Happy Halloween! In today’s episode, I’m sharing some of my favorite spooky memories — like the creative costumes my dad and I made together — and using the holiday spirit to tackle something that haunts many of us: financial fears. We’ll discuss 5 practical steps to overcome money anxieties, from reassessing your emergency fund to calculating your “ramen noodle number” and diversifying your income streams. So grab your favorite Halloween candy, and let’s get to it!
5 Steps to Conquer Your Money Fears:
- Reassess your emergency fund. Evaluate your current emergency savings and aim for 3-6 months of living expenses in a high-yield savings account. Avoid over-saving to the point where it hinders your ability to invest and grow your wealth over time.
- Review your spending habits. Take a close look at your current expenses, focusing on mindless or impulsive spending that doesn’t bring joy or value to your life. Cutting out unnecessary expenses frees up resources that can be redirected toward your financial goals, such as saving, investing, or paying off debt. Consider using apps or services (like Rocket Money) to identify and eliminate forgotten subscriptions or recurring charges.
- Intentional financial check-ins. Establish a routine for checking your finances, such as monthly money dates, instead of obsessively monitoring your accounts. Build automated systems for saving, investing, and bill payments to reduce the need for constant oversight.
- Calculate your “Ramen Noodle Number.” Determine the minimum amount of money you need each month to cover essential living expenses—the bare necessities for survival. Knowing this number provides reassurance and helps you understand your financial flexibility in case of emergencies or significant life changes. Use this insight to adjust your budget during tough times without feeling deprived, focusing on needs over wants.
- Diversify Your Income Streams. Explore opportunities to earn additional income beyond your primary job — such as side hustles, freelance work, or passive income sources — so you can reduce reliance on a single source and increase financial security, especially if your main income is disrupted. Even passive income like interest from a high-yield savings account contributes to diversification and can bolster your financial stability.
Notable Quotes
“Money is a learned skill.”
“Vote like your goddamn life depends on it because it fucking does.”
“We don’t want to ostrich, we don’t want to bury our head in the sand and act like our problems don’t exist. We don’t want to not look at our money.”
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Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
Mega bitch, it’s a fan. What is the TikTok remix where that starts? Do you know what I’m talking about? It’s not femininomenon. Hold on. Oh, it’s 360 or 365. Mega bitch [inaudible 00:00:36]. It’s a fan.
Hi everybody, it’s Halloween. We can keep that whole thing in the beginning. If you haven’t listened to 360 by Charli XCX or Chappell Roan, what are you doing? You have, you’re a human being on this Earth, you have. Okay, welcome. It’s Halloween.
Halloween, fun fact, is one of my favorite holidays. It used to be especially one of my favorite holidays growing up. Now it sneaks up on me every year and I never know what I’m going to be. In fact, I have a costume party in two days. I have no idea what I want to do. I would really like to dress up as Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy with my partner from SpongeBob. That has been a goal of mine for a very long time, but that is going to be one that I have to plan for in advance, not right now.
The reason Halloween is one of my favorite holidays is because starting when I was probably 11, I would dress up in matching costumes with my dad. My dad takes Halloween very seriously, especially when I was a kid. He loved it. And before we started doing matching costumes, such infamous varieties included him as SpongeBob SquarePants, but specifically he refused to any… The rule was you couldn’t go out and buy a costume. You had to make one yourself. So he took foam from a mattress like furniture foam, took one piece and put it in front of himself, one piece and put it back of himself and strapped himself in. I had to lead him around all night. I was seven years old. I had to lead him around because he couldn’t see. He put these eyeballs in and then he stapled one of his red ties to it, and everyone knew he was SpongeBob. I’ll pull a photo, maybe we could post it online because it doesn’t have his face.
One of his other infamous ones, he dressed up as Shrek and he painted himself green in my nana’s bathroom, and when she sold that house 10 years after, there was still green flakes in the bathroom. She was not very happy with him. But the first time we went as corresponding costumes, he was Napoleon Dynamite and I was Pedro and I wore a fake mustache and I had a bolo tie from Goodwill and it was great. The year after we were mimes. So I had a sign that said trick or treat because you can’t talk, obviously. We were Kiss one year, which was very successful. I couldn’t tell you which member of Kiss I was, but we were members of Kiss.
Gosh, what else did we do together? Those were some of the fun years. So we would go out for Halloween and we would go to Value Village or Goodwill a couple of days before and just try to figure out our costumes. I was Hermione Granger for a very, very long time. That was a classic. I was of course Disney princesses. I was Ariel for two years. The first year though, my mom dyed my hair red like the temporary dye, and then it took us two hours to wash it out. So the next year I wore a wig because my mom was like, “We’re not doing this again. We’re not doing the hair dye again, that stains the entire bathtub.”
So hopefully you have fond memories of Halloween and Halloween’s to come, but of course, Halloween is not only spooky, it is also scary. It’s also spooky. And this feels like a perfect opportunity for us or really, you know what? We’re taking the opportunity. We’re making the marketing out of it. Corporate said we have to make some connections from the holiday that’s next to our work, and so we’re going to talk about financial fears, corporate being me. Okay, so we’re talking about less about what the fears are because you already know, they’re the things that keep you up at night and more about what we can do to actually conquer them. So we went to Instagram recently and we asked people, “What are your biggest financial fears?” The common things came up, debt, not having an emergency fund, just not knowing how to money in general, but the biggest thing that kept coming up over and over and over again, it was probably like 90% of the responses from you all was having not enough money or running out of money.
This is unfortunately a feeling due to our financial trauma that happens regardless of how much money we actually have in our bank account. You can be a multi, multi, multi, multi, multi-millionaire. Heck, you can be a billionaire and you can feel like the other shoe’s going to drop at any time or that you’re going to somehow lose your money or you’re going to somehow make a mistake or that you’re just not going to have enough. And that’s how we know it’s related to trauma because you can have this feeling even when you have enough. So knowing that these are often our financial fears. One, please listen to prior episodes to talk about overcoming your financial trauma, getting to a better relationship with your money from a psychological standpoint. That’s not really what we’re going to talk about today. Please go listen to those episodes, but I wanted to give you a couple actionable steps for you to take action, actually do something that helps you feel more in control of your financial future.
In general, when you have fear, anxiety, stress, one of the best ways to at least immediately make yourself feel better is to do something about it. We are recording this obviously before the election and it’s coming out before the election, and I have taken that to heart very acutely. Every time I’m stressed about the outcome of the election, I force my brain to go, “Okay, so what are we going to do about it?” And then I go do the thing. So I go donate money or I go sign up to phone bank or I post on social media or I check my voter registration for the 12th time. This is the same thing we can do with our money. When we feel stressed, when we feel worried, when we feel anxious, you can turn that anxiety into action so that you don’t feel like this is uncontrollable.
It’s something outside of what you have control over. So these are all things that I did when I was preparing to quit my job to take Her First $100K full-time, and it’s a perfect example of you facing any sort of financial challenge or financial stress, kind of shoring up your financial house. So our first step, reassess your emergency fund. Your emergency fund as a reminder should generally be three to six months of living expenses in a high-yield savings account. I’m going to say it again. If you do not have the high-yield savings account, you need one. They’re just like an everyday savings account except they’re making you more an interest. We’ll put the link to the one we recommend down below. But if you feel financially stressed, if you’re worried about the outcome of maybe the election or just the rest of this year, you’re always worried maybe about getting laid off or getting your hours cut or about being able to not afford an unexpected expense, just pad that emergency fund a little bit.
You can pad it to feel more prepared for anything that comes up that’s unexpected. For me, I’m the kind of person that wants every single duck in a row, right? I want a parachute and then a backup parachute and then a backup backup parachute. So this is a nice way for me to feel even more secure, especially if I’m about to, for me, it was about to embark on entrepreneurship full-time. I wanted a little bit of extra money. That’s why I saved that 100K. That’s why I had 100K in the bank before I felt comfortable quitting my job. This comes with an asterisk though. I don’t want you to have two years of living expenses saved in a high-yield savings account because you’re too afraid of investing. This will often happen as people will have way more money than they need sitting in even a checking account because they don’t know what to do with it or because they have not worked through their financial trauma and feel so, so nervous that they might need the money at some point.
I would say a maximum emergency fund, this is a maximum, should be a year of living expenses. I have a year of living expenses for my emergency fund for a variety of different reasons. One, makes me feel better at night. Two, I’m a business owner. I need to have some savings, so I know both personally and professionally that I’m okay if the business is volatile and I… The first thing we would do if the business is volatile is start cutting my own salary. So that’s something that I’m thinking about. And then also I have an emergency fund for the business. We have reserves that we keep in case the business underperforms or in case we fall in hard times. I also just have a more expensive life now than the average person, so my living expenses number has gone up. So emergency funds so important. The reason we talk about them all the time is they do a great job at soothing any financial anxiety you have and beefing that up a little bit. Padding that emergency fund can be a great way to continue making sure that your financial house is in order.
Okay, number two, I want you to take a look at your current spending, especially if you feel like you’ve been mindlessly spending lately or if you’ve been spending in an impulsive way to cope with the stress of the world. You know me, I get it. I’m not going to shame you for that. Life is stressful this time of year, in particular. Jesus Christ, it’s so stressful. I know. However, if you find yourself spending money on things, especially repeatedly that you do not like, that do not bring you joy, that do not add value to your life and instead just make you feel guilty that you spent money on those things, it’s time to cut them. It’s time to cut them. I’m not saying cut the things you like, but I am saying cut the things you don’t. If you’re spending money on things that you don’t give a shit about, that is wasted money. That could either be going to the things you care about more or could be saved or invested or go towards paying off your debt.
I will often sign up for a subscription that I forgot to cancel, and maybe we’ll have it in this ad, but Rocket Money is a sponsor of the show. They help you find those subscriptions. It’s great. Rocketmoney.com/ffpod. But truly, subscriptions are one of those things that get started. You sign up because for me, I wanted to watch Moulin Rouge one time, and so I signed up for a 7 day Star subscription, and then I realized I had been paying for it for three months. Go through and see if there’s anything you’re spending money on that you really don’t need or doesn’t align with your values or that you completely forgot about. So we’re just reassessing our spending. We’re just looking at it, especially if you haven’t done the financial basics I talk about in previous episodes or in my book, like a money date. If you haven’t done a money date in a while, if you haven’t done a money diary in a while where you’ve been tracking your spending, take a look. Take a look at what’s going on and see if there’s anything you could tweak.
Okay, my third thing for you. When you feel financially anxious, when you feel anxious, period about anything, it is so tempting to convince yourself that getting more information is helpful. I don’t know why I’m picking… Well, I’m picking on the election. I know exactly why because it’s very applicable. I have been reading all of the poll data I can get my grubby little hands on because in theory it reassures me. But then I go and I look at the polls and they’re so goddamn close and polls aren’t super accurate anyway, and it stresses me out more than it actually helps me. I do this with a lot of things. I think that getting more information will help soothe me when in fact it just riles me up and it just stresses me out.
The same thing can be said about your money. Now, we don’t want to ostrich, we don’t want to bury our head in the sand and act like our problems don’t exist. We don’t want to not look at our money. But there’s a version of that on the other end of extreme where you’re checking your money all the time, you’re checking your money constantly, and then every time you do it, it’s stressing you out. You get that tightness in your chest and that’s not productive either. Not looking at your money, not productive. Looking at your money all the time, also not productive. So instead, we want to find a sweet spot where we can look at our money in a designated way and an intentional way on a routine. This is why I talk about on this podcast and in my book, we have an entire chapter around financial self-care, and I tell you to make a habit of the self-care practice around once a month, if you want to do it more than that, maybe once every two weeks.
But I don’t want you obsessively checking to the point that you’re getting more data thinking it’s going to make you feel better, but that actually makes you feel worse. So when we’re talking about checking your money, we want to do it intentionally. We want to decide with intention, how frequently we’re checking our accounts, how frequently we’re looking at our debt, how frequently we’re looking at our spending and the status of our investing accounts. Knowing where I’m at, of course makes me feel financially confident, but I don’t check my accounts obsessively anymore because it’s not productive.
And because the systems that I have built for my life, my automated savings, my automated investing, me automatically paying my bills, I’ve already built the foundation of my personal finances and I’ve done it in a way where it doesn’t involve a ton of my work or my direct labor. That’s what we want. We want you to be able to get to a point where you have good money systems and good money habits that are working for you so that you don’t have to obsessively look at your money or obsessively wonder if you have the right account. You already have the HYSA. You already have your Roth IRA. You already have your strategies.
Number four, calculate your ramen budget. If you do not know your ramen noodle number, this is my homework for you. Your ramen noodle number is what I call the minimum amount of money you need to be making in order to cover your bills. And I don’t mean your lifestyle, I don’t mean all of the fun stuff, that is your sushi life. That is your sushi budget. I’m just talking your ramen noodle number, not your sushi number. What is the bare amount of money that you need to be making in order to cover your rent, your insurance, your groceries etc, the things that are absolutely necessary to your life that you could not cut in case of a job loss? This is how much you need to spend to survive on the low end.
This is super applicable to anybody who is running their own business or wants to run their own business because that way you know the minimum amount of money after taxes and expenses that your company needs to make in order to support you. But anyone can use this as a strategy. You don’t have to use this number, right? You don’t have to say, “Okay, this is my ramen noodle number and this is the bare amount of money, or this is the maximum amount of money that I can spend on my life.” No, that’s not what this is for. We’re not calculating the number in order to give ourselves a really strict strategy. We’re just calculating it so that we know and feel reassured that if something crazy happens, if we get caught up with some sort of emergency situation, that this is the amount of money that we need to survive.
It reminds you that you have room to make changes, that your life and your budget are more flexible if you do need to later. And this is again, for the millionth trillionth time, why we save that emergency fund, to protect ourselves, to give us that mental stability and peace of mind, but also to make sure that we can afford our life while we’re dealing with some sort of emergency situation.
And finally, as much as you can, I want you to diversify your income. This isn’t one you can just whip up out of nowhere right now. The rest of these, you can kind of start calculating and within a couple of days you know what’s going on. But diversifying your income is a way to make sure that if your primary source of income, for most people their job, goes away, you have another source of income to fall back on. You are less dependent on that 9 to 5 or that day job to be the sole source of whether you’re progressing financially or not.
Now, some people may have the flexibility to do some freelance work, to do a side hustle, to walk dogs, to work at their gym. I was freelance marketing at the very beginning of my corporate career. I actually got a freelance social media marketing gig before I actually got my full-time stable benefits job. And it was one of the reasons I hit my 100K as quickly as I did, was the ability to bring in multiple sources of income. However, we know that the word side hustle is a word that is just tripping with privilege because for some people, a side hustle is a second job that is absolutely necessary to your life. It’s not a fun add-on.
My favorite hack with this though, if you don’t have the ability to go out and side hustle, if you don’t want to do that, if a side hustle is not in your future, and by the way, we have many episodes in the back catalog about side hustles if you want more information. Sign up for a high-yield savings account. Yet another reason to get one. They make you money and interest, and it’s actually in a different way taxed as income. It’s not taxed as the same as your 9 to 5 income, but it’s income because you’re making additional money. You don’t have to do anything except put money in this account and make sure that you’ve opened one and you’re going to get extra money out of that. That’s a second source of income.
So when we’re thinking about diversifying our income, it doesn’t have to be taking on more labor if you don’t want, but it can be a nice strategy for you to sleep a little bit better at night knowing that you’re fine should something come up. If your 9 to 5, you get your hours cut, if something happens, you’ve got a secondary source of income to fall back on. Or at the very least, you have some high-yield savings account interest.
So as we’re wrapping up, here’s the thing. Money’s hard. We know money’s hard. We know that stress and our anxiety around every part of our lives affects our money, and we know our stressor and anxiety about money affects every other aspect of our lives. But I hope that taking action gives you a little bit of comfort, allows you to take more ownership of your financial decisions, allows you to feel like you’re controlling your money rather than money controlling you. I just want you to give yourself grace and understanding. A reminder that I always say on this show, which is money is a learned skill. It is not something you’re magically good at out of nowhere, and especially as we’re trying to protect ourselves to make sure our financial house is in order. Learning more about money is a great sixth step of this. You listening to this podcast is great and more than the average person’s doing, you learning more about money, learning more about your own emotional triggers, you better understanding your financial trauma, you taking these steps… Like knowledge is power, especially when it comes to money.
Life can be hard, money can be hard, but it really never helps to be hard on yourself. So give yourself grace. Keep thinking about the sorts of advice and knowledge that you can have and continue to learn to better your financial life, to better your career, to better your health so you can make informed decisions during times of anxiety or stress. You know that we’re with you every step of the way. If you would like a free financial plan from us, you can go to herfirst100k.com/quiz. We’ll ask you a couple questions. They’re not questions that you can fail. We’re just asking you questions to get to know you and your financial situation a little bit better. And then we’ll give you a free personalized financial plan, whether that’s for debt payoff or saving money or investing. So you can go to herfirst100k.com/quiz to grab that.
As always, leaving us a five star review really helps. We appreciate the support as well as sharing these episodes. I don’t think in 2024 we have hit the top of the charts this year or beaten Dave Ramsey. Oh, one time Kristen says, one time. I’d like to do it again before the end of the year. I would like to do it again. So one of the best things you can do, literally the thing you can do is sharing episodes and sharing the show. Sharing it on Spotify, sharing it on Apple, sharing it on social media, subscribing, sharing it, texting it to your friends who may not have heard the show. It’s one of the best things you can do, especially if you know a friend who’s struggling with money or feels stressed or is just looking for a place to get financial information that isn’t going to make them feel like a piece of shit. We really appreciate that support.
Okay, we also have a very quick election episode coming out on Election Day. That is, honestly, it’s three minutes long. It’s just going to be a nice little… It’s just a reminder that I love you and I appreciate you, and everything’s going to be okay. We will see you back in our feeds. Well, depending on what happens, we have every expectation that we will see you back in the feed on a more normal week. But during that week, just in general, please take care of yourself.
This is my last solo episode that we will do before the election. So let this be my most impassioned final plea, vote. Vote like your goddamn life depends on it because it fucking does. Vote, not just at the national level, but vote for your local representatives. Vote for local policies. Vote, call, donate, drive your elderly family to the polls. Early vote if you can. Just please, please, please vote. Participate, be an active participant in our political system. I appreciate it. The world appreciates it. Just get out and vote. Vote.org if you’re not sure where to go or if you need a voting plan. Vote.org is where you can go.
Okay, have a spooky, spooky Halloween. Ghosts and goblins, and I want that as creepy as it can be, not Donald Trump. Thank you. Have a great rest of your day. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First $100K podcast. 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, Taylor Chou, Sasha Bonnar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Claire Kurronen, Daryl Ann Ingram, and Meghan Walker, 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 the show. 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.
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.
