Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My guest today is Lauren Groupman. Lauren, welcome back to a reprise performance on Radical Personal Finance.

Thank you so much. I'm happy to be back as always. You were last back with your husband, excuse me, you were last here with your husband, Mark, on episode 108. So back in the early point of the show. And now you're back to show off your new book, The Recovering Spender.

Yes, definitely. I can't believe it's been that long since the first time I was on. It has been quite a while. So we're going to primarily talk about the book and primarily talk about some of the tools and tactics and techniques that you have learned and are now sharing with others.

But go ahead and give us a brief intro story of your and Mark's story, especially as it relates to personal finance. Yeah. So my husband and I, we've been married for 14 years. We got married young. Actually, we were still in college and we got married. We got married in between our junior and our senior year of college.

And we both, you know, I didn't have very much luck with money in my teen years and in my college years. And so it was just it was just a train wreck right away financially. I ended up getting us into $40,000 with the debt. I handled the money and paid all the bills and I did a poor, you know, very terrible job at it back then.

And so Mark didn't really know a lot of, you know, what was going on behind the scenes. So one day, just, you know, after we had a car towed away and we just were like running a thousand dollars short every single month, I decided, you know, I've just got to like, I've got to stop spending money and getting us into more debt.

And I've got to come clean with Mark about what's going on and, you know, how terrible I am with money. And so I came clean to him and told him about our debt. And so that was back in 2006. And so or 2007, I'm sorry. And so we were debt free two years later.

And I've just taken what I've learned as a spender and decided to teach others, you know, how to get out of debt if you're a spender. And that's why I wrote the book, The Recovering Spender. Why did you guys come to this arrangement to handle your financial affairs early in your life?

Yeah. So it's kind of odd, right, that the woman I think is like, I'll take care of the money and like they don't work together. But for me, I always grew up with my mom doing the bills. Like I remember her, you know, watching her sitting in our dining room table, writing down the money.

And so I always remember that, like that, you know, in my mind, the woman does the bills. And so that's kind of, you know, I took over, you know, thinking that's what a wife is supposed to do. When we first got married, you know, Mark had the job, I wasn't working.

So I would handle the family finances and take care of the home. And you know, I was just a complete mess. Like I just I was very disorganized and I was missing bills all the time and overdraft fees, and it just got to be really unmanageable for me. So how has that changed in the way that you handle money together?

What does it look like now? Yeah, so now we do it together. What makes this even kind of humorous, I guess, is that my husband is an actuary. And so he loves numbers, he loves budgeting, he loves spreadsheets, he loves talking about money. And so we really are polar opposites.

Like he was at work number crunching while I was at home getting us into debt. And so we had to really come together and really, you know, make sense of our strengths and how we could work together. And so now we we call it the budget night. And the last Sunday of every month, we sit down and we plan the entire month out.

That's going to come up. We plan it out before it even happens. And so Mark usually manages the tool. We have a budgeting tool on our website. He manages that as we go through the budget. I write it down in my paper planner because I prefer paper. And we talk about what the month looks like.

And we're on the same page. But it wasn't always that way. And it was hard to learn how to not fight over money all the time. So that was difficult. Yeah. So you went from having no budget to and let's walk back to 2006, 2007, 2008 for now and then we'll come to today.

And you took on kind of a very proactive, we're going to only spend $4,000 this next month. And what tactically did you do? Did you use envelopes? Did you use a checkbook register? What did you do at that time that allowed you to get out of debt in two years?

Yeah. So, well, the first thing that we did is we really sat down and figured out where we were spending the most of our money. And at that time it was on food. We were spending probably $1,000 a month on groceries like at the grocery store. And then we were spending probably another $600 to $700 eating out because our food had gone bad or we didn't plan or we just were lazy.

And so that was around $1,600 we were spending at the grocery store. So we really learned how to meal plan. That was like the biggest thing. I learned how to use coupons. I learned how to save money if we were eating out, how to save money on that purchase.

But we kind of like cut eating out altogether because we realized like we just can't afford it. Like we're $1,000 short every month and that's just going down the drain with our grocery bill and all that. So that was a really practical thing. I learned how to cut our grocery bill.

So in a couple months, I cut that grocery bill from $1,000 a month down to $200 a month. And so I fed us on $50 a week for about three years. And let's bring things current because last interview we talked a lot about couponing. I don't want to labor there, but as we record this here in the beginning of August, July, do you remember how much you spent on food in July?

Yes, $550. And that was for a family of six. Yep. Right. Yep. That's impressive. Oh, well, thank you. Yeah, we do a lot of meal planning and freezer cooking and we shop at Aldi. It's like a big thing of ours, but we plan out everything that we eat. And so that really, you know, I don't use a ton of coupons anymore.

Why not? Honestly, it got to the point where it was just, I had to choose. I can't do everything right. So I'm running my website full time. I'm working full time now doing that with Mark and I have four kids and I have a house to clean. And so I thought to myself, okay, I still coupon for things like toilet paper and toothpaste and you know, all those kinds of things.

But I don't do the kind of extreme couponing that I used to just because my time has to go somewhere else and I can't be everywhere all the time. So I've had to say no to a few things. And honestly, I can shop at Aldi and save a lot of money and then coupon for the things that are really expensive and I'm spending around the same amount of money just with less stress.

One of the things I've always wanted to do, and when I read your book last time when you were on episode 108, you sent me a copy of the book and I looked at the couponing book. I always wanted a coupon because I always was impressed by, look at this, you know, money jujitsu.

Right. And so I came to that thought. I was like, man, this is a ton of work for a small amount of turn. And the challenge, well, let me not say that. This is a lot of work and it takes a lot of time. And the challenge is what is the alternative use of my time?

What's the opportunity cost? And I've often come to the point where I have other things that are important for me to be doing with my time. And so I've always felt a little guilty that I've never become a master couponer. Like I should be this frugal expert. But what I do now is I do probably the bulk of the shopping for our family, including the food shopping.

But I joined the local restaurant warehouse store and so I get a lot of good deals there. And then also a Costco membership. And I've worked out just the simple basics of I know what prices things can be. And one of the best, my little best tools is by joining the restaurant warehouse store, I can get food that they often put on clearance where they're trying to get rid of things.

So yesterday, as an example, I bought 10 pounds of chicken drumsticks for 30 cents a pound. And so some of those types of things, I look at them and I say, this is a better way for me at this stage of my life than couponing. Yeah, and I think that's where I got to where I was couponing with one kid, and I wasn't working a job.

So that was kind of like my job. I saw it, like what you said as a, you know, an opportunity cost. So like for me, I could either go out at that time and get a, you know, minimum wage job, or I could sit at home and clip coupons and make enough money.

And to make, you know, $100 or $50 an hour, you know, if I spent two hours and saved 100 bucks in the grocery store, that was a better use of my time. But I'm at the point now where I'm running a business with my website and, you know, all the media stuff that I do.

And it just got to be too crazy where I'm like, I could better spend my time either with my kids or, you know, I can make more money doing this. Did you figure out what your hourly rate probably was when you were focusing heavily on coupons? It was about $50 an hour.

So I do want to emphasize this because one of my frustrations with modern schooling is that there's no emphasis placed on the study of home economics. And I'm convinced that home economics, I'd love to write just an entire course about it, but home economics is an incredibly valuable area of focus that where a stay-at-home mom can make a huge difference in the family budget.

And so I don't want to dismiss the value of couponing. If you could get the equivalent of $50 an hour of savings, you have to remember that, number one, that's a six-figure salary. $50 an hour, if you were working that at 40 hours a week, comes out to be $100,000 a year salary when projected forward.

So that's an incredible value. Plus, when you recognize the fact that this is savings, so $50 an hour is money that's being saved, not being earned. So the equivalent, if you were to add back in employment taxes, if you were to add back in some of the costs of actually going and earning $50 an hour, you're probably more saving like the equivalent of $65 an hour because it's savings and not earned income.

So if a stay-at-home mom with a couple of kids where she's got some time during the day to actually do this, if a stay-at-home mom can focus on this, that can be a huge, huge benefit to the family budget. And when that's expanded out onto other areas, not just groceries, but onto other areas, home economics is incredibly valuable.

And I hate to see what a short shrift it gets in today's world. I totally, totally agree with you because we have all these moms that are going out to in the workplace making $30,000 a year, but then they're too busy to eat at home and they're eating out all the time.

And they could probably make more money or be richer if they stayed home and focused on getting their budget low, making their food at home. If you think about taxes and all of that, and that's where we were at when we were in debt. We had to sit down and it's like, "Okay, I can go out to work right now and make this minimum wage job, or I can work at home and work my tail off to spend as little money as possible." And we even got so crazy that we sold our huge custom built house and moved into a townhouse because we were just like so sick and tired of being broke all the time and really focused on the home economics, like what you said.

And that's really, a lot of what I teach online is that. And through my book, I have a book, a chapter in the book calling "Declutter Your Life, Regain Your Joy." And it's all about how you can go through your home and find hidden, like thousands of dollars worth of hidden stuff in your home and how to sell it and where to sell it.

And that's part of the whole home economics that you were talking about. Give us some more practical examples from the "Declutter Your Life" section. Okay. So I did a little experiment probably about six months ago. Because I go through my house probably once a year and we usually do a yard sale.

But this year I'm like, "You know what? I don't want to do a yard sale. Let me go through my house and find some things that I can sell online on eBay." And so I found a few things that were like old, like a company sent me, what was it?

Like a pretty expensive bottle of perfume as a gift. And I didn't have any use for it because I didn't want to. It was, I was like, "This is too expensive to spray." Like it was a really expensive bottle of perfume. And so I sold that on eBay. I had a whole bunch of old iPhone accessories.

I sold those on eBay. So anyway, I'm going through my house and I'm finding all this stuff and I ended up making $1,200 in two weeks just by selling things on eBay. And so one of the things that I actually have taught a lot of people in my area, especially my sister-in-law, my brother-in-law works full-time for us now.

And then my sister-in-law runs an eBay business where she goes to thrift stores on their like half price days and buys like name brand clothing, like special brand labels that you have to find and then sells them on eBay. And she makes like a thousand to $1,500 a month doing that from her house.

And she has four kids too. And so, so there's so many ways that you can go through and like declutter and go yard selling and find stuff to sell, you know, find clearance sales at stores. And there's just so many ways. So that's like one way that I think, you know, declutter your life, regain your joy that like clutter steals your joy and it kind of clutters your mental space, right?

If you have so much junk around and you're like, "Oh, it's just so dirty all the time." I don't know. For me, it kills my productivity if like I'm just around clutter. And so people are like, "Oh, I can never make enough money or whatever," but they don't realize that they're sitting, you know, literally sitting on stuff that they can sell online.

Yeah. I keep telling my wife, I said, "If you wanted to, you can make us a thousand bucks a month from your curb diving." My wife is the world's greatest curb diver. And she's just awesome at finding stuff on the side of the road and bring it home. And she enjoys cleaning stuff up.

So she'll get this thing that's dirty and she'll scrub it up and she gives the stuff away. I keep telling her, "You can make a thousand bucks a month if you just want to turn around and sell the stuff." But she never wants to actually do it. Seriously. She should because even with like, I don't know if you guys have in your area, but we have, you know, Facebook buy/sell groups for your area.

And I've done that before where I've gotten something for free and, you know, put some chalk paint on it and scratched it up a little bit and sold it for $75. Awesome. You know, I'm always thinking about fun ways because I enjoy that. I really enjoy, you know, redoing furniture and stuff like that.

So that's always fun. Yeah. And my hope, I think hopefully as our oldest son gets a little older, I think it'll be a good way, a good project for him because she's good at finding the stuff and she enjoys fixing it up. So if we can get him making the Craigslist ad or putting it in the Facebook group, et cetera, I think that'll provide a good little business opportunity for him when he's five or six years old is my hope.

Oh, definitely. We'll see. But I mean, our dining room table found on the side of the road, I refinished it and it's an awesome table. She finds all kinds of stuff. It's just amazing some of the stuff that she pulls off the side of the road. Oh, I love that.

I love that. So you in your book go through these 12 recovering spender steps. Right. And I want to get to those and have you walk through them. But before you do that, talk a little bit about shopping. In your book, you talk about the triggers for shopping. You talk about an emotional shopper and a trophy shopper and an image shopper and a bargain shopper and a codependent shopper and a bulimic shopper and a collector shopper.

These things, my guess is that the radical personal finance audience skews male and it probably skews heavily to these intellectual type of people who say, "I don't make emotional decisions with money. I'm perfectly content and I'm a human calculator when it comes to money," which is nonsense, of course.

But I don't really relate with this shopping gene. The stuff you do, the Today Show, kind of the feminine, "Oh, you can just say no to the mall," I don't connect with that. So I don't know how to speak to that. So talk about people who do have that habit built up of being a shopper and how to break free from that.

Yeah. So I think you bring up an interesting point, first of all, that I think that there are mostly women who deal with this problem. But there are a lot of men, but they just shop in different ways. Just different stores and different stuff. Well, different stuff, right? Guys typically spend more money on hobbies and sneakers and things that they really enjoy like golfing or if they like to fix up cars or Mark's really big into craft beer right now.

So men tend to overspend or spend more money on those kinds of things, whereas women are more emotional shoppers. But I think what's really important as we start talking about this to people that are listening is that if you're, let's say you're a financial advisor and you're dealing with people, the common thing that I get all the time is that I need somebody who understands the mind of a shopper or a spender because people just don't realize that they have a problem and they're spending so much money.

And so this book is really, I think, helpful not just for shoppers to spend, but to get into the mind of maybe other people's, of your clients who you're like hitting your head up against the wall because they are getting into debt more and more and more and you can't stop them.

And so that's just like a little side note with that. I think that with women specifically, they a lot of times, I'll talk from my personal experience is that I was an emotional shopper. I think I changed a lot of times over the years, but I would get depressed about something and then I would go shopping and it would make me feel better.

But then I would feel sad that I just shopped and that would make me depressed so that I'd go shopping again and then I'd feel better. And it was just kind of this whole cycle. But I think a lot of people do image shopping too. You know, they're trying to keep up with the Joneses.

Everybody has this. They go to the mall together as friends. They don't want to look less than. They wear expensive clothing and nice cars. And a lot of times guys are image shoppers as well. You know, the guy that always picks up the tab at the bar is wearing flashy clothing.

You know, he's a spender. So it's different in, I guess, classifying guys versus girls. But there's also, I said the bulimic shopper, the person who goes and buys something and then gets a home and doesn't like it, so returns it and buys something else and gets a home and doesn't like it.

And it just happens over and over and over again. A lot of people are like, "Oh, I do that all the time. I didn't realize that that meant that I was a spender." And the collector shopper, that my son is a collector, like big time. So I look at this and I'm like, "Oh, he's like, I just know I've got to work on him harder with this." But he always, it's the thrill of having a collection.

You know, baseball cards or having the same, you know, jersey or whatever you want to think about, you're the collector shopper and you're a spender. And so I think that when spending becomes a problem, it's when your spending starts to become more important than your true values in life.

So if you're spending despite being in credit card debt or you're spending despite not being able to afford your mortgage or you're spending money on a credit card not knowing where that money is going to come from, you're sacrificing your value, which my guess is to have, you know, live a happy, fulfilled, debt-free life.

And when your spending becomes opposite of that, that's when I feel like you really got to kind of take a look at it. And that's what happened to me. I was, you know, I remember one story that I went shopping and I went to the mall and hid the clothes in the trunk of my car and then went inside.

And then the next day when Mark went to work, I brought the clothes inside and hung them up in my closet because I didn't want to get in an argument about it. Like I was like so over him being like, "What did you spend money on, Lauren?" So I didn't want to deal with it.

And so, you know, this we were probably married like five years then or something. And so I hid it in the closet and I realized that, you know, my marriage was way too important to be lying about this kind of stuff that I wanted a marriage that would last.

And in order to do that, it couldn't be based on secrecy. And so I really had to kind of take a look at my value system and realize that like I couldn't keep spending that way because, you know, it was just getting worse and worse. So I think that's kind of was a wake up call for me.

How did you come to talk about it as far as what was it if you were in that situation where you were hiding things from your husband in order to compress through? What brought the point? How did you actually overcome that to be able to communicate about it? Well, I have this saying and I talk about it in the book and it says that when the pain of being broke is greater than the pain of changing your spending habits, that's when you're going to make a change.

And so I was so sick and tired of being broke and being so stressed out over money that it was I was more afraid to stay in that spot than I was to talk to Mark about it, if that makes sense. And so I just got really, really... Oh, hold on.

My daughter just started knocking on my door. Hold on. Sorry, Josh. Sorry. I figured it's one of the joys of a home-based business. No, I'm not going to edit it out. It's fantastic. Hi, everyone. My daughter is knocking on my door. My dog's bark in the background in my show.

It's normal. Yeah. So I got four kids. Somebody always needs me. Right. You hear the little knock on the door? She's like, "Hello. Hello." My daughter, so my one-year-old daughter does that, but she does it unintentionally. And so my kids know when I close the door and I have some soundproofing curtains that helps to cut down most of the noise between my office and the living room.

But my little one-year-old daughter, she likes to totter around. And so she comes up to the door and she loves to bang things with her hands. She'll go, "Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang." And often I have to hit pause on my recording and go and say, "Okay, Tiffany, please take her away.

Let's go to the other room. I need to get the show done." Oh, man. That's funny. So when the pain of being broke exceeds the pleasure that you get from shopping, that's what you were saying. Right. Yeah. So the pain of being broke was suddenly greater than the pain of changing and talking to Mark about it.

And I was like, "Okay, it's easier for me to talk to him about it than it is for me to continue to keep spending like this because I'm just so at my wits end." And so we sat down and I kind of just laid it all out. I actually literally laid my credit card bills out on the bed and just he came in and I just blurted it out because I'm like, "I don't know how to casually say this, but we're in $40,000 with the debt." And I was waiting for him to scream at me or something like that.

And he just kind of looked at me in shock for a while and then he said, "I forgive you. We're going to move through with this together." And that was really healing for me. And so we, from that day, started working towards getting out of debt. So what are the rules that you have in place for you now?

In your book, you go over kind of you learned your triggers. Tell us about some of the triggers that you observed and the rules that you put in place to control your spending. Yeah. So some of them are kind of funny. I don't go to home-based business parties. That's a big no-no for me.

So I don't go to Mary Kay parties or 31 parties or any, whatever kind of party. I don't go to them because I am a sucker for a good deal. And I hate saying no to people when they're asking me to buy something when I know they're right there with it.

So I just know that that's a big no. So I never go to those. I haven't been to one in maybe seven years. And I get invited all the time and I always say no. I don't go to the mall alone. That's a big no-no for me. I don't go into Target without one person.

Usually it has to be an adult. So usually I won't go to Target without Mark or like Hobby Lobby, like all of those stores. I feel like when I'm walking into them, I'm like walking into heaven. It's like, like the music is coming down. So any store that gives me that feeling of like, "Oh, this is amazing," that I just can't go into because I get like sucked in.

I don't do a lot of extravagant parties. I see on Pinterest, like a lot of my friends are throwing these amazing birthday parties with like all of these hand-crafted balloons or whatever. I don't do those. I'm just really simple and not trying to spend money. And I only use cash most of the time.

I don't use credit cards at all. I have one credit card for my business that I use to pay business bills. They get paid off right away. And that is only for security because I travel so much right now. But I use cash on pretty much everything. So those are kind of the boundaries that I've set for myself.

I can talk about, do you want me to talk about like the fence analogy? So I think this is really important when a lot of spenders, like you say the word budget and it makes them cringe because it makes it like literally years ago when we were starting to learn how to budget, like it would make me almost nauseous.

Like the thought of budgeting was so overwhelming to me. And so I would have all good intentions and I would make a budget and then I just could never stick to it. And I did that over and over and over again. And one day I was kind of watching my kids play outside and we have a fenced in backyard.

This is when we had two kids and we had a fenced in backyard and a swing set and they were back there playing. And for some reason it just kind of, I was doing my budget on the back deck for like, you know, updating it. And the idea just kind of came to me that, you know, as a spender, I'm always so afraid of budgeting, but it's really there to keep me safe from whatever, you know, triggers I have or things in the world that I just shouldn't be taking part of.

So what I mean by that is that when you have a fence, like so my kids have a fenced in yard so it keeps them safe. It protects them. They can still have fun within the yard. They can still play, but they're safe and secure. But if they were to go on the outside of the fence, they might get run over by a car or a dog could attack them or they get lost or something like that.

And so I kind of started looking at budgeting as a fence around my money that I can still have fun with my money, but the fence just gives me a boundary. The budget just gives me that boundary to say, you know what, this is what you can do. And so every month we sit down and we figure out where that fence is going to be for the month.

You know, what are we going to spend our money on? And it gives me as a spender a sense of freedom because now I feel safe from all of those outside things. I feel safe to say, I'm sorry, but I can't come to your party tonight. Or I'm sorry, I can't go to the mall today because I have that boundary.

Whereas before when there was no boundary, it was like I could go play in the road and get hit by accident and use a credit card and go into debt. And so when I started looking at it that way, that it actually was there to give me freedom, that it really changed the way that I saw spending money.

Yeah. If you, I mean, my opinion on the shopping spending thing is if you look at how people view spending, if you view spending as meeting a need that you have, whether it's an emotional need or, it's often an emotional need. It could be an emotional need for soothing.

It could be an emotional need for release. Maybe you have relationship stress. It could be an emotional need for self-confidence. As you said, I need to buy this certain thing so that I appear this certain way. The only way to, well, one way to overcome it is to adjust how you view it.

And if you view it as, for me, what I think is really powerful is get a goal that's more compelling. Like you said, nothing, your quote that you said that I didn't write down where I wasn't born to pay bills, but rather have this compelling vision of what's positive, it adjusts the conversation.

And then once you see that and you put some limits on it, whatever those limits are, you can create them for yourself, then you can do it without it hurting other aspects of your life. Back to your question like fences and triggers, I do think this is extremely valuable for people to do and to consider the things that you consume in your life.

I do think it's unfair, although it seems to me that the kind of the extreme emotional reflexive spending does often come from women who might go to the mall or go to Target or something like that. Men it's just a little bit more disguised. So usually I always make fun of my friends.

They make fun of, I always call out my buddies who want to talk about, "Oh, that girl spent $350 on a pair of high heel shoes." And I say, "You see these $300 boots you have over here?" You see this Cabela's catalog that you have here on your table?

It's no different, buddy. You just don't care about high heels. You care about something else. So don't give me that nonsense. Exactly. It's just the way that you put it, where you spend it. Right, right, right. Yeah. I need this tricked out $3,000 gun. Yeah. The one you don't shoot?

Of course you do. You know what's funny, Josh? I just was part of, so part of kind of, I did a video project for my book and what I've been doing the past three months, I've been flying to Cincinnati to help a family who, the woman was a spender, right?

And so the past three months, once a month I've been there and I've been helping them and we've had a film crew come in and film it and everything. And what's funny was by month two, when Bridget started, you know, stopped spending money, then all of the sudden, Andy, her husband's spender, spending came out.

And then it was interesting because now he couldn't blame it on her anymore. Because he was going and spending $50 at the casino every once in a while. And he was going and playing golf with his buddies and then going out drinking afterwards. And he had a $1,000 beer cooler in his basement that he was unwilling to give up because he had plans for in the future.

And so it's totally different. But so many times the girl gets the rap and there's plenty of guy spenders out there. So it's a good point that it's just different, you know, the way that guys spend money. That's where the numbers don't lie. Another one that I do have done sometimes is, you know, the husband's griping about the money that his wife spends at the mall.

But meanwhile, okay, here's this brand new F-150 that you have no need for. Hey, let's calculate how much that thing's costing you every month. Ah, you're getting about $270 depreciation a month. So is this $100 over here at Target really the key? Or is this $270 depreciation something that we should also take a look at?

That's good. I like that. You got to look at the actual numbers. But I think we all should assess and understand our triggers. So here are a couple for me. I don't get connected to the mall or Target, things like that. But I learned years ago that I had to unsubscribe from things like men's magazines.

I used to really enjoy magazines like Men's Journal or some of the kind of the male-focused magazines. But I was always lusting after some new $1,200 kayak or some new $2,000 thing. And I realized the entire purpose of this thing is to sell me stuff. And so as soon as I just got rid of it and dumped the subscription and quit reading it, all of a sudden I wasn't feeding that desire to have this certain thing.

Same thing with cars, car magazines, all of that type of content. What you focus on becomes where your attention goes. And we make those choices intentionally, or at least we should be making those choices intentionally. And so in the same way that you intentionally choose to consume a certain type of media, which is built into creating this dissatisfaction in you, because one of the key hallmarks of sales and marketing is to create dissatisfaction.

You have to create dissatisfaction in your prospective customer and then show how your product or service meets that dissatisfaction. So once you cut out all the sources that are creating dissatisfaction, all of a sudden you have less things to spend your money on. Mm-hmm. That's so true. And I think everybody needs to know what makes them overspent.

That's a really great point because if you're overspending, you don't need to be spending that money anyway. You could be putting it towards retirement or something else. Lauren, you guys have these four beautiful children. I'm curious, have you changed anything with what you've allowed into their lives or how you've chosen to spend or not spend money on them and their desires?

Yeah, actually. So there's been a few ways that we've changed. So my son is 11. Actually today is his 11th birthday. And so then I have seven, five, and three-year-old daughters. And the younger girls weren't raised during my spending time. So they don't really know any different. But my son was kind of there at the most difficult time or I guess the time when I was spending the most amount of money.

And so I really, I feel like, you know, he has a natural spending tendency. And I feel like when I was spending money and I would buy him whatever he wanted, when we'd go into Target and it was like, I was a collector. So we needed to collect all the Lightning McQueen cars because this was when like the Cars movie first came out.

You know, we had to collect all those. So he's a little bit harder and I'm continuously having to work with him. But that being said, there's many situations where they wanted to borrow money from us. And we have the saying, you know, in our house, I'm not your credit card.

And so we'll make them do chores or certain things to earn money to get the item that they want. But also, you know, we're just not, we're not a stuff family. We don't, we don't buy a lot of stuff. We don't go to malls. We don't go on elaborate vacations.

And so actually yesterday, what happened yesterday? We went to the grocery store and my daughter asked me for two things and it was like crackers and something else. And I said yes to both of them. And she looked at me and she's like, "Why are you being so nice today?" Because in the store, I'm usually like, I have a list and don't ask me to deviate from the list because I have a budget.

You know what I mean? Right. And I'm like, "Okay, I'll ask her." And so they're just used to like us saying no to them a lot when it comes to money. But our son actually works for us now. He's our office cleaner. And so he makes $10 a week, you know, spending 45 minutes to an hour to, to wash or to clean our office.

And then we make him put that in a savings account. He has to tithe off of it first and then he has to put it in savings. And he hates us for it, but we're working with him. We're working with him on it. But we, we do a lot of, you know, teaching our kids when I do coupon, they cut them for me.

They know what I'm using them for. They are very familiar with me looking for good deals. They're used to wearing used clothes. And we talk a lot about budgeting and about money and about financial freedom and even compound interest with my 11 year old. He, you know, he understands that now.

So yeah, we just really, you know, I didn't get that financial training. And so we work really hard to, to instill it in our children. I think it makes all the difference in the world. I look at young men and women and the ones who go into a ditch financially are usually trying to satisfy something that their parents didn't teach them.

You know, buying expensive athletic shoes is often a way of appearing cool. But if you can adjust those goals and give a different, better goal, you can, you can set your children on a strong course. Exactly. All right. You've got 12 steps. Give us your 12 steps as a brief overview.

I mean, tons of content in the book, but I've got a listener who says, Hey, I'm frustrated with my spending. I, you know, I connect with what you're saying, Lauren, that, that I also am a spender. What are the 12 steps that I need to, to overcome my addiction to spending?

All right. So step one is to admit that you have a problem. Wait a second. I've heard this somewhere. You stole these 12 steps. No, actually, you know, I, I, I saw this 12 steps of like a spenders anonymous or whatever. And I thought, you know what? Like I like step one and I like step two.

So we're going to use those two, but then the rest of them are a little, are a lot different. So so step one, admit you have a problem. I think the biggest thing for me was to be an admit that like, I can't use credit cards. I can't, um, you know, I know my weaknesses and I really want to be, uh, transparent with that so that I don't overspend.

So, um, so number one is to admit that you have a problem. And I actually have, um, so let me read you these, these 20 questions. And, and I say, I talk about this in this chapter of the book too, but I want to share it and kind of get into depth of that with you on here that most, most spenders will answer yes to at least five of these questions.

So I'm going to read these 20 questions to you. So if somebody says yes to five of these, then, you know, my guess is that you have a spending problem. Okay. So number one, um, is your spending making your family unhappy? Even you unhappy could do that. Um, do the feelings of being in debt cause you to lose sleep at night?

Does the pressure of getting out of debt distract you from daily living or work? Um, have you ever borrowed something and failed to give it back? Now this is interesting. A lot of people don't think about this, but it shows a disrespect for money and that shows that you don't have empathy for other people's money if you constantly borrow things and give people back.

So if you don't have empathy for other people's money, how can you have empathy for your own? Uh, number five, are you afraid that your friends will, you know, work, coworkers, church will find out about your spending. Uh, number six, do you pray for someone to give you a large sum of money to pay off your debts?

I can't tell you how many times I did that. I was like, God, just let a $10,000 check show up in my mailbox, right? That it never happens. Um, cause he wanted me to do the work. Um, number seven, do you make a, do your debts make you feel bad about yourself or giving you a low self-esteem?

Number eight, do you find yourself shopping because you feel bad about your debt? Number nine, have you ever lied to somebody about how much debt you're in? Number 10, have you ever borrowed money without taking into consideration how you pay it back? So that's the same thing as using a credit card without knowing where your money's going.

Uh, number 11, have you ever promised something to a creditor that you know you will not be able to fulfill? Number 12, do you continue to spend as if you have plenty of money and no debt despite having no money and being in a lot of debt? Number 13, do you continue to do everything your friends do for the fear of being found out?

Uh, okay. The last six, have you tried fail? Have you tried to budget in the past but failed over and over again? Number 15, have you ever lied about spending money? Number 16, have you hidden a purchase or failed to mention it because you knew it would trouble someone?

That's like me, hold, you know, hiding the stuff in the trunk of my car. Um, do you find yourself living around chaos or drama when it comes to your money? You're always bouncing checks, missing payments. Number 18, do you live paycheck to paycheck? Number 19, do you have a hard time passing up a good deal?

And number 20, do you have little to nothing in savings? So those are good questions. If you answered five yes to five of those, um, then that those are warning signs. And um, so, so that's, that's the first step. Step two, step two, get help from the one above.

Um, this was a step. This is a step in common, you know, 12 step programs. Um, but I really had to realize that I was not doing a very good job on my own. Um, I really needed to find, uh, something else that was bigger and outside of myself to help me.

And so, um, I really started going back to church and reading my Bible and learning how, um, God could help me, you know, get, get better and, uh, have somebody else to rely on. Yeah. I think this is a, an area where many people gloss over and, uh, I know your book is not, uh, necessarily intended as a religious text.

But if we do not see the way that we handle our money as an extension of our faithfulness to God, it leads to a much less of an importance on it. And many people have this perspective, well, I can just do whatever I want. Well, you're going to be held to account for the way that you handle your money.

And so if you've been faithless with the money that's under your stewardship, if you don't start with repentance of that faithlessness, you're not building on a, on a very solid, uh, on a solid foundation. It's not just a matter of, oh, you made some mistakes. It's a, it's, it's, you've been a faithless steward.

Uh, and the Bible has something to say about being a faithless steward. And one of the great things about it is that if you begin with this foundation, uh, if you can begin with the foundation that you're a steward of the funds and that God is actually willing and able to help you to live on, on, on what you have, it transforms everything.

In your book, you briefly quote, um, one of the favorite scriptures that I love to talk about with people, scripture Philippians 4.13. It's one of the most quoted that probably, probably about five Bible verses. I always laugh when people are like, here's my favorite Bible verse. About, uh, I would guess there's five Bible verses that probably account for, uh, 80% of the time when people say, here's my favorite Bible verse.

And what's fascinating to me about each of those Bible verses is that they're usually not put into context. So for example, um, one of the favorite ones, uh, that people say, Jeremiah 29, 11, for I know the plans I have for you says the Lord, you know, plans to prosper you and plans to give you hope in the future.

I always tell the people, have you read the 29 chapters before that? Because if you read the 29 chapters before that, you might not quote that verse so readily. Another one though, is this is the verse Philippians 4.13. Uh, and what happens is, is that Christians have this terrible disease of quoting Bible verses out of context.

And so you'll often see the verse Philippians 4.13, I can do everything through him who gives me strength, quoted and applied to all kinds of things. And you get it and people get really kind of strangely mystical, uh, at some point. And we ask people, what can you do through him who gives you strength?

I can go through cancer, you know, I can lift a car off of, wait a second, at some point in time, we have a question, uh, about that. But what's so fascinating is if you actually look at that verse and you actually look at it in context and you go back and you say, what can you actually do through God who strengthens you?

And I don't deny that, that God can strengthen you to go through a cancer diagnosis. I don't deny that God can strengthen you to go through these things, but that's not what that verse is actually talking about. What that verse actually applies to when, when the Bible says I can do all things through him who strengthens me, that verse is being applied to living on your income, whatever it is.

It's a hundred percent about money management. It's not about this mystical sense of I can go through cancer, I can face this difficult relationship, I can deal with my drinking problem. Well, you might be able to deal with those things, but you can't take this verse and just make it a blanket statement that you can do all things through him who strengthens me.

And the context of that verse is where, I'll read it just for listeners who are interested, but the context of that verse, Paul says this in Philippians, "I rejoiced in the Lord greatly that now at length you have revived your concern for me. You were indeed concerned for me, but you had no opportunity.

Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.

I can do all things through him who strengthens me." And when you put the verse into its proper context and you don't take it as this mystical let me wave a Bible verse at life, but you actually say, "Oh, I can live on my income." It makes it so much more powerful.

So one of my biggest frustrations when people misquote and misapply scripture, and so I'm glad to see that verse actually spoken about in the context of living on your income, because that's what it's talking about. Exactly, exactly. I'm glad you brought that up. Did I steal your sermon? No, go ahead.

I'm loving it. Bring it on. I'm loving it. A little pet peeve of mine. And I encourage all of, the majority of my audience is a mixture of secular and partial Christianity, but I encourage you, if you know a Christian who misquotes scripture, someone quotes John 3.16 to you, ask him what John 3.15 says and ask him what John 3.17 says.

If someone quotes Jeremiah 29.11 to you, ask them to describe the context of the first 29 chapters of Jeremiah and explain to you why God is saying what his plans are for you in your future. Right. And help them to be a little bit more diligent with understanding what their Bibles say.

Oh, I totally agree with you. And you know, it's interesting because in my book I talk about my experience with Mary K. and that was one of their Bible verses that they promoted all the time. Yes, it was about finances, but it was all about like growing bigger in the company and all of that.

And it was just totally, in my opinion, the opposite of what the verse was supposed to mean because they were all about, you know, recruiting and getting more people and more debt and, you know, sharing the opportunities that their company can grow. And I don't know. So I break that all down for you.

And, you know, some people might be upset that I kind of rag on MLM, you know, multi-level marketing companies, but it's my experience and my truth that, you know, they're not all good. Yeah, definitely not. All right. Step three. Step three, admit your spending to someone else. So for me, I needed to kind of just talk about, you know, what was going on.

And so for Mark, I told him first and then I told a bunch of my other friends. But I think one of the strange things is that when being vulnerable, it actually, you know, a lot of people think like vulnerability. If I tell my friends, what are they going to say that actually looks at as weakness.

But I talk about it as vulnerability is actually the most accurate measurement of courage. And so when people come out to talk about, you know, I might not be able to go to this mall, you know, tell your friends if you have a spending problem or if you think that you need to just get out of debt or, you know, that vulnerability is a sign of courage that you want to get help.

And so that's my step number three. It's really hard to do things alone. And especially if it's going to involve a significant life change, it is hard to do things alone. And the key is to recognize that when you're doing something positive, I mean, if you're saying I'm going to go become a drug addict, you probably don't need to tell other people that because they're not really going to encourage you.

They'll probably figure it out anyway. But if you're saying, "Hey, I'm going to stop using drugs by enlisting the help of other people," or "I'm going to stop spending so much money," or "We're getting out of debt," you can do two things. Number one, you can involve them in your journey and that will adjust their behavior.

They'll invite you to a potluck or they'll invite you to come along with them to the beach instead of to the mall. And it will help and be a positive influence on their lives. And most of us have been influenced by somebody else who's losing weight, somebody else who's getting out of debt.

And that can help you to impact their life. And you know what? There's a TED Talk that I quoted in the book that by, I believe it's Mr. Brown. And he says that if you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow, secrecy, silence, and judgment.

If you put the same amount of shame in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive. And so, you know, by keeping your shame of spending or whatever you're dealing with and keeping that secrecy and the silence and judging, maybe judging yourself or somebody else judging you, you know, that's going to make it even get worse.

And so empathy is super huge. You know, if you're listening to this and you might know a spender, you know, judgment, shame, secrecy, that's going to make it worse. Douse it with empathy and they're going to get better. They're starting, you know, starting and that worked for me. You know, if Mark had yelled at me and said, "You're never going to do better.

This is just the way you are." You know, it would have been harder for me to stop spending and to get us out of debt, you know? Yeah. Step four, make a list of all the people to whom you are in debt. Right. So this just, you know, kind of helps put everything, you know, into, you know, a list of what you have.

So you kind of get it all on paper, helps you not have as much stress because a lot of times we're trying to juggle all this stuff in our brain. So that's step number four. Yeah. And if you don't have a list, you don't know what you're working on.

Exactly. And you can't even create an intelligent plan of attack if you don't know what the amounts are, if you don't know what the interest rates are. Generally, when people get out of hand, and I'm guilty of this just like anybody else, when things get out of hand, it's due to lack of attention.

When your weight goes up, it's because you're not paying attention. When your debts grow and all of a sudden you wake up and say, "I owe $40,000 in debt. How did that happen?" Well, it's because you weren't paying attention. So make a list and detail and even detail what's the amount, to whom do I owe it, what are the interest rates, what are the terms.

And then there's an episode in the podcast in the archive of Radical Personal Finance. I'll look up the number in just a moment where it says, "Here's how you intelligently order that list and figure out in what order to pay off those debts." Rule five, take an inventory of your spending.

Right. So this is kind of as a spender, it's a good starting point. Similar to weighing yourself before you go on a diet, you want to know what your starting point is. And so one thing that I did is took inventory of the past three months of my spending, took an average, and then that was the number that I started with a budget so it didn't feel so shocking to me.

And so I needed to know where I was overspending because that helped me figure out those triggers of mine as well. The episode I was referring to was episode 32 of Radical Personal Finance. It's titled, "In What Order Should I Pay Off My Debts? A Rational Guide to the Debt Snowball, Debt Avalanche, and Other Considerations." So I encourage listeners who are doing this step to go back through there.

Step six and seven. Step six is set your new budget. And step seven, as I'm scrolling down through here, because I don't have my book in front of me. Create your boundaries. Create your boundaries. There you go. That's a good one. So explain the budgeting process and boundaries that you teach people in the beginning.

Yeah. So the budgeting process is take that summary that you just did of the past three months of your spending and you're going to use those numbers to create a budget for the first time. You're going to figure out what you want, what your needs and your wants are.

You start with your wants, putting them into the budget when you run out of money. Or I'm sorry. You start with your needs in the budget and as you're going through, once you start running out of money, those wants you have to get rid of. So if you have to get rid of DirecTV or because you just can't afford it, you have to learn how to do that.

And then the goal is to stick to the budget for the first month. So the goal is not to dramatically reduce the money that you have been spending in that first month. The goal is to stick to the budget because as a spender, we need to be able to feel empowered.

And so I always teach people to do that. Just use what you have been spending. You know, we have time to get out of debt. But for right now, you need to feel empowered to start moving forward. So do you prep people for, do you expect you will be good at budgeting in the beginning or do you prep people for failure?

Oh, no. I expect that it's going to take about three to six months for us to get this figured out, to be able to stick to it, to get the numbers right, to give them a little wiggle room so that they have some sort of play money. Because I think that's really important.

You know, whether it's $5 or $50 a month or whatever, you know, I think that that's really important. And so I think it takes, you know, a good three to six months for us spenders to really kind of get under control. I just want to emphasize that because budgeting is a skill.

And if you do not have that skill, which you obviously don't because you're saying I'm a spender and I'm trying to change, then to expect to go from no skill to perfect skill is illogical. And there's going to be a process. And so I think it's much safer to view it and say, "Over the next six months, I'm going to learn to become skillful with budgeting." That's a doable thing.

And you can build the skills to plan because budgets get messed up, budgets get thrown off and it takes time to build those skills. And I think it's really important too because most spenders have budgeted and failed and budgeted and failed and they just feel like they can never get it.

And so by setting the precedent that, you know what, like we're going to do this, it's going to take us like probably three months to get these numbers right. So let's just expect that we're going to have some wiggle room. You're going to need to try your best. Like I'm expecting you to stick to this, but we're going to wiggle with these numbers a little bit.

And you know, in three months, you're going to be doing great. But I think to encourage them because they're so used to failing at it, that to encourage them that like, "We can do this and this is what's going to happen." Next, declutter your life to regain your joy.

Step eight. Yeah. So we talked about a little bit about that earlier, about decluttering your life, regaining your joy, going through your house, finding things to sell, using that money to pay down debt or put it aside in an emergency fund. And then, you know, learning how to just kind of declutter your house and declutter your brain so that you can move forward with joy again.

What do you mean by step nine? Declutter your finances. Okay. So declutter your finances. Like this was really hard for me at first because I had things that were coming out of my bank account that I didn't realize it. Like you know, all of a sudden all these like iTunes things would pop up and you know, Netflix was coming out and I just didn't know what we were spending money on because I would sign up for a free trial and then all of a sudden, you know, what happens when you don't look at your checking account because I wasn't.

I wasn't looking at my checking statement like ever back then is that I had cluttered finances. I had stuff going on that I didn't know and things would come out and checks would bounce. So I talk about decluttering your finances that you need to, you know, figure out all the details about your money.

You need to write down your credit cards. What are the interest rates? When are the due dates? What are the minimum payments? I always tell people to set up what I call a money flow center so that everything has a place. So you know, I have a basket and in the basket is all of like our checks, stamps, pens, envelopes for all of our bills.

So everything is in one place in our house and everybody knows that that's where all of the money stuff goes. And so, you know, just making sure that your finances are decluttered for everybody so that they know where everything is as well. Yeah. And also with regard to decluttering your finances, I encourage people minimize the number of accounts that you have.

Minimize the number of things that you're tracking. Oftentimes people have very complicated financial lives. I got three credit cards that I'm using. I've got a couple of checking accounts. I got a savings account. And then they go from having no money management system to trying to have a money management system for five accounts.

That's hard to do. Start simple. Just minimize, downsize down to one checking account and do everything out of one checking account. Try to keep things very, very simple. The simpler you have things, the better it will be. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So step 10 is do an expense audit. This is just a careful examination of your day to day, you know, day to day spending.

Free up more money for your emergency fund and just really make sure, you know, this is when you take a look at like, do I really need to watch cable? You know, if I took that same money for cable and I put it aside, then I would have, you know, almost enough cable or enough money to pay for my son's college, you know, when he was born.

And so, so those kind of things to kind of look at the big picture stuff and cancel things that you don't need. Yeah. Next 11, which is get out of debt now. I'm like, what is that now? I don't have my, I forgot my book at the office. I'm scrolling through the manuscript on my computer and I'm not going fast enough, Josh.

Get out of debt now. Get out of debt now. So this is all about strategically paying down debt. And I know you have a podcast on it because I listen to it because I like, I love your podcast. So I listen to it almost in every flight I'm listening to, Josh.

Just so you know. So, so I love, I love talking about this part and I actually in a book, I have a little chart that shows the difference between paying off the lowest, the lowest balance versus the highest interest rate first. And so, you know, a lot of people are, there's two different, I mean, you know, there's two different fields of thought on this that people think that paying down the highest interest rate is better.

But I did a scenario where I took $1,200 in credit cards. And so if I paid off the highest interest rate first, it actually ended up getting paid off one month sooner, I believe. And we had one month sooner. But, but you didn't have those small wins along the way.

So it just gives you some questions about, you know, how do you pay off your debt strategically? Which, which order do you want to do it? You know, personal loans, credit cards, car loans, friends. And so I break that down in that chapter as well. Yeah. The key, the key to this question, which has very simple answer, it's called looking at an actual individual situation and running the math.

But the key is the makeup of the debt and how aggressive the payoff plan is. There's no question mathematically that if you're paying the same amount of money to a higher interest rate debt, that you won't have, that you'll have a better mathematical outcome. It's, it's very simple. The question is, are you actually going to be paying that amount of money?

There's also, in my mind, no question that if you have somebody with a few small debts and a couple big ones, that you can get a big psychological win by getting rid of a few small ones and by having your mental energy focused. So, but in terms of applying it, you have, in order for there to be a significant, like in order for them to be comparable, you got to recognize that, that you're, you're going to be paying off the debt in a short period of time.

That's the goal is paying off the debt in a short period of time. And if you're really hustling, you're paying off debt in a couple of years, then there's not going to be a huge impact of interest rates. And you have to look at the actual makeup of somebody's debt.

I got an email a few days ago from a listener who said, "I got one debt, I think it was $15,000 at this higher interest rate, and I got another debt that's $17,000 of a lower interest rate," or, or vice versa, excuse me. And is there going to be a big psychological win for that person?

I don't know, maybe not, not so much as there is if somebody has a Target card with $300 on it, a Pet Boys card with $400 on it, you know, et cetera, and then a big debt over here of $12,000. Well, yes, there's going to be a big psychological win.

So no problem with that. Details on that discussion in episode 32 of Radical Personal Finance. Finally, step 12, curb your spending and define your values. Yeah, so this goes back to what people value in life and what people are chasing. You know, are you chasing retirement? Are you chasing being able to travel when you're older?

Are you chasing, you know, financial security right now? And we have to learn always how to make your spending a reflection of that value system. And so part of, of helping spenders, and I think anybody can, can really relate to this, is that you, we really have to be spending our money according to the values that we hold really dear in life.

And you know, when I was spending, I wasn't doing that. I was, I was doing what I wanted then, but I wasn't doing, you know, what I wanted for the long run. And so I, that's why I put it as the last chapter is I feel like it's so important for us to really put our money where our values are.

Yeah. And recognize that you, only you are going to know the place that you are in life. You might see somebody who's able to, to drive to the mall in a Mercedes and go around and do some impulse shopping and walk away with a few thousands of dollars worth of stuff in a bag.

And for that person, it may make zero impact to their financial life because they have millions of dollars of income coming in from the dividends of their stocks and you don't know anything about their history. But if it's putting you in a place where you're stressed out and it's causing your relationships to suffer and you're suffering from depression and, and, and, and, and fear about the future, well you might want to face it and recognize that your values probably don't include depression and fear about the future and that a few simple decisions in, in your spending decisions can make a big difference.

Yep. So true. So true. Well Lauren, I want to compliment you on writing the book. I've been impressed very much with all the progress that you've been making on the business. I Am That Lady and all of the associated, all the associated businesses. You're getting some tremendous press, tremendous.

Thank you. Your public relations work is, is fantastic. And so I'm just thrilled to see all of the success that you and Mark are enjoying. And I recommend if anybody is, is suffering from spending, this book is very targeted towards people who are spending. And Lauren's, Lauren's experience is an experience that many, many people share of being high consumption and the stress that comes with it.

It's not a book on investing. It's not a book on, on, on how to get rich. It's a book on how to adjust spending. The title is The Recovering Spender, How to Live a Happy, Fulfilled, Debt-Free Life. And so this would be a great book for you to pick up if that's you or if you've got, if you're looking for a present or a gift for somebody who's struggling with it and would like to hear it firsthand, this would be a great, a great book for somebody in that situation.

Thank you. And when does the book launch? September 13th, but people can pre-order it now at therecoveringspender.com. Great. Thanks for coming on, Lauren. Thanks so much, Josh. Thank you for listening to this episode of Radical Personal Finance. If you're interested in building financial freedom for yourself and your family, please subscribe to the podcast with our free mobile app so you don't miss a single episode.

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In addition to your voluntarily paying for the content you've just heard, as a supporting patron, you will receive a number of member only benefits, including a private Facebook group, access to our weekly Q&A calls, and discounts on future products and services. Details can be found at radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. Again, radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron.

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We've never seen this before. Max, the one to watch for a good scream with Cricut. Phone plans, streams, and standard definition, programming subject to change, fees, terms, and restrictions apply. See Cricutwireless.com for details.