62. Money Mindset and Owning Your Financial Life with Kara Loewentheil

Welcome to Point Me to First Class, the only show for employed professionals, entrepreneurs, and business owners who are looking to optimize their higher-than-average expenses to travel the world. I'm your host, Devon Gimbel, and I believe that your expenses are your greatest untapped asset if you know how to leverage them. Ready to dive into the world of credit card points and miles so you can travel more, travel better, and travel often? Let's get started.

Devon: Welcome back to the podcast everybody. Today I am joined by a very special guest to bring you a conversation that I've been dying to have since I started this podcast over a year ago. Now one of the missions of this podcast and really my business in general is to empower women to travel more, travel better, and travel smarter using credit card points. But not so secretly, I also want to use points travel as a vehicle to empower women to take full ownership of their entire financial lives. 

But, as you'll hear more about on today's episode, there are some significant obstacles in our way that can make that difficult. So today we are talking about money, but not in a way that you've heard about on any other points podcast. That's because this conversation is going to shed some light on how we think about ourselves in relation to money, the lies that you've been taught about yourself and money, particularly if you were socialized as a female, and most importantly, what to do about it. 

To do that I've invited one of the most brilliant women that I know Kara Loewentheil to the show. Kara is a graduate of a few schools that you may or may not have heard of like Yale College and Harvard Law School, and she did what every Ivy League feminist lawyer should do when they grow up. She quit a prestigious academic career to become a life coach. Kara says that her Jewish parents have almost recovered, but the risk paid off.

Her podcast UnF*ck Your Brain which combines evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and feminist theory in concrete and practical teachings and tools has more than 40 million downloads and has been featured in publications like The New York Times, LUK, Refinery 29, and Glamour. Kara specializes in teaching a step by step system that identifies and removes internalized oppression and creates new and unshakable self-confidence.

In addition to running a multiple seven figure business, she signed a major deal with Penguin Life to author her first book, Take Back Your Brain: How A Sexist Society Gets In Your Head - And How To Get It Out. I was very fortunate to receive an advanced copy of this book, which is phenomenal. 

Today, we are going to focus on one very specific aspect of her teaching that I think every single woman needs to know about. That is your money mindset. Specifically, what has influenced it, the impact of socialization on our money mindset, and why it is critically important that women know how to create a money mindset that actually serves them. I cannot wait to dive into all of this. But first, welcome to the podcast Kara. I'm so thrilled you're here today.

Kara: Hi, that was quite an introduction. How did I not know about you that you have like this amazing podcast voice? You have like such a smooth podcast voice. I feel like I. 

Devon: You know what's fascinating? This will not, I promise, turn into a coaching session where you just help me unravel all my thoughts about my own voice. But I have always hated the sound of my own voice. Remember, back in the day, some people will remember this. 

You and I are sort of similar generationally when we actually had answering machines, right? Where someone would call your house, you had the answering machine, and you had to record the message for it. You know you’ve reach this phone number. You're not at home. I always had to record those messages. Then I would cringe every single time I had to hear that because I'm also an introvert and refused to pick up my phone. So I would always let it just go to the messages.

Kara: I hated my voice on recording too. But there's actually science to it. A lot of people don't like the way their voice sounds on tape because it sounds different than it sounds in your head. 

Devon: Yeah, I think that's a big part of it.

Kara: Because when you're talking, it like resonates in your body differently. So your brain has this like ah, that's not me reaction. So I think most people kind of hate the sound of their own voice originally. I did too. But once you've had a podcast for a while, you just kind of get used to it. Now I kind of like it. But yours is very like, it's so smooth and professional. I need that kind of podcast.

Devon: I appreciate that very, very much. But, again, we're not going to turn this entire episode into you coaching me. But one of the things that I do think is fascinating about your story as the folks heard about is that your background and what you do now are two very different things. So can we start to just talk about how does a Harvard educated lawyer and reproductive rights attorney pivot to running a life coaching business?

Kara: Yes, we can. First of all, nothing wrong with a coaching session. Let's just, I mean, people might like that. There's like the short and long version of the story, but I think the short version of the story is that although it sounds like a very radical leap and it felt like it was at the time in terms of like sunk cost and professional experience and financial spending on my education, it was more of a like return to the things I had originally been interested in in some ways. Like I think that I'm always fascinated by like how much we're the same and how much we change and what different ways.

On some level, having gone from like becoming a law professor, which was like next step in my previous professional career, to becoming a life coach seems very radical. When you look back at my high school yearbook, the senior page I did, it's all the same shit I talked about now. It's like what is the good life and feminism philosophy and psychology. 

So I think in some ways my interests have like remained the same. Even in law school, I was like maybe it two or three year, but you have to write some kind of like big paper, like the equivalent of a thesis or something. Mine was all about narrative theory and restorative justice, which is how we tell the story of what happened to us and how people, like a perpetrator and a victim of a crime, how their stories can be the same or different and how you can achieve resolution or kind of justice through a narrative accountability process. So these things were always underneath. 

But I think the way that I ended up, I took this long detour because like many people, especially I think many people socialized as women, I thought that I needed to do what society said was required to be respected, be approved, and be accepted. I also came from a family in which everybody, almost everybody, has a graduate degree. Not quite everybody but most. That was the expectation certainly starting out, and I was the first child. So my parents hadn't encountered reality yet. So they’re like, first child expectations are always very rigid. 

So I had kind of gone down this path of okay, well, I could be a lawyer or a doctor, and I certainly can't be a doctor. So I guess I'll be a lawyer. But that whole time, all the while, I was going to law school and then clerking and then litigating and then in academia. I was simultaneously going to therapy and getting into yoga and getting into meditation and like trying all these different things to try to kind of human better. 

I just I think from a very young age, it always just seemed to me like the way most people act is insane. This can't be like the only way to be it. There's got to be a better way than this. Someone must have a better method for being a human than to just be completely unhinged, like most people seem to be acting all the time. 

Then eventually I didn't find anything that made me feel like I needed to jump ship until I found Brooke Castillo’s work where you and I are both certified. That really changed my life so much that it started to feel kind of untenable to continue on this path. That I now sort of have this comparison of what it feels like to be really interested in something and what it feels like to be going through the motions in a way where you're weirdly still doing well enough to be considered a success, but your heart isn't really fully in it.

Devon: Yeah, absolutely. That dovetails pretty nicely into kind of this bigger question because I know a lot of people listening to this podcast may not be as familiar with what life coaching is, how it works, what the point of it is. So how do you explain to people who are not already really familiar with the field? What is coaching? What is the purpose of it? How does it work? 

Kara: Yeah, I should have started out with that since probably half the people have been like life coach? I am turning this podcast off. So I think that coaching is a I don't know. It's like calling everybody who touches your body a body person. Like there's so many different things people do, but from like everywhere from massage to neurosurgery that could be covered by like one term. The same is true for coaching. 

So, to me, coaching is a really intellectually rigorous and transformative practice that is essentially practical philosophy. So, I think a lot of the questions that I, when I say we ask in coaching, I mean I ask in coaching of people who work with me. You've worked with me like in my world of coaching.

The questions that we're asking are the same questions that when men ask them are considered philosophy. I mean they're what Aristotle and Plato are asking. What is truth? What is reality? What are our perceptions versus what is real? How do we decide what to believe if we don't know what's perception and what is real? Who do we want to be? What is the good life? How should people relate to each other? What kind of society do we want?

When we ask these questions on an abstract or social level, they're considered political philosophy and you get a chair at Harvard, and you probably are a man for doing it. Then when you ask them individually, on a personal level, it's women asking them. So, to me, this work is incredibly profound. It is a vehicle. Women have been shut out of that academic and social conversation for centuries. So coaching is a sort of vehicle for women to have those important conversations with themselves. 

But it's not all abstract. It's also a vehicle for women to change the way that they think. Not just be thinking what's the good life in general, but who is it I want to be if I can get out of these sort of shackles of social conditioning that keep me feeling insecure and people pleasing and trying to make everyone happy and feeling guilty about ever doing anything for myself? Coaching is like the method we use to identify who we want to be and what kind of life we want to live and then change our thinking so that we're able to actually do that. 

Devon: You take so many of your own intellectual property and personal concepts around coaching, how to apply them to women, why coaching is a little bit different for folks who were socialized as women inside of your book Take Back Your Brain. But I'm really curious to hear from you just what does it mean for women to take back their brains? Why did you feel compelled to write this book when, as folks have heard, you already run an incredibly successful and popular podcast? You run a business where you help and teach women how to do this every single day. So why the book and why now?

Kara: Yeah. I mean, I think that when I started the podcast, and you have a podcast so you've experienced this. As time goes on, you experience even more. Your podcast is geological layers of sediment that have accumulated over time. So my podcast started in 2017, which, yeah, in the scheme of life isn't that long ago, but it's like 350 weeks ago. That's how many episodes we have or whatever it is. First of all, I started out coaching lawyers. So the first 20 episodes of the podcast are about lawyer brain. If you're a lawyer, go listen to those. 

Then even when I transitioned and started speaking to a broader audience and talking more about women's socialization in general, when you first start out with anything, you are more kind of repeating what you've learned. Over time and your own intellectual framework starts to grow, your own body of work grows, you start to see things in different ways. The podcast is like a geological record of your whole thought evolution. So, I came into this work as a feminist. My coaching was always a little different even from the beginning because of that. 

But certainly, I have a whole different perspective after seven years, having coached thousands of women, having, you know. So, number one, I finally felt like I was at a place in my career where I was like I have something new and different to say. So many self-help books out there. I am somebody who, before I found coaching, read every single self-help book I get my hands on.

Much like a lot of academic articles, it often felt this could have been a three page summary. There's maybe one idea here that's not even that. It's like somebody had the, some people write a whole book because they had like one idea about how to change a habit or something. You're like I don't need 300 pages on this. 

So I didn't want to write a book too early. Like I had gotten an interest earlier in my coaching career from agents and publishers and whatever, but I just didn't I didn't want to write one of those books. Writing a book is a big deal. If I was going to write a book, I really wanted it to be every page I want the reader be like what the? Oh, my God. I never thought about that way. Wow. 

So I really wanted to wait until I felt okay, I have a whole picture here. I have a whole body of work. I have a whole framework. I really understand what's going on. I can explain it. I also wanted to make sure that I was at a point where I felt like for everything I was teaching, I knew the solution. 

Now I'm like okay, I've iterated all these solutions. I've tested them on, not tested them on my clients. I've participated in them myself. So I really felt like I'm at a point where I can write this down from start to finish. I can like write a book that teaches something. Somebody can start on the first page knowing nothing about anything. 

Like they think the book is a cookbook, and they pick it up. Then by the end, they understand how their brain works in general as a brain. They understand what the way that they were raised or socialized, what they've learned from society has impacted their brain, they understand how their thoughts, feelings, and actions work together. They understand how to change their thinking to change their feelings and how they behave. They understand how that impacts their life. Then they understand these five kind of core areas that I've talk about in the book and women's lives, which are sex and relationships, money, time and time management, body image and body relationship, and self-confidence. Then how all that relates to the broader world. 

Although it is written with women in mind, I will say first of all, my first two readers essentially after my editor are my fiancé, who's a cis man and my father. Both of them said that they've gotten a lot out of the book and a lot of it resonates with them. So my work focuses on the socialization women receive, but people of all genders, I think, will see a lot of themselves in the book.

Devon: Yeah, absolutely. Because one of the things that I love to that you point out in the book is right, that all of these binaries, like they are all constructed, right. That there really is no reality in which there are just two types of people, even if the way that a lot of our systems and frameworks have been constructed pretend that there are only two types of people. Ao it can be a little bit reductionist to talk about women who were social, or folks who were socialized as women versus not. 

I agree with you that there's a lot of value to be had about all of us learning more just about the systems in which we grew up that we, a lot of us, were never taught to question. So many things that we just accepted as, quote unquote, truth. Starting to realize oh, wait, no. A lot of the stuff was made up by other human beings and passed down from human being to human being. So there's a lot here that we can begin to dig into and question.

Kara: Even if you're socialized as a woman, all your other identities are going to impact that. So for anybody, like no book can be sort of like this captures everything you were ever taught, individual person, right. So the whole framework of the book, whatever gender you are, whatever your backgrounds are, is framed in that way. I got different socialization as a Jewish woman then a Christian or Muslim woman might. If you are a woman of color, I'm a fat woman. I got different socialization around that.

So the book is really designed to, I'm talking at a general level, mostly about gender socialization, but it's an intersectional. For any listeners who know what the term intersectional feminism means, it is a book from that framework. So whoever you are, it's helping you figure out what did you hear from society about you? 

Devon: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of those areas that it was not as apparent to me until I did start learning from you years ago and working with you that we have received a lot of messages about is just money in general, finances, who we are, and how we are when it comes to money. Something that I've experienced, especially over the last couple of years as I've started to work much more extensively with folks personally, again, about credit card points and travel, which I think on the surface just sounds like something that's really kind of frivolous and fun, right. 

But what I have noticed, and I'm sure you've had this experience working with as many folks as you have worked with, is that I will have someone come to me who otherwise is so brilliant, highly competent. They can perform cardiac surgery very successfully and safely. Despite being very professionally accomplished, they don't feel as confident or even competent around money and finances. One of the things that you argue in your book is that, again, humans, folks who have been socialized as women, they have been done so to think about money in a very specific way. San you talk more about what that is? 

Kara: So I think you're absolutely right. If you had to sum it up in like one sentence, what society tells women is that women are bad with money. Women come into coaching all the time telling me they're bad with money, and then I have to be what does that mean? Right? What are you talking about? They almost always, for women, it means that they're not good enough at saving and being thrifty. 

That's what women mean when they say bad with money usually is I spend too much. I'm irresponsible. I'm not saving enough. I'm not investing. It's always this sort of I'm not, funnily enough the word is husbanding, but it's I'm not like taking care of my resources correctly.

That is 100% socialization. Because if you think about it for thousands of years, and I've focused mostly on what were the legal and social customs in kind of Western Europe and the UK because that's what came down to America, but there are similar threads throughout the world. Women were socially and economically disadvantaged. I mean, women in the West couldn't, a married woman didn't have any entitlement to wages. If she did work, she need her husband's permission to work. If she did work, the money she made belong to him. If she wasn't married, it might belong to her brother or her father or someone else, right?

Women couldn't have a bank account when there were banks. Women couldn't make legal contracts in their own name, often, especially if they were married. They were married, their whole financial legal identity was subsumed into their husbands. They literally didn't have a legal identity. They were just part of their husband. It's hard for us to even get our brains around what that means, right? 

But I mean, you and I were talking before we started, it wasn't until 1974 that a woman had a legal right in every state in the United States to open a credit card without having to bring a man down to the bank to sign and guarantee the credit card. Right? Which is hilarious. In my situation, I make the money. That'd be I have to bring my partner who I've retired who is a stay at home father now to come down to the bank to guarantee the credit card that I opened with my multimillion dollar business. Like that's insane. 

But that is very recent history. Right? As I write in the book, like there's people reading this book who were adults when that happened. So if you think about from that perspective, women mostly were given, and also marriage was essentially compulsory for most women, right? 

I mean, you needed a husband to survive, or you had to live with your parents or you had to, there were very few opportunities before the Industrial Revolution for single women to earn a wage. So being good with money did mean your husband gives you an amount of money to manage the household. That's the money you have, and that's what you're in charge of. 

So like it's these things sound unrelated, but they're completely related. Why do most women think that being good with money is managing an amount of money that somebody else gives you, like your salary or whatever else, and being thrifty and saving and not being irresponsible and not spending it? That's what women think being good with money is. 

Whereas men more often think being good with money means making money, acquiring wealth, investing, taking risks. The huge irony is that the studies show that women make better investment decisions than men do. So, as usual, we've been completely gaslit into thinking that we are bad at something thing that we are actually better at.

Devon: Yeah, I mean, there are so many different ways, honestly, that we can take this conversation, but I think this is one of the things that at least I can see a lot in the folks that I work with is just trying first to just reconcile this really kind of extreme dissonance, right? Where, again, someone can have a very high opinion of themselves in some aspects of their lives and the way that they consider how they function in different areas of their lives. And, at the same time, have this other aspect, finances or money, where that's not their experience whatsoever. 

I think even just this first point of starting to understand and acknowledge oh, wait a minute. It's not because there is something that is objectively true about you and money. It’s that there's been a lot of explicit and a lot of implicit education and messaging that has been filtering down, especially for someone by the time they've reached their 30s, 40s, 50s. They've been receiving a lot of messaging about how they are or how people like them are when it comes to something like a resource with finances. 

So where do you go from there, I think, is one of the most common questions like once people finally come to the recognition that oh, wait a minute, maybe it's not actually true that just one group of people is somehow just cognitively gifted when it comes to money.

Kara: With money, a thing that we've made that somehow they're better at. Yeah.

Devon: Yeah. Like you said, there's so much data and research that shows that that's not actually the case. Yet, at least in my experience, what happens is it's one thing to know a thing and it's one thing to believe a thing, right. Like we can hear about studies, like the fidelity study, that really did show that women's performance investment wise outperformed men's performance. 

Yet, I don't think that that one statistic alone really instills so much confidence in any individual woman that she's like oh, okay. Thank goodness I have this statistic. Now I feel very comfortable managing all of my own taxable investment accounts. Or I feel really comfortable now deciding which retirement vehicle is going to be the most advantageous to me based on my tax bracket and my future financial goals. 

Kind of where is that bridge? What happens once we begin to understand that maybe what we have been taught about money and our own capability with money is a little bit made up and still not automatically feeling really amazing about it?

Kara: Yeah, I don't think anyone should expect to feel automatically different just because they hear a statistic. I think the reason that the historical context is helpful is that it gives you an alternate explanation for why you think the way you do, right? Because most people left to their own devices just think well, I must be thinking this because it's true. Why would I be thinking this otherwise? When I came to coaching, I learned okay, I might be thinking this because of evolutionary psychology, or talk therapy will tell you you're thinking that way because your family. 

But those aren't the only two influences. Those are both big influences. But society is a huge, huge influence that just was like not even being discussed in coaching when I entered the field. So the historical context isn't meant to magically change your brain. That's not how the brain works. But it's meant to give you an alternative explanation, which starts to help wiggle. I often think is like a little bit of gross metaphor, but I think about like wiggling a loose tooth or something or like wiggling a stuck nail in a board, let's say. But the first little step is we have to get a little bit of daylight between your thought and then your belief that your thought is definitely true. 

So there's actually, right, there's like two things happening. You have a thought in your brain, like I'm bad with money. Then you have a sort of conviction that that thought is true and must be true. That's what you're thinking about. Here's all the evidence you've collected. So the point of bringing in the society and the culture is to help you just start to see even, okay, it's possible that one reason I think this might be because I absorbed it from society. I was told to think this. 

So it's possible that my brain as a thought I often offer people is it's possible my brain is not a completely reliable observer of this, right? Or not a completely. We think our brains are just reporting the news or reporting the weather. In fact, they're actually a biased witness in a trial who has been paid to testify for one side and will change its story as much as it has to to support that side. 

But a lot of time on the book, because I found when I came to coaching that even though it was supposed to be so different from talk therapy, which I think it is. There was still sort of a lot of okay. You've had the insight that this thought isn't serving you. We've identified a new thought you want to believe, and now go believe it. I was like how am I supposed to do that? Nobody really seemed to have a good answer. 

So I spent a lot of time in my work developing techniques by which you can literally train your brain to think differently. I talk about that a lot in the book. Once you're willing to acknowledge that possibly, your brain is not just telling you the truth, I would also say possibly you don't even know what your statement means. Like when you say I'm bad with money, what does that mean? What do you think being bad with money is? What do you think being good with money is? 

I mean, there's a perfect example. Socialization is like we haven't defined any of this shit for ourselves. We just walk around I'm saying I'm bad with money. I'm always behind. I'm not organized. Then in coaching, I'm often being what does that mean? How do you know if you're organized enough? How do you know if you're good with money? We haven't thought about it at all. We've just been walking around saying this stuff. 

So once you started to get some meat on the bones there, like you've started to understand how am I even defining this? Where did this even come from? Then you got to work a little bit by little bit to change your thinking. The biggest mistake that people make in this area, which isn't their fault. This is like what you get from, I don't know, pop psychology on Instagram, is like trying to go straight to really positive thinking or affirmations. 

So I would never coach a woman who fully believes she's bad with money and has so much evidence she's collected over the years. That one time she made that investment decision that didn't work out. Then that one time she bought a purse she didn't strictly need, and then whatever evidence her brain has gathered. I would never be great. Your new thought is I am a money goddess and the next Warren Buffett because you don't believe that. 

So we've got go with something very small and believable, for instance, possible my brain is not an objective observer of this, or I've made some money decisions that I wish I could change. I've made other money decisions that I think worked out well. Like little baby steps. That's how you work your way up to believing you're good with money. 

But this work is so crucial. Like I'm in a mastermind of seven, eight figure business owners and like people still have these thoughts. The number one thing I have coached on when I coach women entrepreneurs in business is the belief that they're irresponsible with money while they are like running a business.

Meanwhile, you know there's some fucking third, fourth generation Harvard dude out here who's had three venture companies fail and has wasted like 120 million investor dollars and thinks he's a fucking genius. No offense, if you're listening to this podcast, sir. 

Devon: I'm pretty sure those guys don't listen to this podcast.

Kara: Probably not. They don't have to do. They don't care about miles.

Devon: They certainly don't like my take on points. 

Kara: No, probably not. You're right. They're out there like -- 

Devon: They're our their using their -- 

Kara: Like well, I've never had to save money, but this sounds right.

Devon: That's usually the guy whose only card is a personal Amex Platinum Card who makes a really big show of pulling it out to pay for their dining bill with it when it's one of the absolute worst points earning cards for dining, but still thinks he's doing an amazing job. So, again, those guys are great. We love them because they don't know what they're doing. So it just leaves more points and more points redeeming opportunities to the rest of us. 

But you and I were kind of chatting before we started recording. Again, I think there's obviously so much nuance to all of this. It isn't just that kind of as a blanket statement people socialized as women, we're kind of taught that they are not as good or not as competent with money. But I see so many threads of this and so many expressions of this, honestly, not only in myself, but in so many of the other people that I work with. 

I was curious if we could kind of just chat about some of these scenarios. I'd love to hear kind of your take on this because I think it's going to be useful for any listener who sees themselves in any of these scenarios. I think one of these scenarios that I see a lot in terms of points conversation is almost this idea that when you can use points to significantly reduce or defray the out of pocket cash cost of travel, that that oftentimes, not that is just celebrated because I think it's worthy of celebration.

But that's almost used as the sole justification of I took my family to whatever location you can pick. I took my family to Japan, or I flew business class with my partner, but I got it on points, right. So it's not such a big deal that I saved $10,000 or $20,000. That's because of the points, right? So it's almost like this justification in a way that otherwise it would be very irresponsible for us. 

Kara: Because women are socialized to believe that their spending decisions are frivolous. 

Devon: Yeah. 

Kara: You don't ever hear a man be like I flew my family out, but don't worry, it was on point. They might be I'm a fucking badass. I did this all on points. Like I'm not saying obviously men use points. But they don't, like there isn't that apology about it. That's because women are socialized to believe that their uses of money are frivolous. You shouldn't be too financially successful or be like flaunting it or like doing anything unnecessary. 

Like it's okay to be a woman and be financially successful as long as you're, I don't know, giving all of the money to charity, which is like not a standard we have for Jeff Bezos. It's like embarrassment. You're not supposed to be too big. You're not supposed to shine too bright. You're not supposed to seem too successful. You're not supposed to spend money. It has to be your family. Like I flew my whole family. 

But even so it's well, a woman who flies her family first class is like being frivolous, spoiling her children blah, blah, blah. Whereas a man who flies his family first class just must be so successful and financially well off that he can fly his whole family first class. Like what a provider.

Devon: Yeah, yeah. Another scenario that I see a lot, again, because I do consulting with all sorts of folks, people who have credit cards for their personal spend, business owners whose to have significant business expenses that we really want to leverage using credit card points. One of the things that I often walk people through is pretty granular look at let's see how you're spending your money. Because my thought is if you're going to be spending this money, I want to put you in a position to earn as many points as possible for those expenses. 

But it's so interesting to me when some women will come to these calls, and the way they even talk about some of their expenses and the feelings that very clearly surround what does it mean to spend $100,000 a month on vaccines for your medical practice versus what does it mean to spend $25,000 on a Birkin bag because you just really love that bag? You know? 

I'm really curious to hear, again, your thoughts about why is it that we have such strong judgment of ourselves sometimes for even the things we spend money on, and it's not even on that dollar cost basis. It's not oh, I spent $100,000 On A versus B. It's $100,000 on A versus B somehow has so much meaning to it.

Kara: I think it's a similar thing. Because if you think about it, like a man who buys a Lamborghini, like a Lamborghini is not necessary. A Ford Focus will get you where you need to go. The same is true of a Birkin versus a bag from Macy's. It's just a more luxury version of a thing that has some utility. 

If you think about the fact that women used to make their own money, this is all coming from a time when women were spending their husband's money. So there's always this, obviously, some women have always made money. Women of color more often have always had to work and not have the kind of privilege of even being able to stay home, quote unquote. 

So I think that we just essentially still think that money belongs to men. So they're entitled to do what they want with it. If a woman has some money, somehow she doesn't have that same level of ownership or entitlement to it. It needs to be like justified and reasonable in how she spends it and all of these sort of things. 

Women are socialized to care, to believe that their value comes from what they do for other people. So if you have money, if you have energy, if you have other resources, you should be spending them on other people. Spending them on yourself is frivolous and selfish whereas we obviously do not think that about men. 

Devon: Yeah, 100%. Another thing that I see come up really commonly, especially with women. We've touched on some of the main points that I see a lot, even when it comes to, quote, saving money using points is also this idea, like you said is, there's so many women who are either partnered or have children or both, partnered and have children, and sort of the concept of them using their points and/or using their cash to travel solo is a really interesting conversation. 

Especially for people who maybe had a very sort of strong experience of traveling solo when they were, quote unquote, single or when they were younger versus now being at a different age and deciding I want to take some of my time, I want to take some of my money, or some of my other currency in the form of points and use those to take myself away for the weekend or to just give myself a travel experience that is really only for me. I see so much reluctance around that. Can you kind of unpack that a little bit? 

Kara: Yeah, I think that goes back to the sort of women are socialized to always be taking care of other people. Then especially once you've, I mean, it used to be like a woman traveling solo was a dangerous thing. Then now we're that's okay while you're single. But once you get married, the socialization kicks in. Probably it's okay. 

I think most people would say that they would get less pushback if they're married but don't have children, and they go away for a weekend. People might a little bit oh, you're not going to miss your husband, but not as big a deal. But if you have children and you leave your children, God forbid. They'll just die in the wild without you because obviously their other parent or babysitter or grandparent can take care of them. 

So I think that when women have children, this like whole other suppressed level of conditioning kicks in, I think, around motherhood and being a mother ore being a parent and what that requires of women and people socialized as women. That means that, essentially, spending any time or money on yourself, especially if it takes you away from your children or just being available for your children, is unacceptable. Like you can't go on a three day trip even when your kids are in school because like what if they need you? What about the three hours in the afternoon that they're home? What about?

That stuff is so, I mean for so many years women were taught that they're, and by so many I mean thousands, that their entire purpose in life was to have sex and have babies and take care of a home. So I think that like there's a lot of deep socialization around it being selfish for a woman who has children to essentially care about herself at all.

I tell this story kind of frequently, but I did a consult call once when I still did one to one coaching with this woman who was having panic attacks like every day. Her family had plenty of resources. They had a lot of money. They were doing like, they already lived in a big house. They were building like a second rec room. I guess so the kids could do different things in the rec rooms at different times. Which fine, totally fine to use your money that way. 

But the point of this is she didn't end up doing my program or working with me because she couldn't get over the guilt of spending some of that money that could go to the second rec room. I was like okay, so you're going to have two rec rooms. So you can have panic attacks in different parts of the house every day. This is insane, but this is how we've been socialized. Women, their own mental and emotional health and certainly their own. It's we can't even get over it for our own mental and emotional health. 

It's the idea of just doing it for fun or pleasure. It's like fascinating being I'm now a part time step-parent, which was not in my plan. I was childless by choice, and I accidentally fell in love with a divorced father. It's fascinating to me now like the pushback that I get or the comments from people like oh, you're traveling. Do you take the children? I'm like no. I mean sometimes, but no, not every time. Even just that assumption is like wild to me. 

So that stuff is so baked in. But, again, all this can be changed by changing the way you think. I mean, that's the most important part of this. You don't just have to struggle through carrying these thought patterns for the rest of your life. 

Devon: Yeah, absolutely. I've mentioned some of the patterns or some of the very common scenarios that I've just seen working with women only in this very small context of helping them to earn credit card points and then turning that into travel for their families. But I'm curious if there are some more other common money lies that, in your experience, you've seen comes up time and time again, that women learn either, again, explicitly or implicitly through socialization? 

Kara: Yeah, well, first of all, no thing is small because anything is a microcosm. It's like you're running into all of this money socialization because points are just a currency in the way people think about them. In the book, I talk about the three money lives, which we've already kind of touched on some. 

One is that money is for men. I think women much more often also are socialized to believe that money is something someone else will give to them. It's sort of like they don't feel as empowered to just create money or make as much money as they want. It's sort of if I keep my head down and do a good job, like somebody will give me money and then I'm just supposed to manage the amount they give me. So money is men's business. 

Lie number two is that, we just talked about this a little bit, caring about or wanting money makes you ungrateful, makes you selfish, makes you bad. I mean there's so much moralization around this. This does apply to men as well. But I think women get it much more strongly because women are supposedly inherently nurturing and caretaking and should be grateful. We just do not talk a lot to men about how they should be grateful. That's not really a thing people say to men so much, but we say to women all the time in different ways. 

Sometimes we dress it up as a gratitude practice. Then we call it self-development, which yeah, there's evidence showing that working on a gratitude practice can be good for you but only if you actually feel grateful. Not if you're doing it because you think you have to or you're a bad person. I should preface all this by saying I came to this work from the nonprofit world before I became an entrepreneur. So I get it. I have had all of these thought patterns myself, but they are changeable.

The third lie is that this is sort of a lie of omission almost. It's sort of like the idea that you can opt out and not impact things. It's sort of like the idea that if you don't look at any of your socialization around money and you just continue under earning, letting your male partner handle the investments, paying some dude named Chad who's 24 3% to just put your money in an index fund, which you can do by yourself. 

If you sort of like try to opt out of all this because it makes you uncomfortable and you have all these thoughts that somehow you're sort of leaving the world in neutral almost. You're not impacting it. You're just opting out. You're just walking away. But in fact, everything is connected. So when you walk away, Chad at national whatever gets 3% of your net worth, and then you don't have that money to invest or to give away or to spend in ways that matter to you. Your opting out is making the inequality of resource distribution we have worse. 

So it's not my position that everyone needs to be able to, everyone should care about making an enormous amount of money. Obviously, everybody's different. But it's really important to me and my goal is that women have done the work to be able to come to that decision clearly and cleanly. There's a big difference between making money is a big part of my life and something I focus on a lot. Wealth is my goal. That's one thing. Not everybody needs to do that. 

But there's a big difference between that and well, I have some kind of money life because I live in a capitalist society, and I'm ignoring whatever it is because I don't feel capable of engaging in it. So even if you're going to be an artist and make 40 grand a year and you want to live off the grid, you don't care, that's fine. But I want you to feel confident enough in your own abilities to see if there's a better checking account for you or figure out, talk to the squirrels about your retirement plan, or like whatever you're going to do. You have to take ownership of that. 

Devon: Yeah, absolutely. I think as somebody who's been doing obviously this own work for themselves for a long time at this point, you probably have some great examples or some experiences that you can look back on and really clearly identify certain thoughts that you had about money or certain thoughts that you had about the availability of money to you or your competence with money that you have probably very deliberately worked to change over the last couple of years. I was curious if you'd be willing to share just any of those examples of who you see yourself as now with money that didn't just magically happen. That you actually created on purpose.

Kara: Yeah, absolutely. So I'll give you a little teaser. Then I will let your audience know that if you preorder the book this week, the bonus that we're doing just this week is that you get a list of my favorite money thoughts that you can borrow to think for yourself, and because I'm me, they're not all positive affirmations you can't believe. There's a whole range of starting from very small steps to positive money thoughts.

Absolutely. I mean, I came from being a social justice litigator who made $60,000 a year living in Manhattan and then an academic and then had to start my own business. It turns out, it's very hard to run a business if you think that thinking about money makes you a bad person, which is what I thought. So that was, I mean, I had to change that one. That was the first one. It was like in retrospect a strange decision of mine to be somebody who believed that like caring about making money made you a bad person that decided to become an entrepreneur. 

But I didn't really even know that that's what I was doing. I think I thought I was going to have a life coaching practice that was sort of like being a therapist, and therapists also can own businesses, obviously. But I imagined it as you have a small private practice, and you just have like 10 or 15 clients and you make $100,000 a year. That was my goal originally. 

So I had to bust up or rewire that thought that wanting or caring about money made you a bad person. That I was bad with money. The story of my family growing up was always that I was somehow bad with money. That I was frivolous with money. As it turns out, my story now is yeah, I like to spend money, and I like to make money. I'm good at doing both those things. That's okay. 

I mean, I also was sort of raised with the story that a lot of people have, especially women, that like being good with money means not spending it, means saving it, right. I see this hampering women in their businesses, right. Because if your thought is being good with money means I have a big stockpile, and I'm saving it then you're not actually leveraging it or spending it the way that you could. You're not investing in your business. You're not doing whatever else. You're not using credit where it makes sense to use credit. 

I mean, your whole business is built on people being willing to use credit because you can leverage it for something else, right. So it's such a good microcosm. Your willingness to get an Amex to get points rather than just paying cash everywhere you go is leveraging credit and debt to get a bigger return. So people listening this podcast, I think the good news is you're already one step ahead because you're willing to do that. 

That is one of the thought lessons you have to get through is this idea that to be good with money means spending as little as possible, always having a stockpile. It's this like very hoarding scarcity mentality. So I had to get through that as well in order to have a business, in order to fund the business in the beginning. I mean, there's so many. We could do this for another like three hours. 

But that's just a little, but I think the like irresponsible and frivolous. That's the big one for me. I still have to coach myself sometimes when I choose to spend money because it's such a perfectionist thought pattern, right? Because you could always be spent. It could always be more. You could always be saving more. You could always be spending less. 

So I think I mean this is maybe a good like coming back to the central node is that fundamentally, women are taught and socialized to believe that they can't trust their own decisions or their own discernment, right? That they are sort of inherently emotional and irrational. We are supposed to second guess ourselves all the time. If anything goes wrong, we're supposed to blame ourselves for that. 

So that comes up a lot around money I see with women is by its nature investing or spend. Whatever, money ebbs and flows, comes and goes, some spending or investment purchases turn out amazing. Sometimes you go on the trip of a lifetime, or you get a 10x return. Sometimes the company you invested in goes under or the trip was terrible or whatever. The fear of that happening and the beating ourselves up ahead of time and being unwilling to take risks because of that, I think, is really core to what women are taught, which is just that we can't trust ourselves. So that is like a lifetime of unwinding and rewiring work.

Devon: Yeah. I think one of the things that I love the most about the way that you do your work, because I don't consider myself, honestly, to be, shall we say, optimistic. Like I think I am a very, I would say realistic and -- 

Kara: Having coached you for a long time, I would agree with that. Yes.

Devon: But I think that's one of the things that really resonates about your work with me is that I don't feel like you come into this basically saying we can just believe whatever we want to believe, and let's just tell ourselves that everything's amazing. 

I think that at the same time, it is really critically important that so many people of all backgrounds understand that basically any major aspect of their life in which they interact, they are probably operating off of just some really ingrained beliefs that they never picked on purpose to be begin with, right? Whether you learned it from your family of origin, whether you learned it from the community that you were raised in. From, again, back in our generation when there was news, you would turn on the TV and like the news would be telling you and informing you what you were like, what your country was like, what other folks were like. 

We've all just received so many different layers of messaging. One of the things that I just really like about your work is that you don't ignore that. At the same time, you also don't just fall into this pessimistic bundle of the world is kind of messed up, and there's nothing we can do about it. I think that, especially when it comes to women really taking ownership of their relationship with money, over their thoughts with money, you teach people how to do that in such a relatable, accessible way. 

Sort of the last thing that I want to get your opinion about before we wrap up today is that it's one thing to start to recognize our thoughts or our perceptions about ourselves and money might not be totally accurate, like you said. But for people who really want to start engaging in this work and see the potential benefit of really intentionally changing the way that they relate to money. Do you have any concrete or practical tips for how we can start to more intentionally cultivate really constructive and productive thoughts about ourselves and money?

Kara: Obviously, come preorder the book. There's a whole chapter on this, and you'll get your money thoughts bonus. But I think it's, I'm just going to go back to what I said before, which is identify what your thought is about yourself and money. Then it's useful to identify like what you wish you believed, but you can't stop there. Now we've got to go back to the original thought and come up with something that's you make great investment decisions. But you currently think you can't understand investments, and it's overwhelming and confusing. 

Then we need to come up with like a little, I call it the 10% less shitty thought. That's what we're looking for. We just want to feel 10% less shitty when we think it. So we want to be looking for a thought that's more I've learned hard things before. It's possible I can learn about investing. Or it's possible that my brain is wrong about how complicated this is. Or it's possible that I can learn a little bit about this topic. It's like we just are going to look for like a little next step thought. 

So, my big advice to anybody, especially if you're trying to change your thought out there on your own in the wild, which is the hardest way, is to make sure that you are just trying to shift your thought a little bit of time. Think about it like trying to teach a baby to walk. You're not expecting them to run a 5k right away. You're sitting right in front of them while they're holding on to the table, and you're just going come on, just one step. You can do it. Just take one step. That's kind of how you have to approach your brain. 

But it'll be much easier with guidance. So just come preorder the book, it's $29. Put it on your credit card for points. What credit card should they use? Get your extra points, and I will teach how to do it step by step.

Devon: I agree. Everybody, I think there is so much in this book that can serve you. Quite frankly, even if you don't identify as a woman, chances are someone very important to you in your life does. I think all of us becoming just more educated, more informed about, again, the messaging and the socialization that is exposed to every single person can be so helpful. When you think about why this work matters, I just want to read a small segment from Kara’s book.

Specifically when it comes to you and your thoughts about money, there's a really wonderful reminder in this book that the thoughts that society has programmed into your brain about money aren't for your benefit, and they don't serve you. They serve the established financial interests. So if you're going to participate in society, which as Kara mentions is probably the vast majority of us, you have to understand that when you avoid financial topics out of fear or insecurity, you're just rubber stamping the current system. 

The truth is that you are fully capable of understanding money. You are fully capable of creating more wealth, and you are fully trustworthy to steward your own financial future and life. Changing your thoughts about money is how it all has to start. 

So for those of you who have been very intrigued about this conversation and are interested to uncover even more what your thoughts are about money, how they got to be there, and what you can do about it, I highly recommend grabbing a copy of Kara's book Take Back Your Brain: How A Sexist Society Gets In Your Head - And How To Get It Out to learn more about how to change your thoughts about money and honestly so much more. Kara, where can folks find the book, or just learn more about you and the work that you do in the world?

Kara: Yes. So you can get the book at takebackyourbrainbook.com. That's important because if you want to preorder this week and get that bonus of all my best money thoughts that you can borrow, you’ve got to do it through that site, takebackyourbrainbook.com. You'll see there are links for if you're ordering internationally. The book is already coming out in certain places. In addition for that country, we've got the links to all that. 

So wherever you are it’s takebackyourbrainbook.com. That's honestly just the best place to go. My social handles and stuff are there. My last name is impossible to spell. So if you're trying to find me on Instagram, just go to takebackyourbrainbook.com. The social icons are at the bottom you'll see my name and how to spell it. You can copy paste. Everything is there. 

Devon: All right, Kara, thank you so much for joining me today. I so appreciate you and the work that you are doing in the world. Thank you so much. 

Kara: Thanks for having me. It's so fun to see this whole venture of yours blossom having been there from the beginning. 

Devon: It's been a lot of fun. I agree. All right, everybody, have a fantastic week, and we will see you back here again same time, same place next week on the Point Me to First Class podcast.

Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of Point Me to First Class. If you want more tips on turning your expenses into travel, visit pointmetofirstclass.com to learn more. See you next week.