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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.
Financial boundaries are one of the most overlooked but high payoff places that we can invest our time and attention to get a big payoff in terms of our overall sense of safety, abundance, and just general flow and ease in our financial lives. Welcome to Plenty. I'm your host, Kate Northrup, and together, we are going on a journey to help you have an incredible relationship with money, time, and energy, and to have abundance on every possible level. Every week, we're gonna dive in with experts and insights to help you unlock a life of hunting. Let's go fill our cups.
Kate Northrup:We're gonna talk about the energetics of financial boundaries today. Financial boundaries are one of the most overlooked but high payoff places that we can invest our time and attention to get a big payoff in terms of our overall sense of safety, abundance, and just general flow and ease in our financial lives. So many people misunderstand boundaries, and they think it's just about putting walls up and saying no. But actually, when you think about it, like, in terms of a river, if you want to have a strong flow of a river, and the river being your money, you need to have good, strong river banks in order for that river to know where to go. And that's the same thing with our money.
Kate Northrup:Our financial boundaries are a beautiful, literal, and also energetic riverbank to have clear boundaries to direct the financial flow where you want it to go, and it actually keeps the money safe. It keeps the flow of abundance safe. It keeps it knowing where to go, and it prevents you from leaking out your resources any which way because the riverbanks have fallen in or eroded, or right, because then you just get sort of like a mucky, boggy, So with, today we're gonna talk about financial boundaries, what they are, what they're not, and why they're so important. So number one, what are some signs that you need some better financial boundaries? Well, one would be not knowing where your money goes.
Kate Northrup:So if you are like, I just don't even know where it goes, you need to know some financial boundaries. Overspending, overpaying, overgiving, saying yes even when your body says no, and even if it's micro, like spending money in ways that you don't actually feel good about, but you have trouble not doing it, or you're maybe not even aware that you're doing it in the first place. So those would be some signs that you need some financial boundaries. Now what are financial boundaries? It's not about, like, a strict budget.
Kate Northrup:These are not just spreadsheets. This isn't about you saying no to your kids when they ask for money. I mean, it could be, but it's not only that. Financial boundaries allow your whole being to relax and surrender because the boundaries do the holding for you. So there was a great New York Times article that came out many years ago, and it was about decision fatigue.
Kate Northrup:What scientists have found is that we only have so much decision making energy on any given day, and that by the end of the day, we all have decision fatigue, meaning we can no longer make smart aligned decisions by the end of the day, which is why so many people end up zoning out, scrolling on their phones, binging Netflix, eating an entire sleeve of Oreos. Like, if you've not set yourself up for success, you will use all your decision making power in the morning and and into midday, and by the end of the day, you'll be like a blob of dysregulated goo just distracting yourself and giving in to any whim for pleasure or you know, a quick hit of dopamine anywhere. Instead, what we can do is we can make conscious decisions, agreements, ahead of time so that you don't have to use any of your limited amount of decision making energy on any given day for a decision that you could make ahead of time, aka a boundary. Now when it comes to money, in Relaxed Money, we do something called abundance agreements. So I lead our crew, our students, through a process of creating abundance agreements.
Kate Northrup:So we won't go through the whole thing today because it's in the program, but I'll give you the high level so that you can start to get this working in your own life. So what's an example of an abundance agreement or a financial boundary? Well one thing that I really recommend doing is to get super clear on what matters to you. What are your values? And I have a process to go through for folks to do this inside the program.
Kate Northrup:But high level, you can begin to ask yourself, what really matters to me? What in this lifetime do I want to make sure I've experienced? Do I want to make sure I stand for? What breaks my heart in the world? What do I feel most called to do something about?
Kate Northrup:What are the experiences that have brought me the most joy? Those are examples of some of these questions that you can start to ask yourself to have emerge, what are your values? And then some of the financial boundaries that I recommend are that the way you spend your money is in alignment with these values. For example, I'm not much of a car person at this time in my life. I still drive the same Toyota Prius that in fact, I'm so not a car person, I don't remember the year I bought this car.
Kate Northrup:I'm like, I don't know. It's it's we we bought it cash. It's paid off. Have no car payment, and because I live in a walking neighborhood, and because it's a Prius, I like I think I spend less than $20 a month on gas for this thing. So I that's like my car experience.
Kate Northrup:I just I'm, like, not into it. Right? I get a huge bang for my buck, though, from going out to nice dinners with friends. So I spend next to nothing on my car because I'm like, whatever. But we actually have a high, a high line item for really great restaurant experiences and really great food.
Kate Northrup:I order from the left side of the menu, right, like what I actually want to eat, not based on what it costs. I love treating friends to incredible meals. Love it, right? So that's an example of my values are the environment, beauty, like the environment, A, the environment, like the Earth, the planet, but in what I'm talking about here, like beauty, like being in an experiential thing with people I love. So sometimes it's just Mike, sometimes it's us and the kids, sometimes it's us and friends, family, whatever.
Kate Northrup:And so that's a high value of mine, so I have no problem spending money on that, and that's in alignment versus, like, I also don't buy a lot of, like, designer clothes, designer shoes, designer handbags. I just yeah. Like a few pieces, that's great. Not a huge value of mine. Doesn't give me a big bang for my buck.
Kate Northrup:So those are examples of how you could look at it. We often get ourselves sedated, honestly, by our hyper consumer commercial culture, and we're so inundated by commercial messaging. Not just like watching commercials, because most of us don't watch commercials anymore, right, with streaming services and stuff, but it's everywhere from your Instagram feed to the way television shows and movies are scripted to its subtle and explicit. Right? We are just marketed to constantly with the false belief that if you buy something, it will make you better, or that if you buy something, it will make you different, or that if you buy something, it will relieve the existential angst of being human, which it will not.
Kate Northrup:Right? Like, it ain't ain't never gonna happen. That's an inside job. You No amount of money you can spend is gonna do that for you. And so we need to awaken from our collective slumber and really say, like, what is money for?
Kate Northrup:Right? That's the question that we're asking with financial boundaries. What is my money for? I have gone out here. I have likely worked for this money or received it in some way, and it is valuable.
Kate Northrup:It matters. And so I'm only going to use it on that which matters. And if you want to go deeper into this topic, there's a great book that I've been reading called Work Optional, and I would highly recommend it for the chapter that goes deeper into this conversation around aligning your money with your values. Okay. So that's what really is important to understand about financial boundaries is like they are meant to help you to use your money for what it's for as opposed to leaking it for what it is not for.
Kate Northrup:So how do we create these financial boundaries? Well, I would start with a sensation. Start in your body and start asking yourself when you're making transactions, when you're having money conversations with clients or a boss or a coworker or your spouse or whoever, like, how is this feeling to me in my body? Where do you have a sense of a no? How does that show up for you?
Kate Northrup:And your human design might give you further information for this. I know that in my human design, my authority is a sacral authority, which means I essentially get a gut feeling of a yes or no viscerally, immediately, in the moment. And when I second guess myself, I'm going against my human design. Now for some people, they get they have an emotional authority. Like my husband Mike, my business partner, he has an emotional authority, so his is not as strong of an instant knowing.
Kate Northrup:He often needs to sleep on something and think about it for a little longer. So there's different kinds of authorities, and I would, if I were you, I would look up your human design. All you need is your birth date and time, and then you can get your design, and you can find out what is your authority, and that might really help you to know how to set financial boundaries. And so you can also say, like, when you're getting a financial request, how does this request land in my body? And also, is it making me feel expansive?
Kate Northrup:Does it feel expansive in my body, or does it feel contracted? And that information can be so helpful to know for the future, okay, what's a financial boundary that I need to have? So for example, I've been at this business a while now, since 2010, 2009, 2010, and I just know that I don't like to do one on one financial coaching, right? Like that's not my business model. I don't do one on one coaching.
Kate Northrup:I am a one to many person. Now sometimes we have opportunities where someone can win like a VIP session as a bonus and things like that, which I love to do, but as a general rule, my boundary is I do not do one on one sessions. Why do I know that? I know that because I have had that request enough times, and have felt in my gut a no, like a contraction, to know that it's just a no. Would it be a good business model?
Kate Northrup:Sure. Could I make tons of money doing it? Could I charge a really high hourly rate? Yeah, absolutely. But it's just my financial boundary.
Kate Northrup:I don't want to. It is just to know, and I don't need to know why. Right? I don't need to even go down that road. It's just to know the end.
Kate Northrup:That's fine. So that's a boundary that I have. We also have financial boundaries around our terms and conditions, our payment plans, our agreements with our students around those payments, how they pay, when they pay, what happens if they don't pay. All of those are great financial boundaries. And a few other examples.
Kate Northrup:My husband and I have a financial boundary that we don't spend more than $1,000 without having a conversation with each other. That's a boundary that we actually learned the hard way, because there was a scenario where money was spent where that conversation was not had ahead of time, and it didn't end up that we were both in agreement with that expenditure. So we set that boundary. A lot of times, honestly, you don't learn what your financial boundaries are until they've been crossed, either by you or by somebody else. That's okay.
Kate Northrup:You can just write that down as a new financial boundary once you get that information. You can also practice an aligned yes and an embodied no in small ways throughout the day just to build this muscle. So what do I mean by that? When you go out to a cafe, for example, maybe you're used to ordering matcha latte, but you actually read the menu, and you actually look at their other options and ask your body, Do you want a matcha latte today? And maybe the answer is no.
Kate Northrup:Maybe you actually want a chamomile tea. I don't know. Right? So you can practice in small ways actually becoming more attuned to your body's signals so that you'll know during higher stakes conversations if things are a yes or a no. And then you can anchor your new boundaries with a loving structure.
Kate Northrup:What do I mean by that? Well in Relaxed Money, we practice creating an aligned spending plan. So there are a whole bunch of steps we go through, including something called the expense edit, and then we come up with everybody has an individualized, aligned spending plan. So that's a beautiful way to operationalize a loving boundary in a real systems way. Another one would be, I already said this, but client containers that protect your energy.
Kate Northrup:So setting up your agreements with your clients in a way that really protects you and your energy. For example, if your clients can text you and email you and WhatsApp you and send you an Instagram DM and send you a Voxer, like if there's 35 different ways that they can contact you and they expect you to respond right away no matter what time of day or what day of the week it is, that's not a clear container. Right? That's not a firm boundary. Instead, you can let them know during the onboarding, you can contact me between the hours of nine and five via email, or you can contact me between the hours of nine and five via our Voxer channel, and I will respond within forty eight hours on business days.
Kate Northrup:That would be a clear boundary for how you can be contacted. And it helps you to manage your energy in a powerful way so that you're not leaking your energy all over the place, and that will reverberate, that will be mirrored in your financial life. And then also, another idea of a financial boundary is allocating the amount of money that you use for certain things. So a great example of this is like you, we don't want our housing cost to be higher than ideally 25% of our take home income, at the very, very most, 35%. So you don't want your rent or your mortgage to be higher than at the very highest 35%, but ideally not higher than 25%.
Kate Northrup:That's an overall financial boundary that's kind of like a standard in personal finance. That's an example. We have another financial boundary in our life that we take 5% profit off the top in our company. So rather than waiting until the end of the year to find out how profitable we are, we take the profit off the top because of the book Profit First by Mike Michalowicz, which I highly recommend. So those are just some examples of the financial boundaries you can have.
Kate Northrup:So to wrap this up, you can also start to make some powerful reframes, because for some people, what comes up around financial boundaries is our child selves who don't want to be told no. You know, so if there's a part of you that's like, I don't want to have financial boundaries because I just want to do whatever I want to do with my money, and I never want to be in deprivation, and I always want to be able to do whatever I want, right? And I want to buy what dresses I want to buy, and I want buy the wallpaper I want to buy, and I want to buy all my supplements, and I Right? That's our child's selves, right? And that's okay.
Kate Northrup:You can give that part of you a voice, and also, like with children, a loving boundary actually creates a greater sense of safety than having no boundaries at all. Right? So if I just say to my kids, you can go to bed whenever you want, that's not a feeling of safety for them. Then it sort of feels like there's no parent in charge, and that's scary for a child. There's actually a part of all of us that needs a financial boundary for a sense of safety so that that riverbank can guide us towards where we are meant to go, as opposed to the water just sloshing and leaking everywhere.
Kate Northrup:So instead, saying no to misaligned expenses or client requests, remember that that's saying a yes to you. Saying no to spending money on random clothes at the mall when you didn't plan to buy it anyway, or going to Target and just buying whatever you want from their home section, and coming home having spent over $100 yet again, that may be a loving no that you say to yourself so that you can say a more empowered, embodied yes to your financial goals. Right? So anytime you say a no, it's allowing you to say a more powerful yes somewhere else. And then the final thing that I already said, but I just want to really take home is financial boundaries do not limit your abundance.
Kate Northrup:They actually increase your financial flow. So you want to ask yourself now, what financial boundary for you would help your nervous system feel more safe? Is it a boundary you need within your business or within your career somehow in your job? Is it a boundary you need with yourself? Is it a boundary around spending, a boundary around saving, a boundary with your children, a boundary with a loved one, maybe with your spouse?
Kate Northrup:What kind of financial boundary could you set today to increase your financial flow and increase your nervous system safety and increase the amount of energy you have left over from not having to make that decision at every single crossroads, and instead make the decision one time so that you don't have decision fatigue spill out all over your finances, and instead have clear boundaries that you've decided ahead of time so that you can have more flow and more ease. Thank you so much for listening. I hope this was helpful, and I will see you next time. What if managing money felt effortless? You've worked so hard to earn money, so why does it feel stressful?
Kate Northrup:Well, I wanna introduce you to something brand new that I've created called the money reset because abundance starts in your body, not in your bank account. This free audio experience will help you rewire your nervous system for wealth, stop the money in, money out cycle and create a foundation for true wealth, and relax into a new relationship with money. Plus, it comes with the five minute calm cash flow ritual so you can have financial clarity and magnetism anytime you want. All you need to do to get the free money reset is go to katenorthrop.com/reset.