Growing Your Financial Awareness — with Amanda Clayman

Jennifer Owens  
Amanda Clayman, thank you so much for sharing your Sandwich expertise with us today. 

Amanda Clayman
Thanks, Jennifer. I'm thrilled to be here. 

Jennifer
So you are a clinician who focuses on money issues. And so as such, I‘m going to tell you right now, you're the guest I've been looking forward to talking to on Club Sandwich since day freakin’ one. So I would love for you to set the scene about the work that you do, so our listeners kind of understand why I'm so psyched.

Amanda
So I am, as you said in the introduction, a clinician who focuses on financial issues. I specifically went into the mental health field because I felt like money was this misunderstood entity in our lives. And I was coming off of a period in my own life where I had just become very acquainted with my own financial mess, if you will, and got, and got this sort of thunderbolt about how most of the struggles that I was encountering in my life, when it came to money, had deep psychological and emotional roots. 

And I thought, why isn't there a place where you can really go to just dig into that. And so I thought I was the first person in the world who had ever put these two things together.

Jennifer  
I know that you were, I’m sure.

Amanda
I was at the forefront. And this was in the late ’90s, early 2000s, before we had the benefit of social media, and being able to just instantly connect with anybody who might share the same interests as us. And so I looked around and tried to figure out how this could be a job. And I went and got my Master's in social work. And I have ever since then worked in agencies, worked privately, worked as a consultant, helping people and the institutions that serve them better understand and feel empowered as to the role of money in their lives.

Jennifer Owens  
And how deep it goes.

Amanda
It goes all the way deep.

Jennifer
I won't make this my therapy session. Instead, I will talk…

Amanda
Well, you’d be the first interviewer who didn't.

Jennifer
Well, you know, as listeners have come to realize, Club Sandwich is just me trying to get the answers to all the questions for my multi-generational family. So there you go. 

This week is National Financial Awareness Week, and that's why I'm particularly glad that we're chatting. What I love about this concept is that this week is not about financial literacy. There's a lot to learn in literacy: mortgage-backed derivatives, CDs, and SPACs. Everybody's about SPACs now. But awareness is a broader concept, and it’s much more than literacy. And so I was wondering if you could help us kind of define financial awareness.

Amanda
Financial awareness. The words that come to mind as I think of financial awareness are that I want us to be awake, attentive and present to how money is working and not working in our lives. And so sometimes there are gaps in our learning or understanding, and so financial literacy and education are important because we want to know what our options are and how those options impact us. But the reason I said “money goes all the way deep” is because money maps over all of the different aspects of our lives in some way, shape or form, from how we think about power and decision-making in our relationships, to how we nurture, to the kind of work we do and how we feel that that work gets valued in the world. And so all of these things that often show up in our lives as financial problems, ultimately have a much more personal and significant dimension in terms of the meaning that we project onto these situations, and the ways that we interact with that meaning layer, often unconsciously. Does that make sense?

Jennifer  
It does, because we're talking to the Sandwich Generation. So there is the squeeze of — we often talk about the pressure of what's up with our parents and what's happening there, and then, Oh, my goodness, our kids are on this conveyor belt: the minute they appear, there's always the next stage we have to get them through. But that's a lot of the action stuff of our lives. But how we define ourselves as standing in the middle of being like stand-up folks who are holding up our families. I was the editor of Working Mother Media for a very long time. And it was a defining thing, being very proud of being able to support my family, and “support” had to do with money and why I had a career. It's all very together, and it's how we define ourselves, and then how we actionably do ourselves, do our families and run everything.

Amanda
Yes. And that identity piece, that's very representative of the the stories that we're telling ourselves about what's happening, that's how we see ourselves inhabiting these roles. So a very important sense of identity for me is as a parent and a family member. And, and I think of being a parent as being nurturing and providing. And that can mean how I make decisions about money, both in terms of my own financial contribution to the family, but also like, when my kids are asking me about stuff — which is literally their full time job to ask me about stuff — how do I respond to those requests? And how is money playing that kind of a function in the way that I nurture my child? Or in terms of financial relationships and boundaries that we have with our parents? Are they in a place where they are competing for nurturing and resources for nurturing, with our children? Or are they a source where money and nurturing is still flowing from that grandparent generation to us, and to the grandchildren?

Jennifer  
And how do we feel about it? How does it make us feel when we're all here just hanging out watching reruns of Match Game? And yes, that is a very specific experience from our family, hanging out and watching Match Game reruns from the ’70s. And there is a bit of who is who in the room? And it has to do with money. And also love and who can you depend on? But a lot of that “depending on” is money. So when you think about the awareness part — that’s the financial part of it, in a sense — but the awareness part of it is, I'm going to make an assumption, is helping people realize they do have feelings about all of this, and yes, it is impacting things.

Amanda
A lot of times we need to make room for feelings to sort of go through their process. And feelings sometimes move faster than our thoughts and understanding and sometimes they move a lot slower than our thoughts and understanding. So something can feel really off when it comes to money. So if we do worry about an older parent’s financial security, and that is causing tremendous anxiety — as it does — there can often be multiple layers of meaning that are happening around that, underneath.

Jennifer Owens  
No! [laughs]

Amanda
Yeah. I've come with some news. 

Jennifer
I'm so shocked to hear you saying this.

Amanda
A lot of times that anxiety is very misunderstood, because we tend to code anxiety as an indication that something is wrong. Whereas really — if there's anything really top-line practical that I want to be able to offer your listeners, is that it helps to reframe anxiety as our body and brain's cue that something needs our attention. So we say, “Okay, stress. Okay, anxiety. You have done your job. I am cued. I am paying attention to you.” Now my job is to create a space to be able to hold this feeling while I interrogate it and explore it. And say, maybe I need more information about, you know, my mom, who is sending me some signals that she's worried about money. Okay, let's engage her and try to find out more details.

Jennifer  
Right, what's actually fueling the anxiety that I'm reacting to? 

Amanda
Yeah. So we’re just gathering information here. We need to think about like, “Oh, some of the anxiety that I'm feeling is because this is about shifting roles, or fears I have about my mother's mortality.” Or “I'm picking up on a sense of my own limited constraint of resources of my own time and money. Like, I want my money to be for me, or I want it to be for my kids, and I have all kinds of complicated feelings that my mom may also need my support.”

Jennifer  
Right. And I worry about all these things that are swirling around me, and I just need to, for me, I just need to write it all down. What's what's actually at play here? In my anxiety, my insomnia.

Amanda
Because anxiety will keep knocking at the door, right? Of your awareness, going, “Hey, here I am again! I’m here!”

Jennifer  
Well, I love that you call financial challenges inevitable, which is very calming to me. Because I've had student loans, mortgages, debt, medical bills. I always have the thought that someday, we'll be done. Someday, it'll all be figured out. And yet, life only gets more complicated. So yeah, it is inevitable! It's a simple concept that really hit home for me.

Amanda
One of misunderstandings is — I mentioned one being that we want money to have this very rational solution to it. But the other one is that we get to be finished with money at some point, as if this is something we need to kind of check off our to-do list. And I think it's more helpful to think of if it as that we have a practice and that practice exists beside the things that go into that practice. Meaning whatever financially is on our on our plate at the moment.

Jennifer  
That is it. We have our yoga practice, we have our deep breathing practice. Can you can you give us some one-on-one ways to have a healthy mindset about a financial challenge. Maybe, say, college is here — I used to say it was looming, now it is here — but these challenges that are gonna come in, and kind of freak us out.

Amanda
When we think about money as a flow and a practice and something that exists in perpetuity throughout the course of our lives, but that doesn't mean that we don't have boundaries around it. And that's kind of the rationale behind creating this as a practice. We can say things like “The money that is coming into my life right now: here is how I'm directing it in these different ways.” And then as those needs change or my resources change, then I may change how I direct the flow of that money. But I really think that first and foremost, we need to make sure that that practice exists in time in our schedules. The way that I ultimately found that worked for me is I literally have it in my calendar as “Amanda loves money.”

Jennifer
[laughter] Love it.

Amanda
And it's in there every two weeks and I make sure that twice a month all the mail is opened, all of the account statements are opened, I'm checking these things against the budget. I had tried doing it once a month, I had tried doing it every week, I've tried a million different things because I I really embrace the idea of experimentation here as opposed to: This is a problem that needs a solution. 

Jennifer  
Right. Here's how you do it, kid. 

Amanda
And I sort of love the phrase “Amanda loves money.” It just makes me happy when I see it in my calendar.

Jennifer  
It's very funny. I like it because you could do different stresses on the words: Amanda loves money. Amanda loves money. It’s like one of those actor exercises. I like it. It matters how you're feeling every fortnight, how you’re going to react to the money.

Amanda
Sure, and different words might trigger a different response in different people. Like, it could be Jennifer appreciates money. Or you might not enjoy referring to yourself in third person as much as I do.

Jennifer Owens  
I’d like to put that on your vision board. Money is all right. I don't mind it, I would love to have to worry about having too much money. Just putting that out there into the karmic Universe.

Amanda
There you go. Bringing that karma. 

Jennifer
Well, and then on the flip side, I know that one of the things you talk a lot about is the shame part of money. Because we're talking about kind of existing with it, and then what to do with the future of it. But  I'll be the first to admit, the worst — even now, if you don't pay some medical bill, or we had a late fee, I missed a dental appointment and so they dinged me for doing this for 100 bucks. You’ve got to pay that, because they'll send that to collections in a heartbeat. And you get that scary pink envelope, you know, it's always on a colored piece of paper. And the shame comes up from your ankles. That, “Oh my goodness…”

Amanda
That your mail carrier is out there, thinking about your pink envelope.

Jennifer  
Yes. Everyone knows! So looking at the other end of the spectrum of fear, anxiety and shame, and just all that — the tough stuff.

Amanda
Okay, so now it's time for Amanda's one-minute TED talk on shame. In the same way that we think of anxiety as an indication that something is wrong, and we want to reframe it as something that needs attention, shame also has a way that we tend to experience it and code it in our brains. And if we step back with more of an evolutionary psychology perspective, we can understand shame in a more constructive way. Which is that shame’s use, it’s a social emotion that is employed around behaviors or traits that jeopardize our inclusion in the group, that jeopardize connection. So something that we feel ashamed about is something that we feel others will judge and that maybe threatens our identity as this responsible, competent person who deserves a place in the group.

Jennifer Owens  
Yes.

Amanda
So in some ways, the origin of shame, and the purpose of shame, is just to protect our survival. Because there was a time when being out of the group meant we would die in the wilderness by ourselves. So it's a powerful emotion. And it can shape our response or shape our reaction like almost no other kind of — we call these negative emotions because they feel bad, but it doesn't mean that they they are bad, or an indication something's wrong. So I would advise a person to think of shame as: what is the purpose of this shame? What is this shame actually trying to help me do? Or what is it trying to protect me from? Because we don't need to just go, Oh, this hurts, I'm going to push it away, or I'm going to react to it. Or I don't know what to do. So I'm just going to take it inside — this is what I think of toxic shame, where we direct the shame against ourselves and see ourselves as unworthy. 

So there's so much attachment, that money has to shame, because shame is something that we use, in a way, to inhibit these behaviors that we categorize as dangerous or antisocial or things that are going to put us at risk. So I feel like there's a way — just as with anxiety, where we go “Oh, what are you trying to tell me, anxiety? Yeah, you're trying to bring my attention to this.” It’s the same with shame. Similarly, we can say “Oh, what is this shame trying to protect me from? Or act in service of? Is that actually something that I want to respond to?”

Jennifer
Righ. “Will I take this call?” Yeah, what did you want to tell me? Yeah, thanks for reaching out. 

Amanda
Totally. Totally. Because sometimes it's like we get into this judge-and-jury in our head. Life, if I want to buy this thing for myself. “Oh, but that's bad. And I should put this money toward this other thing.” “But I deserve it and I make this money and I want to take care of myself.” But there's no right answer. Whereas if we just go like, “Oh, look, there's some shame behind this thought, about ‘I shouldn’t’ do this.’” We can think of them together, the SHH, because shame and should often accompany each other.

Jennifer  
Ah! I love it.

Amanda
So when we're getting a “SH” signal, cue into that. We can sort of go like, “Oh, this is just shame.” There was a message that I got about “I don't want to be selfish,” or “We have to be careful with money and make sure that other people are being taken care of. Are the people in my life being taken care of? Am I being responsible in these other ways? Do I still want to make the decision to spend this money on myself? Okay, I can proceed forward.” And we gave ourselves a moment to process that shame. We tolerated the feeling enough to interrogate it a little bit. And that allows us to be able to move forward without having that shame cannibalize our attempt to use money to take care of ourselves.

Jennifer  
I've read something that you had written about moving money from a problem to be solved — which is completely how I see it — to being a source of empowerment. Is this part of that, with the messaging? How you see it, how you react to these messages in your brain that no one else can hear, but somehow you think are being shouted with a megaphone to other people.

Amanda
One thousand percent. This is where I feel like the opportunity for money being an avenue for transformation, growth, and connection can happen. Because, for example, I talked about the judge-and-jury process, and this is something I'm deeply familiar with. And and I'm so familiar with it, that when I change that process? That's where I was so aware of the transformation. And the process change was, instead of thinking, Do I need this? Do I want this? I put the money there first, and then used the money that I had allocated for it. So it is very different to spend on self care, versus allocating money towards self care, and then spend the money that you've allocated. Because you've already made the decision that it's okay, so you don't have to waste mental energy on doing that again.

Jennifer  
I love that. Because I never do!

Amanda
Yes, and once I put money toward it. And I felt like — you know how when you get eight hours of sleep, and then you have a cup of coffee, and you feel like you're a superhero?

Jennifer  
Yes, yes I do.

Amanda
That was this moment where I was like, I cannot even find the words to describe how different that experience was, to make a decision about where I wanted my money to go and then act on that decision, versus to act and then try to justify the decision.

Jennifer  
Because it's so much energy to do it. The only time I go to spas, I get it as gifts. It’s always a gift I want for Mother's Day and my birthday. And Christmas. That's all I want! And you know, what I really want is to allocate some money and have a fund that supports me — because I'm so against it, right?

Amanda
For your audience in particular, we can use this same kind of approach to think of money in relationships and having safe boundaries and empowered boundaries. So if an older parent needs help, a lot of times what we do, is we look at what the parents’ need gaps are. And then similarly, when we're in that sandwich, we look at the children, and we look at what their needs are. And it can often feel like those two needs are infinite. 

Whereas, when we start with ourselves, what our resources are, and what our values and intentions are with our money, then we can say, like, “Mom, Dad, parent — here's what I can do for you. This is what I can do.” And there's the boundary on it. And children, here's a boundary to, an expectation that you can organize around in terms of what I can do for you. And then let the other people take care of their side of the fence. So most of us don't have infinite resources to be able to take care of everything that needs to or could be taken care of. So we do need to make decisions about how to resolve the tensions around our values with money. 

And this can create a sense of safety for ourselves that we don't feel like we're just gonna be sucked dry by all of the people who need us. But also again, I think that that piece of not doing somebody else's work for them. That's appropriate with kids and with aging parents, too. “Here's what I’ve got, here's what I'm going to do with it. These are my decisions and I am empowered to make them. And you now get to have your reaction.”

Jennifer  
Right. And what are you going to do? And what's your part of it? So we talk a lot about financial wellness at Firstly. Is this financial wellness?Right. And what are you going to do? And what's your part of it? So we talk a lot about financial wellness at Firstly. Is this financial wellness?

Amanda
This is, yes.

Jennifer
Setting your own philosophy, based on your values and then setting the boundaries that define it. 

Amanda
I look at financial wellness as a holistic and integrated way of approaching money and dealing with money. And by holistic and integrated I mean that, the holistic piece is that we are acknowledging money in its full context. So it's not just numbers on a page. It is all of those associations and layers of meaning that are attached to that. And integrated meaning that we're making purposeful decisions about our money that are grounded in reality, and then our behavior is aligned with the decisions that we're making. 

Jennifer
And we feel so much more peace when that alignment happens. 

Amanda
And it even just creates the opportunity for it to feel good. Otherwise, it’s as if we're just trying to run away from bad feelings, and we don't have any ability to feel good feelings. Financial wellness doesn't mean that you are just blissed out about your money all the time, because you are feeling a lot of these things that do feel negative and unpleasant. But we can have those processes and feel those feelings without being so reactive to them. And we are creating space, and hopefully more and more space, to feel super good. And to feel like “I have looked at this problem, and given it the attention it deserves and deepened my understanding where I needed to understand it better. And in the fullness of that understanding and knowledge have made some choices for myself, that I am empowered to make. And I'm a grown-ass person who is in charge of her life.”

Jennifer
Right! I feel like you've given us homework. And it's good homework, because I know in my head what I think it is, but I think I need to say it out loud what my values are. 

Amanda
Yes.

Jennifer
Because I am entering a stage where I do have a child going to college. One is in high school, and that’s less expensive, it's a public high school. And then I do have parents that are knocking on the door of 80. Things are happening. So it's time to write this stuff down. And get it together.

Amanda
That's part of giving it the attention and space to have these processes and, and to let it be — I use the word messy, but I feel in all seriousness, that that's too pejorative of a term. Because what it really is is complex. There are tensions between things that can be very important to us that don't have a simple solution. And so if we can, ideally, in the best-case scenario, think of that as "I am living my life deeply and fully and I am awake and present in these decisions." And to give ourselves some credit for that, and the enormity of that task. Then I hope that that does give some people some strength and encouragement along the way. 

Jennifer
Thank you so much for joining us on Club Sandwich. I hope that you'll come back and check my homework. 

Amanda
Yes! Oh, I would be delighted. Thank you. 

Jennifer
Are you living life in the middle? Share your story with editors at Firstly.com, and please take a moment to rate and review our podcast. It really helps us grow. And of course if you could use a little extra financial wellness help, visit Firstly.com, created specifically with the Sandwich Generation in mind, and let me know what you think. Until next week, I’ll see you in the Club, Club Sandwich.