12: How To Overcome Money Issues (Chris’s Story)

September 11, 2019 By yaxyoga Comments are Off

What Is This Episode About…

In this episode, it’s Chris’s turn to talk about his experiences growing up in a family that was on welfare and struggling to make ends meet. John will interview him about growing up as the youngest in the family, seeing his mom struggle financially, and the dysfunctional patterns that he formed from that.

They will also dive into his money issues, and how he overcame them when his responsibilities in life increased. Tune in and enjoy!

Key Points Discussed:

Growing up as the youngest of six kids (02:37)
The survival instincts to get food (05:18)
The moment that wired Chris for financial dysfunction (06:44)
Ignoring budgeting and piling up debt (09:40)
The turning point towards being financially responsible (12:47)
Being aware and conscious of the patterns (17:36)

Learn More About The Content Discussed…

Join The Facebook Group –> http://bit.ly/yogaentrepreneur

Some other resources related to personal finance:

Books ?

➡️ The Millionaire Next Door

➡️ I Will Teach You to Be Rich

➡️ The Index Card

Online Resources ?

➡️ https://www.thesimpledollar.com/

➡️ https://www.nerdwallet.com/

➡️ https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/

When Was It Released…

This episode was released September 11, 2019

Episode Transcript…

Disclaimer: The Transcript Is Auto-Generated And May Contain Spelling And Grammar Errors

00:00 Best story I could tell about like, the money thing, was I remember being at the store, and so, we were in the checkout line, she’s balancing her checkbook, and she realized she didn’t have enough money, and she looks at me, because as we are shopping, I was like, “Hey mom. Can I get this, and can I get that?” And she’s a sweetheart. So, she said yes to everything, and says, “Hey Christopher, do you really want this? Because, we can buy it, but we may have to give something else back.” And I remember the embarrassment. I wanted to curl up into the fetal position in a cave and die.

00:32 What’s up everyone? You are listening to Yoga Entrepreneur Secrets. I am Chris Yax, and I’m John Yax. We are part of a small group of yoga entrepreneurs who are committed to making a living, doing what we love, without feeling guilty about making money, or ashamed of being successful, because we know the real value of yoga and how the world needs it now more than ever. This podcast is here to teach the strategies and tactics so we can thrive financially as yoga entrepreneurs. We are the Yax brothers and welcome to Yoga Entrepreneur Secrets.

01:02 I am so not excited about this one today. So, the last episode, we got to talk a little bit about money on my side, my issues, and what’s… growing up in a family of six siblings and then mom and dad, but basically mom, raising us. How you’re so incredibly crazy. Yeah, totally. How we… how we all grew up in a family of that… basically were raised on welfare, my mom taking care of six kids and… and then just the struggle of it, and now more important than that, is like, is the patterning, the issues that creates as you’re being raised in that way, and how that affects your future self. So we got to dive deep on my stuff last time, so we’re going to flip the script, and I’m going to interview… Alright. That’s it. Great show today, John. Let’s move on. We’re going to flip it and throw it back at Chris a little bit because, what we talked about last time, one of the fascinating things is that Chris and I are four years apart, and we grew up, obviously we grew up in the same family, but how… what I saw being four years older created the patterns in me in a certain way, and what Chris experienced, same exact experiences, but just being four years younger created similar, and different patterns in him.

02:13 So…

02:14 Yeah, yeah. The way it gets interpreted. Like at four years, especially when you’re younger, four years is like… like an ocean of difference in your cognitive ability, how you’re seeing things, why you’re seeing things. And so, as you experience, so we say we experience the same thing, but really, we didn’t experience the same thing because the way we interpreted those experiences were totally different, which is so fascinating. Yeah. So let’s dig in. You ready for this guys?

02:37 No. No, I’m not. Alright, let’s start with what did it feel like growing up in a family with five brothers and sisters. So it’s six of us, and being the youngest, and being the rant. You were actually kind of small for a little while. I didn’t really start growing until I was in 11th grade. That is no joke. I think I was five-two until…

03:01 we played basketball. He could hit some three-pointers. He was like a point guard bugs him alone. Muggsy he was the little guy in the Al side. Oh, Malin. The three-pointers, but I digress. So what did it feel like being the youngest and growing up in and growing up in our family? It was challenging for sure. I mean, I didn’t have all the like a room or a bed, the log cemetery for the luxuries of my life out there. There’s a seriously a good period of time, years where my bed was the couch and that’s when I was living. I would literally have to be like, hey guys, I need to go to bed now. I’m going to turn the TV off and you need to go into your room because you’re in my room on my bed on this couch. And so it was tough in ways.

03:45 It was awesome and ways to like, so the struggle was there prior to dad leaving, but I was so young, I was like two years old when they two or three years old when they ended up splitting up. The struggle got more intense after he left, obviously mentally, emotionally for my mom. But what it also did for me and for the brothers and sisters, which is one of the reasons why I thank my dad for all the choices that he made, is that it allowed us to bond together and like we actually supported each other and like the support system was no longer like mom and looking to mom and dad for the guidance and the discipline. For me it was looking to like you and Jimmy and the older sisters, cause I was the youngest for that guidance, for that discipline and to like learn what it was like to be a human being in this world.

04:29 Now being the youngest, there was always this feeling of like, man, there’s not going to be enough food. I’ll tell two stories. I remember mom coming home the weekly grocery shopping, right. And it was like she would come back with like a hundred bags and like load up the refrigerator and it was like starving wolves. Like they would all come in and in my mind, it was like a cartoon where they’re like, like food flies everywhere, like clothes and like hair and like everyone’s just like devouring each other. And I’m the youngest so I’m not getting in the melee. I’m just waiting. So then I started getting smart about it and like once she would come home, I would start grabbing food and like hiding it and behind places and things that I knew, like they wouldn’t go behind the lettuce. So that’s where I’d put like Turkey and the Cheese to make sure that I could eat.

05:18 So I joke. But I mean literally it was like a survival instinct to make sure that I was going to have food the next day. And so I would go and hide shit and like just make sure that I have food cause it was, and there’s something instinctual about being the youngest I think. And if you’re like the youngest in your family, you’ll probably resonate with this. Where like survival’s not guaranteed man. Like you’re not like you, you were the lowest on the totem pole. So that’s one story that was like, and that food thing came to talk about pattern like core pattern. That food thing came up a lot later on in my life as far as the dysfunctional pattern that I had to work through. But maybe the like the best example, the best story I could tell about like the money thing was I was, I remember being at the store and my mom had a full grocery cart.

06:05 Right. And so we’re in the checkout line and the cashier’s ringing us up and ringing us up. And this is like the time where like my mom would have her checkbook out and we got the total, she’s balancing her checkbook in the line. Like, and this is prior to like everyone using a card. So I don’t think people were like rushed or like pissed off that she was balancing your checkbook. But now like you’d get like you’d get kicked out of the grocery store if you tried to balance your checkbook in front of people and she realized she didn’t have enough money. This is late eighties probably late eighties early nineties maybe. Yeah, she didn’t have enough money and like she looks at me because that’s where a shopping, I was like, hey mom, can I get this and can I get that? Can I get this? And she, you know, she’s man sweetheart.

06:44 That’s a crazy warm-hearted person. So she said yes to everything, realize she doesn’t have money looks at me and says, Hey Christopher, do you really want this because we can buy it but we may have to give something else back. And I remember like the embarrassment, like I wanted to curl up into the fetal position in a cave and die and I just like, I couldn’t even answer. I just walked away. I’m maybe like seven years old at this point. I walk away and I’m like, please God, kill me. Like, get me out of this scenario please. Just, I want to avoid that feeling of embarrassment of like not having enough money and then my mom asking me if I’m okay with putting something back and like I felt like everyone knew we were poor at that point. And like somehow I was responsible because I asked for too many things that we didn’t have enough money to buy all this stuff. And so that one experience like stuck with me, there’s, you know we’ve talked about patterning the way of like building a pattern in your mind. Literally your brain is to have one really, really strong like traumatic event. Like wire it tight off the first go or to do things a little bit, a lot over a longer period of time. That was one event where it was like one moment and you’re like wired for dysfunction financially for the rest of your life. That was me.

08:03 So an example of this would be like if the stove is hot and you reach in your little, you’re young, you reach up to touch the top of the stove and you burn your hand. You only have to do that one time. Like it’s wired I, that is a pattern that is there. And then doing these little things over and over again to build deeper patterns is what most of us build patterns with. And uh, so that experience was like, burn your hand on the stove. [inaudible] so hard printed it imprinted deep.

08:28 And it was reinforced by like, every time I would see her have to pay a bill. And like I talked about last time, I literally like every time, like I pay a bill now I’m like, I hear her, oh, I don’t know where the money’s going to come from. And so she would like, and I see that and she was so open about it, she didn’t try to hide any of it from us. So like all her, the are emotions and the mental anguish and the financial struggle was all like, they’re just available to us to hear and to see. And so like not only was that like the burned wired tight into my brain event, but it was then reinforced like, oh yeah, every time, like every week a bill comes in [inaudible]

09:07 how much money you don’t have and how poor we really are. So let’s fast forward a little bit. As you get older and you start to have responsibilities, you get job, you started to make money. How did those patterns kind of play out in your day to day? Was it easy to buy things for you or is it easy to buy smaller price things more difficult, buy more expensive things. How did that affect your managing your finances as you got, as you started getting older and actually making money? What’s funny, because this is last time in the last episode, I was like, man, if you went the entire like 180 degrees opposite from where I went with it. So you are like, I’m going to [inaudible]

09:40 learn about it, I’m going to like control it and I’m gonna figure it out so I’ll never have to deal with it. And I was like, I’m going to run away from it. I’m going to bury my head in the sand and if I never look at it and I avoid it long enough, it’ll just disappear and so and so I didn’t, it was like small purchases. When I knew I had money I was like, okay, that’s no big deal, but I would never look to see if I had enough. I would literally be like, here we go. Like bigger purchases. I knew like I had to like I couldn’t bounce a check, I couldn’t, but I didn’t really like I knew generally how much money I had, but like specific expenses and income and like what was going out and what was coming in, I will fully disregarded it. I didn’t want to look at it. I didn’t want to experience it. I didn’t want to know cause if I didn’t know then I wouldn’t have to deal with the reality of how little I had or how struggle, how tight finances actually work. So I actually just, I was like, if I don’t learn about it then I’m just as good as I am now. And that moment when I ran away in the grocery store was just replayed over and over again in different ways as I got older.

10:47 Mm, yeah. Yeah. It’s funny, I never really thought about that until now, but that literally it was like the representation of how I responded for the rest of my life was burned and wired in the grocery store as I was seven years old. And when we talk about this, it’s like when I decided to dive deep, I didn’t all of a sudden start studying like finance books and like the art of making money or like how to, how to invest. I just was like, how the hell do you just budget money? Yeah. Like how do people budget their money? Like what are good strategies to budget money? And what it sounds like is like you’re like that. I’m going to go in the other way. Sorry to throw an f bomb out there guys. But you’re like, I don’t even want to understand how to budget. I’m just going to very much like you said, bear my head in the sand and roll. See where I end up.

11:32 Yeah. And it didn’t work out good. That didn’t turn out good. Like I bounced a lot of checks. I didn’t have money. I had to find out like through more embarrassment of like, oh by the way you just got an email from your bank and you overdrafted again. Oh and by the way, when we asked you for overdraft protection, you said no because you thought it wasn’t worth it. So I mean it bit me every single time but so you know, so I’ll fast forward even more and all the sudden like I graduate from college and I’m super in debt. I decide I’m not going to go get that corporate career job cause I was international business major and I like emphasized and Europe and I studied abroad and so I was all set up to like start making money. German and minor in German.

12:17 I was like two classes away from a double major in German and international business. The smart kid not financially. And then let’s pause this just cause I want to make, I want to highlight this point. You majored in business. Yes I did. Right? You majored in not just business, international business. Yes I did. And your personal finances, you were struggling. You were struggling at that time even right. Cause the person was more like an elementary school level understanding of finances and money. So what was the turning point? The turning point was when we opened up hothouse, right. So it was interesting cause we had a martial arts academy, like it was backyard style. So we had it in our home and I got to a point where like I was waiting tables, I was going to school, I was like teaching classes regularly. I was training like crazy and I was living like pretty modestly.

13:09 Like you and I were living together and so I didn’t have a lot of expenses so I didn’t even at that point have to look at them. I didn’t have to, I was good to go. And then, and I was making more money than, and I just knew like I’m making way more money than the money that’s going out. So I’m just good to go. Which was like it was good, but it was also bad cause it just reinforced the same behavior of me not looking at the money that I had and needing to really like organize it and make sure I could be, I wasn’t thinking about saving, I wasn’t thinking about the future. I was literally just like what day to day, week to week, month to month, which sounds like super, I’ll go in for the flow. You know, I’ve got, I don’t have to worry about the future.

13:46 The time now. Always now. No. So when we buy finances, go with universal provide man. No. So then all of a sudden like we opened up hothouse and like what I guarantee I took a pay cut because we didn’t like, we knew like at that point we had partners and we knew what our expenses were within the business and we knew what we couldn’t do and I knew personally, but the amount of time and effort that was putting into it, the amount of money I was getting out, like I had this really start looking at it. So the answer is that the turning point was like getting more responsibility and having to do it because of the consequence of not doing it. Like so high was so much increased some prior in my life that there was, the turning point was you can’t do this.

14:35 And it’s not just for me personally because now there’s other people who are at stake here. You not taking care of like me not taking care of my finances could potentially harm my partners, my business. And at that point I was like, no, this has got to get right because I can no longer operate this way because it’s now not just about me. It’s about other people. Fast forward even more. And I got married. Hello? Yeah, I was just gonna ask about that because as you get older, you start to stack responsibility and then it’s not about you anymore. And what happens with a lot of people I think is that they, like even when they make a commitment to somebody else, they still hold to their old patterns and then all of a sudden that other person’s wrapped in their chaos and their dysfunction.

15:21 And then fast forward a little more and you have kids with kids with that person. And if you don’t make an effort to say enough, it is time to change these patterns. If they are not serving me, they’re definitely not going to serve my spouse and they’re definitely not going to serve my kids. It is time to make a damn change. Yeah. It’s funny because you’ll do more for other people than you’ll do for yourself typically. And that’s exactly what like the spur was for me was it started with business partners and realizing that I’m like we have money, we have our house on the line, I cannot mess around anymore. And then it was like increase the intensity and the pressure with having a wife like triple fold the intensity and pressure wants to have a kid than a second kid. And what also started happening is like man, expense has started just ballooning because you got kids, man.

16:05 I got like, you know, labor and delivery and the whole birthing process and then all the, how do you keep them alive? Like you gotta buy stuff to keep them alive like food and like high chairs and car seats and strollers like stuff. I’m like, oh my God. So all of a sudden I had to be very like much more dialed in personally with my finances and this, it was interesting what ended up happening too is that was kind of what the pressure built in that and it was, we’ll talk about this in another podcast, but it was one of the reasons why the partnership had to change at a certain point was because I, the pressure of needing to make more and to have more control over my own life was bumping up against the amount of expenses that I had and how I couldn’t control that with the partnership that we had.

16:50 Yeah. So yeah. So all that to say like the, I wish there was a magic bullet. I know like, cause we all have patterns like, and it’s not like are you patterned or not, it’s what patterns do you have that are functional and what patterns do you have that are dysfunctional? And this is like Yoga One oh one we’re pattern to see the world in a specific way based on our upbringing. Like we’re talking about money, but it’s, I talked about earlier, like I have food patterns I’ve got, so we’re talking about relationships, patterns of relationships, how I viewed the world in relationship to money, how have you, the world relationship to food, how have you, the world in relationship to working out, health, eating, diet, all of it. And so like I wish once you became like aware of it, that was enough to dispel it and like you’re done.

17:36 Like, Oh, I’ve got a money issue. I’m now aware of the money issue and now I no longer have the money issue. I read a book and it’s all gone. Yeah. Oh my God. Done. So the answer really is like, so if you hear this, you’re like, man, that’s great. Good stories. Now what? Like who cares is like, this is like what I said Yoga One oh one it’s what meditation does for you. What Yoga is designed. Like I say meditation because that’s Yoga and yoga. Asana, which is a supplement to meditation and what that does for you is it gives you one awareness. I can now be aware and conscious of my patterns that don’t serve me, my that feeling that comes up when I have to pay a bill. That feeling that comes up when it’s taxis and the feeling that comes up when I know I’m getting paid and I’m not sure how much money we have and like I need to look at it and be proactive about it.

18:21 That awareness is first the impulse of feeling a certain way. For me, the impulse of wanting to run away and bury my head again. Like, no, that’s not, that’s I can’t work. My life doesn’t support that anymore. And so that impulse control is the, the desire to feel that and to do that, to act on it and to not, right. So I have the awareness, I have the impulse control and that ability to not act on it is how we start changing behaviors, how we start changing habits. And then it’s like for me, I think that goes the third part of it is empathy, right? To recognize that in my relationship it’s not just about me. I have to feel and understand where others are. And then that was like, I guess the biggest, strongest push for me was to, to change those behaviors, to have that impulse control, to actually like change how I was behaving in relationship to money because of understanding how other people would be affected by it.

19:11 Yeah, that’s huge. Yeah. That’s huge. And then when you have all of those things, then the three ways to change it are your story. Yeah. Your state or strategy. Yeah. And with this, for me personally, this was the strategy piece of, of what does a simple way of budgeting money? What’s a simple way of looking at it weekly? What’s a simple way of understanding it? What’s a simple way of building it, right? Simple way of being able to approach this subject so that I have better control over it. Yeah, exactly right. And so if you’re listening to this, you’re like, wait, this is yoga entrepreneur secrets. Like where’s the secret as an entrepreneur for yoga? Well, the secret as a yoga entrepreneur is your patterned, and we’re going to talk about it in the next episode about money specifically about how you view money and that vantage point.

19:57 That viewpoint of money is a pattern of thinking. It’s evil or thinking it’s wonderful or thinking whatever it is like and it’s affecting the decisions you make as an entrepreneur basing at your like services and the price you charge for your services is going to be a reflection of the pattern that you have around money. And this is what we’ll talk about later. We wanted to tell our stories behind it because it’s important for you to understand like, man, we where we are now. Like if you look at our circumstances, we shouldn’t be here, right? I should be like dying slowly in a trailer, worried about the river.

20:34 Oh my God. And I’m not because of yoga, because of the practice. So this is what we have the like this beautiful opportunity to do as yoga teachers, as yoga entrepreneurs. We can yet teach Astana and help people feel better physically, but we can also help them understand that we’re all patterned in certain ways and that the core of yoga is to help rewire the patterns that don’t serve us anymore. And as far as the Yoga entrepreneur, it rewires the patterns that are encouraging you to charge less than you’re worth encouraging you to invite. If you’re me bury your head in the sand. If I just don’t pay attention to it, then maybe it’ll go away. And if I keep charging less than maybe more people will show up and then it just doesn’t work. It’s a recipe for disaster. And with all of that, if you are an entrepreneur and you do have a yoga business, are you looking at your numbers? Are you flying blind or are you looking at your numbers? And we’ll talk a little bit more in detail about that in the next episode. So thank you so much everybody for

21:29 tuning in and keep an eye out for the next episode will be a good one. Yes, Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed this episode and be sure to tune in for the next one. Thanks. Peace. Thanks. Yes, thanks so much for listening to Yoga Entrepreneur Secrets. Do you have a question that you’d like us to answer raw and uncut on the podcast? If you want your questions answered, all you need to do is head over to Apple Podcasts, and do three simple things. One; rate and review telling us what you think of the podcast. Two; in that review, ask anything you want related to yoga, and three; if you want to shout out, leave your Instagram handle or name and that’s it. Then listen in to hear your question answered Live, raw and uncut. Join us next time on Yoga Entrepreneur Secrets Podcast. Thanks.