Your budget isn’t the problem—but your mindset might be.
I’ve seen it over and over again––the smartest, most capable people sabotage their financial success because of mindset traps they don’t even realize they’re falling into. In this episode, I’m walking you through 5 sneaky money mindsets that could be silently wrecking your financial goals—and more importantly, how to break free from them. These aren’t just bad habits. They’re deeply-rooted beliefs that keep us playing small, procrastinating, and feeling like we’re not “cut out” for financial freedom. I’ll break down why these mental blocks are so common (especially for women and marginalized folks), how they show up in your daily life, and what to do instead. So whether you’re paying off debt, saving for a big goal, or just trying to feel more in control of your money, this is the mindset reset you didn’t know you needed.
The 5 sneaky money mindsets ruining your financial goals:
Making excuses
Saying “that could never be me” when you hear someone else’s success story might feel like realism, but it’s actually a way to avoid accountability. Yes, systemic barriers exist—but choosing to shut down instead of asking, “What can I learn from them?” keeps you stuck. Excuses limit your potential before you’ve even started.
Labeling yourself
We’ve been taught to label ourselves as either good (saver) or bad (spender) with money, but this binary is both harmful and false. Everyone is a spender—you’re just choosing when and how to spend. Reframing savings as future spending can actually help “spenders” build better saving habits.
Obsessing over time
When a goal feels like it will take forever—paying off debt, earning a degree, building a business—it’s tempting to not even start. But the time will pass anyway. Would you rather look back a year from now knowing you moved forward… or that you stood still?
Confusing wealth with exploitation
The internet often lumps millionaires and billionaires together—but they’re not even close. While billionaires hoard wealth, being a millionaire (especially for retirement or homeownership) is often just about basic financial security. Rejecting the pursuit of wealth out of guilt or misinformation keeps marginalized communities from gaining power and options.
Looking at the whole mountain
Big financial goals—like paying off six-figure debt—can feel paralyzing when viewed all at once. Instead of staring at the summit, focus on the next step you can take. Progress, not perfection, is how you climb. Look forward, not up.
Notable quotes
“You’re overwhelmed because you’re looking at the whole mountain. Just look at the next step.”
“We very much associate our net worth with our self-worth, and if we haven’t hit a milestone like homeownership by a certain age, we feel like we’ve failed.”
“Time will pass anyway. The 10 years it takes to pay off debt will come and go—will you be in a better place or the same one?”
Mentioned in this episode:
How to Stop Emotional Spending
The #1 Mindset Holding You Back in Life
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Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
These five money mindsets are the reason you’re not achieving your goals, and in order to become financially successful, you need to know what they are. Let’s get into it. But first, a word from our sponsors.
We’ve talked about many times on this show that money is not really about numbers, it’s not really about being good with math or good with the numbers and the spreadsheets and the charts, it’s all about your mindset, and the truth is most people don’t have a good money mindset. Most people are actively sabotaging themselves because they’re not understanding what’s actually going on psychologically when they’re thinking and talking and earning money. So today, we’re talking about the five money mindsets that you haven’t considered before that are actually sabotaging the way you think about money and sabotaging your financial success.
The first one is finding every excuse in the book for why you can’t do something. Yeah, you’re getting tough love Tori right off the bat here. I think it’s very, very common to hear about somebody’s financial experience. Maybe it’s mine, I’d saved $100,000 at age 25. I have many episodes where we talked about how I did this, I have an entire book about how I did this. And especially when I was first sharing my story, when I was getting featured on Good Morning America, when I was having articles on CNBC or CNN written about my journey to saving 100k, The comments all had this very common theme, which is, oh, I can’t do this too.
It’s very easy to look at some sort of financial milestone and just think, well, that’s not possible for me. And I get it, there’s a lot of systemic reasons why you might not be able to save $100,000 at age 25 or pay off your student loans until you’re in your 40s. There’s a lot of barriers that we talk about on this show every single episode that are keeping you from financial success that have nothing to do with your own personal choices. However, I hate the mindset of writing off somebody’s experience because it’s not exactly your own. I kind of think it’s like a get out of jail free card. I think it’s a person’s way of abdicating responsibility rather than looking at somebody’s experience and going, okay, they might not look exactly like me, they might not have the exact same degree, they might not live in the exact same city, they might have some privileges that I don’t, but also, what can I learn from them?
This is a great opportunity for you to understand that you can learn from almost anybody, from almost anybody’s financial circumstances, and especially somebody who is actively trying to help other people get better with money. Envy is an opportunity, envy and jealousy is an opportunity for us to take a look at what we really, truly want. But every time we go, well, that couldn’t be me because of XYZ reason, yeah, that might be true, but everybody’s lived experience is slightly different. You’re never going to find somebody who has the exact same life experience, except if you look in a mirror.
The first mindset of finding every excuse in the book as a reason that you can’t do something is in fact just sabotaging your success, is in fact just giving your brain a million reasons for you to discount all of the good information or the good learnings that someone else’s situation could teach you. But finding excuses and finding every single possible way to say, well, that couldn’t be me, or I can’t do this, eliminates any path to success. Maybe you can’t do exactly what they did, but you can formulate it for you. For me, I knew I wasn’t going to save $1 million at 22, but I thought maybe I can do 100k at 25, and that was my happy medium. That was me taking pieces of other people’s success, other people’s stories, and saying, how can I make it my own? I don’t want you throwing away your own responsibility to yourself. Yeah, there’s a million things systemically that are outside of our control, but there’s also a lot that’s in your control.
Mindset number two, we have been told our entire life that there’s two kinds of people, there’s savers and they’re spenders. Now, I could win an Olympic gold medal in saving money, I am very good at it. I went from 100k at 25 to being a multimillionaire at 27, I’m very, very good at saving money. But as soon as we start classifying people as either savers or spenders, it makes one type of person feel really good about themselves and the other type of person less so. The spenders always feel immediate shame, but they also internalize that belief. They’re like, okay, I’m just a spender, I can’t save any money, and it also makes savers potentially too hyper-focused on their goal.
You know me, I’m a financial expert that is not going to tell you you can’t spend any money, because that’s not realistic and frankly it’s not fucking fun. So this sort of classification of are you a saver or are you a spender doesn’t actually help you achieve your goals and gets you in this mindset rut where you’re just a self-affirming prophecy. So rather than classifying yourself as one or the other, I need you to understand that actually, we are all spenders. Yes, even me, who, again, could win an Olympic gold medal in saving money, I’m a spender. I will eventually spend all of the money I have saved. It might not be for a while, it might be in 30 years when I retire, it might be on a wedding in a couple of years or on a house in a couple of months.
But the thing about spenders, we’re actually all spenders, we’re all going to spend the money we have saved, we’re all going to spend, so I do need you to figure out what you actually want to spend money on. And if you were someone who would’ve classified yourself as a spender, if you said, oh, I’m a saver, I’m a spender, I’m definitely a spender, this is a great way for you to actually get your brain onboard to save more money, because if you can say to yourself, you know what? I am going to spend this money that I have saved for retirement, it just is not now, or I am going to spend this money that I have saved for a down payment on a house, it’s just not right now, you can start to see that you can rewire all of your spending tendencies to actually get your brain onboard to start saving more. So stop classifying yourself as either a saver or a spender, we are all spenders, it’s just a matter of when and how we spend that money.
So number one was all about finding excuses, finding every excuse in the book for saying, I can’t do this. The second one was thinking about classifying yourself as either a saver or a spender. In fact, we’re all spenders. And the third one is something that is so pervasive and is something that I think impacts every aspect of our lives, not just money. When we think about any goal that we have or something that we’re trying to do, whether that’s trying to get in shape, trying to pay off our debts, going back to school to get an education, our brain does this interesting thing where it immediately goes to the amount of time that that thing is going to take you.
So whether it’s paying off student loans and realizing that that’s going to be a 10-year process, or it’s going to get a bachelor’s degree and knowing that’s going to be four years, or it’s like, okay, I know I’m not going to become The Rock overnight, I’m not going to look like him going to the gym once, and this is probably going to take me months, if not years, our brain immediately wants to disengage from that goal because we want immediate gratification. This is how our brains work, we want dopamine, we want serotonin, we want things that immediately make us feel better. So we think to ourself, oh God, this is going to take me 10 fucking years, why would I do anything at all about it? This is going to take so long, oh my God, going back to school that’s going to take me four years.
This happened to me a lot when I was starting my business. I remember thinking to myself in 2016 when I just wanted to get out of corporate, this was my first job out of school and immediately I was like, I don’t think this is for me, this is awful. And the fact that I was going to have to stay there for 35 years, I was like, how am I going to do this? But also, I want to build a business that gets me out now. That wasn’t realistic. The business that I wanted was not going to be built in three months. So I remember thinking to myself, well, if it’s going to take years to build this business, why do it at all?
Here’s the deal though, whether it’s 10 years, a year, even six months, and you’re thinking, God, it’s going to take that long, time will pass anyway. The 10 years is going to happen regardless of whether you’re pursuing your goal or not. The four years it’s going to take to get your degree are going to happen anyway. So you can either spend the next four years enrolling and getting your bachelor’s degree and putting yourself in a very different financial and life stage in the next four years after that four years, or you can remain in exactly the same spot, or maybe even a worse financial and life stage. The same thing with your debt, yeah, it might take a really long time to pay off your debt, it might take a really, really long time and a lot of effort, but you’re either going to be in a better place in 10 years or the same or even worse life stage.
It doesn’t matter how long something takes. It doesn’t matter that this is going to be a multi-year or even multi-decade process. But it does matter that you start now, because I want those years to be better than the years before. I want you to have time pass, and knowing that you’re setting yourself up, that you’re investing in your future, rather than staying stagnant. When it comes to investing, for example, starting now is way better than thinking, oh, I’m not perfect, I don’t have all of the answers, so I’m going to wait until I know more. The truth is time is going to pass anyway, the four years, the 10 years, the six months are going to pass anyway, so I would rather you put yourself in a way better position to actually get closer to achieving your goals, than looking back and going, wow, I didn’t do anything in that six months to actually get where I wanted to go.
When we come back from the show, we’re sharing more about the money mindsets that are sabotaging you, and if you want even more about spending versus saving, listen to episode 25, where we talk about the emotional spending triggers that cause people to mindlessly spend. Again, that’s episode 25. We’ll see you back here soon.
Number four, this one, oh my God, okay, I’m going to put myself up on a soap box here for a second. When we hear the word billionaire, we typically associate billionaires with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and for good reason. Most billionaires are men and most billionaires are bad people. Most billionaires have exploited their way and won capitalism to a point where they have more money than they know what to do with. I don’t want that for myself, I don’t want that for you. There’s a lot of billionaires that are not good people. There’s a lot of billionaires that have pursued wealth at the expense of the environment, at the expense of their team and laborers, at the expense of their own families, and sometimes at the expense of general morality.
So a lot of people, myself included, look at billionaires and think, I’m good, I’m good, I don’t need that much money. But where it really starts to get toxic and where it really starts to sabotage your own financial goals is when you start lumping billionaires with millionaires. A lot of people on the internet think that these two things are the same, and when they talk about eating the rich, they want to eat somebody who’s a millionaire as well as a billionaire. My friend over at Your Rich BFF, Vivian, talks about the difference.
A millionaire, let’s give an example of a grain of sand, if you have $1 million, you have a grain of sand, and let’s say you have a couple of million dollars, we have a couple of grains of sand. You know how small a grain of sand is, we’ve all been to a beach, it’s extremely tiny. I can barely fit it between my fingernails, that’s how tiny it is. But when we talk about a billionaire, they have a bucket of sand, and some of them maybe even have a small beach. They have lots of millions, and we’re not just talking about $100 million, we’re talking about at least $1,000 million, that’s what a billion is, a thousand million, that’s a lot of grains of sand.
And we’ve talked about on the show before about how women in particular feel this really uncomfortable level of pursuing money. We feel like if we are rich or want to be rich, it’s bad, it’s gauche, it’s impolite, that the pursuit of money is somehow wrong. If you’re out here wanting to be a billionaire, that is your primary goal, yeah, that’s not great. But if you want $1 million, or even some millions of dollars, that is a very different story from having billions and billions of dollars.
I live in Seattle, the average home price is $950,000 in this city, that is $1 million. So if I were to just buy a decent home in the Seattle area, and especially if I’m trying to buy it without taking a loan from the bank, I need at least $1 million to do that. In order to protect myself in retirement, for anybody, the average person, to protect themselves in retirement, you’re going to need millions of dollars. So this idea that billionaires and millionaires are the same thing, and therefore we should eat all of the rich people and lump them all together and also actively push away wanting to be a millionaire, it’s just not true, it’s not the same thing.
And if you’re a member of a marginalized group, I have said it many times, but I’ll say it again, a financial education is your best form of protest, having money means having options, and nothing bad happens when women have money, nothing bad happens. So when you have millions of dollars, it’s very different than having billions of dollars, and in fact, it’s actually as much money as you need to live a comfortable, safe, healthy life, and hopefully also take care of your family and community. Millionaires and billionaires could not be more different, and when you lump them together in your head or in the comments section, it’s just not accurate and it’s also not helpful for everybody else who’s just trying to get by.
Our final one, this one kind of couples with number three, but I was talking about this in our recent life coaching we do in the 100k Club. In both of our programs, the 100k Club and Stock Market School, I do monthly live coaching, it’s one of my favorite parts of the month. It’s the only coaching I do anymore and it’s so impactful, I can literally see people’s mindsets shifting, I can see their progress towards debt getting way, way easier. We have helped literally thousands, we’re at tens of thousands of people at this point, help them impact their money, help them actually get better with money and investing and paying off debt.
And recently, in the 100k Club, this just happened a couple of days ago, somebody asked a question about feeling discouraged and feeling like they had this mountain of debt. I believe this person had $116,000 in student loans, and so it’s not just a tiny amount of debt, that’s a significant amount. And they were asking, “How do I actually stay motivated, and how do I not get immediately overwhelmed in the pursuit of paying off that debt?” And what I’ve talked about in workshops before and what I told this person on coaching is the Mount Everest example.
When we’re encountering a big goal, again, whether it’s financial, it is $116,000 of debt, it is trying to invest enough to protect your retirement, or it’s something not related to finance, it’s getting fit, it’s having a better relationship with food, it’s bettering your relationship with your partner, what happens is we look at any goal like it’s Mount Everest and we’re standing at the bottom of the mountain. It’s so difficult to figure out how the fuck you’re going to climb this mountain because you’re staring straight up at it. You’re seeing the full entire mountain, you’re seeing $116,000 of debt, you’re seeing arguments and conflicts with your partner and the amount of time it’s going to take you to resolve those conflicts. You’re looking at, God, I haven’t been to the gym in months and now I have to get back on the treadmill, this is going to suck. You’re looking at every single possible thing that could go wrong because you’re looking straight up the mountain, and no wonder you’re getting overwhelmed, you’re looking at the fucking tallest mountain in the world and you’re going, how the hell am I going to climb this thing?
So I need you to stop looking up and start looking forward, stop looking up and start looking forward. How do you climb a mountain? You climb it one step at a time. You just look forward. You look at the things that are in your sight line. You look at the things that you can control, the problems that are going to come up on the trail that you’re on right now. When I was building Her First $100k as a business, that’s the perfect example, honestly, is I was looking at, oh my God, in three years, I’m going to have to hire somebody, and I have no idea how the hell to do that, and also in a year, I’m going to need a lawyer, and I don’t know any lawyers, and what happens if someone on the internet yells at me? I don’t have the tool that I need to figure that out and to navigate that.
I was looking at the business that I wanted to build that was going to happen in three years or five years or 10 years, I was looking at the mountain, and the mountain kept getting bigger, when in actuality, I just needed to focus on the problems in front of me. I just needed to focus on not getting tripped up and not falling flat on my face, hiking up the mountain one step at a time, because the truth is all of the problems that I was stressed about, I knew how to solve when I actually encountered them because I had another year of experience or another three years of experience. It’s the same thing with your debt, it’s the same thing with any other financial goal. You’re getting overwhelmed because you’re looking at the entire mountain as opposed to just the steps in front of you. So okay, $116,000 of debt, how could you pay off $500 this week, or even can I just put $20 this week to my debt? Take these small steps, progress matters over perfection, stop looking up and start looking forward.
If you want to take your learning further, we have an incredible episode with the number one money mindset holding you back, hence it is all about this Mount Everest example, but in more detail, it’s the all-or-nothing mindset, and it’s holding you back in every aspect of your life way more than you think it is. It is episode 142, you can listen wherever you get your podcasts, wherever you’re listening right now.
Team, I need you to work actively to not only better your finances, but to better your money mindset. You can tell from these and so many other mindset episodes that we’ve talked about on this show that your mindset has everything to do with whether you’re financially successful or not. It has everything to do with how close you are to achieving your goals, even how you set goals, or if you’re sabotaging yourself along the way. So as always, please take your financial learning seriously. If this episode was impactful for you, please share it. If you’re watching on YouTube, please subscribe to the show. It’s the easiest way to make sure that we can continue giving you really important, valuable information. Thank you for supporting feminist media, thank you for being here, and we’ll see you very soon.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First $100K Podcast. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you’re confused about your personal finances and you’re wondering where to start, go to herfirst100k.com/quiz for a free personalized money plan.
Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Research by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Daryl Ann Ingman, Shelby Duclos, Meghan Walker, and Jess Hawks. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First 100K community for supporting our show.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
