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What if you could get more of what you want in life? But not through pushing, forcing, or pressure.
You can.
When it comes to money, time, and energy, no one’s gonna turn away more.
And Kate Northrup, Bestselling Author of Money: A Love Story and Do Less and host of Plenty, is here to help you expand your capacity to receive all of the best.
As a Money Empowerment OG who’s been at it for nearly 2 decades, Kate’s the abundance-oriented best friend you may not even know you’ve always needed.
Pull up a chair every week with top thought leaders, luminaries, and adventurers to learn how to have more abundance with ease.
We are going to talk about a state or an experience that I call healthy financial overflow. Feeling supported by your money. The more structure you have in your money, the more freedom you have in your life. Welcome to Plenty, a weekly recalibration of power, money, and safety for high capacity humans. I'm Kate Northrup, best selling author and creator of Relaxed Money, and this is where neuroscience meets ancient wisdom meets real wealth strategy.
Kate Northrup:This is the sacred conversation at the intersection of money, the body, and the life you're truly here to live. If you're ready to reimagine what's possible for yourself and for the world, you're in the right place. Let's go. Welcome to the recalibration. This is part four of a four part series that we've been doing here on Plenty for powerful people just like you who want to recalibrate their relationship with money, power, and safety.
Kate Northrup:So if you're just tuning in, you can go ahead and start back at episode one. Or if you're feeling called, go ahead and start here and then work backwards. Whatever works for you. Just know that I'm gonna be referencing a few pieces from the other episodes, and they do build on one another. Now we've been on a journey together with the recalibration field guide as our companion.
Kate Northrup:If you've not downloaded that yet, it is a free companion diagnostic tool to use along with this series so that you can integrate and implement what you've learned and know where to go next. So you can get that at katenorthrup.com/fieldguide, and the link is also in the show notes. We've really been on a journey together, and congratulations for making it to part four. This is kind of where we bring it home and also open the door to what's next for you and your financial life upgrades. Over the last few episodes, we've talked about how to increase your income without increasing pressure.
Kate Northrup:We've talked about the hidden money ecosystem, and you've identified what state yours is in. And we've looked at the subtle leaks that are shaping your financial life, and you've gotten clear on which ones show up for you. And all that leads us here today where we are going to talk about a state or an experience that I call healthy financial overflow. So healthy financial overflow is not about excess for the sake of excess. It's rooted in radical sufficiency as my friend Lynn Twist, the author of The Soul of Money, calls it, and it's not about bigger numbers just to have bigger numbers.
Kate Northrup:So I really wanna be clear about that. Healthy financial overflow is about being in right relationship with your money, where you're feeling supported by your money and where you can then turn outside your life to see where you could begin blessing the world with your resources of time, energy, experience, and, of course, money. It's really about a life where your money is structured. Instead of being about bigger numbers just for the sake of bigger numbers, it's about your financial life being structured in such a way that you have stability, sufficiency, increasing freedom with your time and energy, so ever increasing levels of freedom, and eventually, the ability to direct your resources towards what matters most. Your ecosystem state shows you the environment that you're operating inside of.
Kate Northrup:The patterns and leaks we talked about last episode in episode three show up and are about what's leaking inside that environment. What And I'm gonna walk you through today now is the sequence that allows everything to actually come together. So it's the place where your hidden money ecosystem meets your money leaks, meets the wealth stewardship pyramid. This is not through force. It's through structure.
Kate Northrup:When we have the appropriate structure in our financial lives, we actually get to relax. As my friend James Wedmore says, the more structure you have in your business, the more freedom you have in your life. I'm going to adapt that and say the more structure you have in your money, the more freedom you have in your life. It's not about never ending structure. It's only about structure to the degree that you need it.
Kate Northrup:It's like the minimum viable product. Right? The minimum amount of structure to get the result that you want. So the wealth stewardship pyramid is not something to rush. It's not something that we're trying to perfect overnight, and it's really not even about rushing to the top.
Kate Northrup:Just like they always say, right, it's not about the destination. It's about the journey. This is true of the Wealth Stewardship Pyramid as well. Even though we are, of course, headed eventually to the pinnacle, to the summit, to the tip of the pyramid, there are really incredible lessons and opportunities for abundance at every single step that you don't wanna miss by rushing through. Most people try to live at the top of this without building the foundational layers that make it possible, and so I'm gonna walk you through what these layers are today.
Kate Northrup:Before we dive in, this episode is part of the recalibration series, and there's a companion recalibration field guide to go with it. It's where you'll locate yourself inside what we're about to cover, audit your hidden money ecosystem, and identify the one shift you can make right now that's gonna make the biggest difference. You can download it for free at katenorthrup.com/fieldguide and use it as you listen. The link is also in the show notes. Alright.
Kate Northrup:Let's get into it. Each layer is really a way of being, not a task list. Okay? So I really want that to be clear to you. Level one is the layer of financial grounding.
Kate Northrup:Now these do all build on each other, but sometimes you might get to one layer of the pyramid and then go visit the bottom layer again and then come back and hop up three layers. So even though it's designed as a pyramid that does ascend, just know that you don't have to be linear about it. At the base of the pyramid is financial grounding, and this is where you get so that your income is greater than your expenses. These are kind of some of the touchstones or the check marks that you could mark off. So your income is greater than your expenses where you have really good visibility in your money.
Kate Northrup:You're really clear about your numbers, and you are feeling a sense of ever increasing stability because you're building your financial cushion. You are really having clarity. Money loves clarity. Money is attracted to clarity. Clarity begins in level one of the pyramid, financial grounding.
Kate Northrup:This is where the ground stops moving. Okay? So you're really getting grounded in clarity and visibility. Level two is where you start building and increasing that cushion and breathing room. So this is where you're building your cushion fund.
Kate Northrup:This is where you are building a buffer in your financial life. And this is where you are having ever reduced financial stress because you are tending to your numbers, and you are also tending to the energetics, to your sense of safety in your nervous system, to your emotional relationship to money, to your wiring around money. And all of that's happening at the same time. This is really where money stops feeling so urgent like this hot potato, and instead you are making decisions responsively instead of from reactivity or emergency or immediacy, and you're really starting to build some spaciousness for yourself. So that's level two.
Kate Northrup:It's really not about hoarding. It's about creating room to breathe, and that's cushion and breathing room, level two. Level three is when we begin to move into structural stewardship. So you're starting to implement an allocation system where you know what percentage goes where, when, and some of that actually becomes automated so you don't even have to think about it. You are implementing a strategy to dissolve your invoices for blessings already received if you have any high interest debt.
Kate Northrup:You're stepping into more financial leadership. So instead of feeling like money is controlling you, you are stewarding. You are leading your money so it can support you, similar to how you would lead your team so they can support you, and you're starting to invest. This is where your money starts having a destination before it arrives, where decisions are no longer reactive but predecided. And this core philosophy of level three is where you move from managing money to leading it.
Kate Northrup:And if you want help with this, I really invite you to join our premium part of Good With Money. So Good With Money is a free live financial upgrade experience that I teach one time a year, and it is coming up. It's right around the corner. You can get all the details at katenorthrup.com/good. It's also in the show notes.
Kate Northrup:And Good With Money has a premium upgrade associated with it. And part of the premium upgrade is something called the keep more formula, which is a paint by percentages allocation template to actually feel rich now and build wealth for later. So it's about how do I take what comes in and allocate it according to the right percentages to enjoy my life now and also feel wealthy later and have true wealth later. And there are a couple of different stages for how to do those allocations and those percentages, but it's all in the keep more formula, which you receive when you upgrade to the premium experience of good with money. So check that out.
Kate Northrup:Katenorthrup.com/good. Okay. When your money starts to have a destination before it even arrives because you've made those decisions about allocation ahead of time, the amount of energy you save from decision fatigue is absolutely revolutionary. Because what people don't realize is when they don't have strong energetics and strong engineering when it comes to their money, they actually are thinking about money all the time. So often people say like, I don't wanna deal with my money because I don't want to be thinking about money all the time, but what happens when you don't have the engineering and the energetics in place is that money is running your life.
Kate Northrup:You're having to think about it all the time because there's all these little emergencies and these fires to put out, and it's reactive. Once you set up the healthy hidden money ecosystem, money can move to the back burner of your life, and you can just live your life. And money can support you living your life as opposed to you having to think about it all the time. Doesn't that sound nice? Okay.
Kate Northrup:Great. Level three, again, structural stewardship, and that is where you move from managing your money to leading it. Level four is sufficiency and lifestyle alignment. So we are getting into there values based spending, so your spending is becoming more and more aligned with your values, consistent investing, possibly automatically, and increasing optionality, meaning there's an increase in work optionality. Imagine what you would do if you were work optional.
Kate Northrup:I do want you to reflect on that right now. What would you be doing with your time? Would you be volunteering? Would there be causes you'd wanna contribute to? Would you have creative outlets that are underexpressed right now?
Kate Northrup:Would you be doing the same work you're doing now? It's a question that not many people give themselves permission to ask, and I want you to give yourself permission to dream about that right now. Now this area, sufficiency and lifestyle alignment, is not about restriction, but it is about your external life actually reflecting what truly matters to you, where you're really getting the biggest bang for your buck, And it's where you're no longer spending to match an identity, but you're living in alignment with your values. So that's level four, sufficiency and lifestyle alignment. Now level five is healthy financial overflow.
Kate Northrup:Here we are at the promise. There's actually one more level after this, but at level five of the Wealth Stewardship Pyramid, you're at healthy financial overflow. And this is where you really are on a trajectory to becoming work optional, where your investments or your intellectual property or whatever leveraged assets you have are creating enough income that you are work optional. Your wealth is compounding, and you are having ever increasing levels of time and energy freedom. So great.
Kate Northrup:This is where your money is no longer dependent on your constant output, where growth continues even when you're not pushing and even when you may not even be showing up for periods of time. And I just want you to know this is not a pipe dream. I am working towards this myself, and I have many friends who some of whom are younger than me who have created this for themselves. So this is possible for you. This is not just for multimillionaires.
Kate Northrup:This is not just for people making 7 figures in their business. If you are one of those people, fantastic, but I want you to put this on your menu. Okay? Overflow is not something you chase. It's what happens with when everything beneath it is built well.
Kate Northrup:This is also a place where you can step into such greater generosity where you can really, in a much more meaningful way, begin to direct the overflow from your financial life and also from your time and energy towards investing in making the world a more beautiful place. Now level six is stewardship and impact. So at the top of the wealth stewardship pyramid is stewardship and impact. This is where you're directing resources, and this is where your deepest gladness meets the world's deepest need, that Fredrik Bruckner quote. The place where God calls you is the place where your deepest gladness meets the world's deepest need.
Kate Northrup:And when we really have strong foundations in our engineering and our energetics and we get our money working for us, we actually have so much more bandwidth to ask the bigger questions. Why am I here? How can I help? What is the truer, more beautiful world that I can envision, and how can I contribute to making that true? This is where money becomes something you direct with intention toward what breaks your heart, what lights you up, and what you're here to contribute to.
Kate Northrup:Not from pressure, of course, but from healthy overflow. Not from sacrifice, but from the sacred part of your soul. Bringing the whole system together when your energetics are grounded and you feel fundamentally safe, when your systems are designed and you have strong engineering, when the leaks are addressed, this is really what becomes possible. This is how you stop being the one who has to make everything happen. And this is when your systems carry the weight, your money has direction, and your life is no longer dependent on constant effort.
Kate Northrup:Now are you gonna build this in the next week? No. But even if it took ten years, would it not be worth pursuing going through every layer of this wealth stewardship pyramid so that you can truly find yourself in a work optional reality where you can do whatever your soul calls you to in terms of your contribution here on Earth? Now do you need to wait to be work optional to ask those questions? No.
Kate Northrup:Of course not. Asking these deeper soul aligned questions around our relationship with money actually helps us to traverse this pyramid more powerfully and even more effectively and quickly. So you don't need to wait to make your greatest contribution, obviously, until you are work optional, but know that alongside that path, you're asking these bigger questions is accelerating your growth. This is what it means to become a wealth steward, not controlling your money, not avoiding your money, and not overworking, but instead, being someone who has built a relationship with money that is both grounded and expansive, structured and alive, practical and deeply aligned. Now if you're ready to begin building this, I want to help you, and I am here to help you.
Kate Northrup:In a way that is both practical and deeply supportive, that's exactly what we start and build inside Good With Money, which, as I said, is my free three part financial upgrade workshop. I only do it once a year, and it is right around the corner. So head over to katenorthrup.com/good. The link is in the show notes, and you can sign up for the next step there. I can't wait to see you inside Good With Money, and I will see you next week for the next episode of Plenty.
Kate Northrup:Thank you so much for joining me for the recalibration. One last thing, and this is important. The difference between where you are now and where you wanna be financially is not effort. It's architecture. Join me for good with money, my free three day live financial upgrade experience, and we will close that gap together.
Kate Northrup:Tens of thousands have already done it, and you're next. Join us at katenorthrup.com/good. Again, that's katenorthrup.com/good.