it’s the fabric, you can see it’s been custom tailored and her shoes. And you know, she’s going out for expensive drinks after work. And I actually, one of the things I did in the book was I added up what it would cost to live and groom at that level, and then compared it to the average income of a paralegal. And you literally would have to earn 30 to 50% more to live that way. So the media is showing us constantly these lifestyles that don’t match the incomes, that the people living, those lifestyles would be earning in the jobs that they’re purportedly doing. And then you layer on to that the fact that with easy access to debt, you know, it used to be when you know, you lived in a certain neighborhood because it wasn’t super easy to get a mortgage, you had to put, you know, 20% or more down. And so you and your neighbors lived a fairly similar life. But now we can live well beyond our means with credit cards. And it’s so easy to look at our neighbors and say, well, if they can do that, why can’t I do that? And then social media tops it all off, right? Because when you see the family photo from vacation, everybody’s like kumbaya on the beach. And there are no photos of the kids having the food fight or mom and dad giving each other the silent treatment. So you know, societally we have this pressure that encourages us, if that happens to be a wound to keep valuing money, success status. But even if we don’t have wounds, that alone can create a toxic painful mindset.

Jessica 

Yeah, I mean, I guess this the idea, and it really going back to what we’re discussing at the beginning of this interview was the idea of, there’s never enough if you are stuck in a cycle of believing, you know, really wrapped into like Instagram and social media and just the expectations of the neighbors. They’ve got this beautiful house and did it. I mean, just not my street alone. It seems like everyone is always doing renovations and like, how do they afford like, this is an expensive time with high interest rates. How are you affording renovations when your mortgage is up? It’s you can probably feel like no matter how much you weren’t how much you save. There’s literally never enough because there’s always some new product, there’s always, oh, you know, you did a renovation five years ago, it’s outdated. Now you got to do it. Again. It’s this constant, you know, kind of like you said, hamster wheel, you can never get off. And you can never stop earning money or you can never have enough money. Because there’s always something to spend money on in order to then kind of feel validated and valued and feeling like you were enough, right?

Manisha 

Precisely and and the thing, renovations is a classic example, the finish line never ends. The very common example is like you start renovating either the kitchen or the bathroom. And the next thing you know, you’re like adding on a sunroom and then you’re adding on a home gym, and then you’re adding on a home theater and you know, where where is the finish line when you are in an environment of seeing media images, seeing your neighbors do things? And then that brings me to the third factor that can drive this never enough mindset, which is this pervasive cultural idealization in a way of what’s come to be known as hustle culture. Yeah, and you know, I mean, it’s not just in the US. I mean, this happens in a wide variety of countries overseas as well, where we are literally taught that our careers are our callings, and they are careers are who we are not going back to the beginning of our conversation, our character, you know, it’s not that you are a kind person who loves your family enjoys knitting makes great brownies and volunteers that’s not your worth. Your worth is the you know the title on your business card in somehow there’s a writer for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson and he calls it I think there’s the first person to coined this term work ism that we’re all we’re worshipping at the altar of work ism. So if you feel No this way, my point with this factor is you’re being pushed, you’re being you’re being pushed into this to do it, you’re rewarded for this kind of behavior.

Jessica 

Yeah, I mean, I, it’s interesting, because it’s definitely I feel like the hustle culture has evolved, still exists. But it’s very different. Like in my 20s, it really was like, work long hours get up before, I mean, there still is a lot about grab, get up beforehand. If you’re not getting a bit worrisome and going to the gym, then putting in new 12 hours and hustling, then who are you? Who are you, there’s another thing that I’ve been seeing just as constantly on my social media, this idea of working really hard, so then you can set up a lifestyle where you can, oh, you only have to work kind of like the four hour workweek, you only have to work, you know, four hours a week, and then you can just enjoy your life in I don’t know, like Costa Rica, or something like that. They never tell you how to do any of that. But it’s also this idea that, Oh, you’re working a nine to five, you’re an idiot, you’re doing something wrong, you should be like me living in Costa Rica, you know, and just spending my day surfing with no context, that actually works. And so you kind of feel like you’re between the either you have to work all the time, or you’re working, you know, the average amount, you’re a chump, you should be working two hours a week, you’re, you’re not doing it right, and you’re like, Okay, I literally don’t know which one to pick. And again, going back to the feeling of not feeling worthy, or you’re just doing it wrong, or, you know, you’re you’re gonna just be caught into a weird cycle that you don’t know how to get out of well. And

Manisha 

the irony is, you know, as you so rightly pointed out that these images, we don’t get the details behind how they were done. So, you know, maybe somebody is in Costa Rica working four hours a week or four hours a day, because they are living in the most sparse conditions. And they’ve really pared down, they’ve made a very conscious choice to trade things for this experience, that would be healthy, one way to do it. But often what happens is people are doing this by incurring debt. And so that lifestyle that we’re seeing, it’s going to catch up down the road when you have to pay that off. Now, on the flip side, there’s a movement, fire, financial independence, retire early, where, you know, people who espouse to this philosophy save an awful lot early on, so that they are able to do this, it’s a conscious decision, it’s a lifestyle decision. And generally speaking, the process of doing that high level of savings is bringing joy. And so there’s joy in the process of, of reaching this able to live the life I want to live. But when we just see it, in the absence of context, we don’t know which one of those routes someone has taken. And it can make us feel really bad about ourselves.

Jessica 

There’s, there’s one kind of thing when looking at some notes about things to discuss the idea, and I haven’t heard this before, but I love it, the idea of achieving less as the real path to lasting success, we always hear more and more and more, do more, be more, buy more, achieve more, earn more, etc, etc. Why? And usually, when we think about less, it’s always in a negative context, like you have less you are less. You know, it’s never with a good healthy lens. So what is this idea of achieving less because I like I’ve scaled back a lot in terms of some of my goals or, you know, expectations I put on myself and I’m significantly happier because I realized I was putting way too much pressure on myself and was kind of losing track on why do i Where did these expectations come from and when I scaled back and was kind of doing a little bit less and kind of just letting myself relax and enjoy the moment I was happier. And it also kind of in some areas of my life opened up doors to new opportunities and you know, kind of honestly, not that I really believe in manifestation but it definitely allowed for a different perspective. And you know, I was wasn’t necessarily like a failure for choosing a different path. Do you want to kind of speak to what achieving less means and how it could be maybe a healthy thing to integrate into your lifestyle?

Manisha 

Oh, absolutely. This is sort of the culmination of you know, it’s one of the last topics I talk about in the book and what I love about it is it’s a tool to enable you to find your enough because when you’re constantly doing and adding more and more and more obligations, commitments, stuff, goals to your life, you can’t find your enough it’s it’s so crowded in your Your head and physically and logistically perhaps in your life. And one thing that I noticed when I was working on early drafts of the book and running it by various colleagues and friends was of all the concepts I talked about in the book achieved less was the one that got the strongest reactions. And I don’t mean in a positive way, people were really, I don’t want to you know, and that doesn’t appeal to Yeah. And it really was a lightning rod concept. And yet, what you described, you know, this, you know, I’m with you, I’m the term manifestation, I’m always a little worried about using it. But really, what is happening is that you now have more space. So you are identifying the activities that make you happier, and saying no to the activities that don’t whether those are work and paid activities, or outside personal pursuits. And so you are making better decisions with your limited resource of time. And that’s how you end up having what feels like these more, these serendipitous opportunities pop up, well, they couldn’t pop up before, because you either didn’t have time to notice they were there, or you didn’t have time to hone the skills that would be needed for those opportunities to pop up. Because you were trying to develop skills and too many areas where you didn’t have time to take advantage of something that came out of the blue, like a friend saying, you know, hey, I was gonna go on this trip with my boyfriend. And now he has some other commitment, you want to come with me. So that’s what I think about achieving last. But it’s a very scary concept, unless you’ve gone through these other steps of under standing, what’s driving you to this place. And, you know, maybe one last concept we could talk about would be the fourth factor, which is the evolutionary biological factors, because I think those play into why the words achieve less are such a lightning rod,

Jessica 

I mean, I can totally understand where people would hear the word lesser achieving less, and feel, you know, a certain reaction because that is counterintuitive to everything that we’ve learned. So when you say kind of, you know, some of these kind of human, you know, behaviors, what do you mean, what are what are some of these things that we should be aware of?

Manisha 

One of the very fascinating things, as I was researching, was that the path led me to talk to evolutionary biologists who focus on why humans do what they do from a biological standpoint. And so one of the examples that I talked about in the book is how modern life as we know it today is, you know, pick your number 300 400 years old, for the vast majority of humans, life on this planet, we lived very close to the land, and we lived with this seasons, and there were seasons of plenty, and there were seasons of scarcity. And so our brain was hardwired during seasons of plenty, to gather as much as we could to make it through the periods of scarcity. And our brains have not evolved in that very core area, to fully process a world in which we have nonstop in developed countries, plenty on steroids. And so you know, physically we’re hardwired to grab more grab bore, and so a cheating less, trying to attract less trying to bring in less, that just from a completely subconscious amygdala standpoint can be terrifying. Another one is that we, you know, when we lived on the land, we could meet in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, or our very core needs, food, shelter, you know, our transportation was walking or a horse. And nowadays, you know, somebody through you and I into the woods, I bet you anything, we’d have a pretty hard time finding ourselves food and shelter for a prolonged period of time. And that’s because what we use in modern society to meet those basic needs is money. Money is how we buy food, shelter, transportation. And so you know, from a survivalist standpoint, we’re hardwired to want to meet those basic needs and money is one of the tools there are other tools but money is one of them. And so when you say achieve less, not only are you speaking to the ego, too societal issues to cultural issues to personal smalti trauma drivers, but you’re also speaking to, you know, the core of your fight or flight center of your brain.

Jessica 

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people don’t realize how much these things that are there deep inside us from, you know, 1000s and 1000s of years are just based off of feeling, are we, you know, we need to survive and to be feel threatened, even in like a modern day context. You know, some of the threats don’t make any sense, of course, there’s going to be enough, there is a lot of data to show that there is enough resources on this planet, to sustain everyone. And yet we are, for whatever reason, I’d say, especially in Canada, and America with our kind of capitalist society built how it is, it’s everyone for themselves. And everyone is just like survival mode, get out of my way, I need to make sure that I get my cut, because we’ve kind of moved away from more ancient civilizations of community and helping each other. And it’s, it’s hard. I mean, that’s a big shift, I don’t know how we’re gonna ever get back to that, which I’m like, I kind of wish we were more community based and taking care of each other. You know, he always heard that saying, Oh, it takes a village to raise a child and like, Who is this village, like, there’s no villages anymore. No one is like you are hiring, you know, people or you were just struggling to make it on your own, there’s no village to help you anymore,

Manisha 

you’re bringing up such an important point. Because there there are big structural issues behind this. In a lot of capitalist societies. Not all but in a lot, there just are not social safety nets. And so of course, in the absence of knowing that you are going to have access to health care, access to education, access to funding and retirement access to safe housing, of course, your fight or flight is going to be going on. And you know, we live in many capitalist countries in a world of, you know, 1% and 99%, where a very small portion of people control a very large portion of the wealth. And if that can be redistributed in various different ways, if our cultural priorities shift, I think there are a couple of examples, the Scandinavian countries in particular, where if you look at the bell curve of earnings, it’s so much tighter than what we see here. There is a very strong emphasis on the community versus the eye. And there are robust social safety nets. And, you know, as a result, you see more of an emphasis on building up the emotional wealth component of your life and a lot of the Scandinavian countries because your financial health is not under constant threat. And financial wealth, like really trying to maximize it is, you know, for what, because you it’s more clear, when you’re able to not come out of the gate, worrying about massive student loan debt and credit cards that you’ve run up and jobs that you may get laid off from, you know, these days via email, sometimes even you know, there’s like no sense, there’s no sense of safety. And we don’t have community in the same way. You know, I’m half Indian. And, you know, one of the things my I have several cousins, but my, my uncle, one of my uncle has three kids in particular. And, you know, between them, they’ve had medical degrees and PhDs and amazing jobs at tech companies, but they all have children. And so at various points in their careers, they and their spouses have literally moved in with my aunt and uncle. And that’s how they’ve had childhood. They’ve literally had multi generational community, and then the Indian community because they’ve cultivated it’s not like all Indians everywhere have this. I certainly don’t. But they’ve cultivated a really tight community of friends. And so when somebody follows on a difficult time, there are people there to step in and help. And broadly speaking, we’re not encouraged to cultivate because it’s what you said it’s you know, everyone out for themselves rugged individualism, if you need help from other people that makes you

Jessica 

think yes, when you’re like, Man, I love the idea of having you know, if I wanted to have a family to get that kind of support that you really don’t see in a lot of families in North America when it there’s so many benefits not just financially but like you’ve talked about emotionally and you know, just for even like the kids to be able to have that really close relationship with their grandparents or their aunts and uncles. wasn’t family, I think it’s a beautiful thing. But in our capitalist society, you know, if someone has to move back home, we’re like, Oh, what happened as if it’s a bad thing, when really, we should just be thinking about things differently. But it’s hard to get away from, I guess, you know, our worries about how people perceive us, or how society perceives us, which is, obviously what your book is trying to trying to dismantle. So we can think differently shift our life, and who cares what other people think, because you may realize everyone’s just doing the same thing. I think probably also get a lot out of your book, too.

Manisha 

I think, you know, my toxic paradigm was believing that my self worth was my net worth that came from a variety of different factors. Everybody’s, you know, if a person is not experiencing money, then which I would define as calm confidence and clarity about both the specific tactical role that money plays in your life and what you need to do to manage that, but also your relationship to money and having a positive relationship. I feel like many, many, many of us have an algorithm or an equation in our head, that is not a healthy one. And if we can flip that switch, and it’s different for each of us, if we can flip that and say, You know what, I want to live my life to optimize the equation, financial health, plus emotional wealth equals money Zen, where my goal is to be financially healthy. Because as we said earlier, having no money is a huge problem. But the goal is not to have, you know, as much money as you possibly can make at the expense of everything else, where you are putting your time and resources in your enjoyment in both of those buckets. health, financial health and

Jessica 

emotional wealth. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that’s the the magic recipe and and, and people can learn more by grabbing a copy of your book monies. And before I let you go Manisha, where can people you know, if they want to kind of learn more about you, where can they find you online, or grab a copy of your book.

Manisha 

So I have kept my life simple. Everything is on money. zen.com you can find all my socials there. And you can find links to preorder the book. And it’s available in all the places bookstores, that you typically buy books, but I want to also mention that I have a fun quiz. And if you go to money Zen quiz.com It’s sort of a fun, slightly lighthearted, but also slightly serious way to assess where you are on that spectrum of financial health, to emotional wealth, and what steps might help you shift towards where you want to be. So for fun, money Zen quiz.com And for more info on the book money zen.com