What happens when the life you’ve spent decades building shatters overnight?
Today’s guest, Jen Hatmaker, joins me to talk about the moment everything collapsed—and how she rebuilt her identity, her faith, her confidence, and her finances from the ground up. In this deeply honest conversation, we explore what it means to wake up to your own power after betrayal, divorce, and a total life upheaval, and how taking control of your money can become the foundation for reclaiming every part of your story.
Key takeaways (repeat after me):
I have to stop outsourcing my power.
Jen’s story is a reminder that handing over the reins—financially, emotionally, or otherwise—creates a fragile life. If you want real security, you must stay involved in the decisions that shape your future, even when it’s uncomfortable.
I need to trust what I already know.
Watching Jen ignore red flags to protect her “good girl” narrative shows the cost of dismissing your intuition. Reclaiming your power means believing in yourself for the first time—and acting before life forces your hand.
I can face my money, even when I feel ashamed.
Jen’s financial overwhelm and humiliation didn’t stop her; they guided her. If you feel embarrassed about what you don’t know, that’s a signal to learn—not to hide. The stress is in the not knowing, not in the numbers.
I’m capable of rebuilding, no matter how big the wreckage is.
Jen’s financial reset—from crying in a parking lot to becoming a “financial assassin”—proves that literacy and stability are learnable. If she can do it during the worst season of her life, so can you.
Taking control of my money creates safety everywhere else.
Financial clarity gave Jen the stability to heal emotionally, rebuild relationships, and trust herself again. When you handle your money, you reinforce confidence and create safety that reaches far beyond your bank account.
I don’t have to wait for a crisis to wake up.
Jen’s plea is clear: reclaim your life before disaster forces you to. You can choose agency, clarity, and presence right now, without waiting for everything to fall apart.
Notable quotes
“Reality went ahead and chose itself since I wasn’t willing to choose it.”
“Your capacity to heal, to mend, to reinvent, to recover is so expansive.”
“If women start getting what they want, you all are gonna benefit from it.”
Episode at-a-glance
00:00 Intro
00:54 The Story We Tell Ourselves vs. Reality
02:04 The Moment Everything Changed
04:00 Why We Ignore Red Flags
06:36 The Cost of Disruption and Divorce
09:14 Money Reckoning After Divorce
12:07 Why Women Opt Out of Finances
15:19 The Emotional Labor of Money
17:22 The First 90 Days: Financial Overwhelm
20:06 Becoming Financially Literate
22:44 From Shame to Action
25:22 Taking Ownership and Finding Safety
28:22 The Cost of Self-Erasure
31:07 What Happens When Women Have Money
34:07 Deconstructing Faith and Identity
38:42 Finding New Definitions of Church
41:18 Advice for Anyone in Upheaval
Jen’s Links:
Book: https://jenhatmaker.com/awake/
Website: https://jenhatmaker.com/
Visit herfirst100k.com/ffpod to stay up to date and find any resources mentioned on our show!
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Meet Jen
Jen Hatmaker is a bestselling author, award-winning podcaster, speaker, and fierce advocate for women living in freedom and agency. With 14 books—including four New York Times bestsellers—along with her beloved For the Love podcast, Jen Hatmaker Book Club, and more, she reaches millions with her signature mix of humor, vulnerability, and wisdom. Her newest book, AWAKE: A Memoir, releases September 23, 2025, and chronicles her raw, real-time journey through the shocking end of her 26-year marriage and surprising reinvention. She lives in a creaky old farmhouse, loves 90s country, and drinks Almond Joy creamer like it’s a personality trait. Find her at JenHatmaker.com.
Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
This is your wake-up call to stop ignoring your money and stop letting someone else manage it for you. Today’s guest was the epitome of what I call the ostrich effect. Burying your head in the sand, acting like your financial problems don’t exist, until suddenly shit hits the fan and you have no other choice but to get honest with yourself about money. After waking up in the middle of the night to find her husband of 25 years voice noting his mistress, saying, “I just can’t quit you,” Jen Hatmaker’s entire life blew up. And not only did she have to rebuild from scratch, she had to get really honest about the fact that she was completely ignoring and had no knowledge of anything when it comes to money.
This is a common story that I get messages about every single day, women at every stage of life, but especially 40 plus, who are going through some sort of crisis. A divorce, a death of a partner, a financial awakening where they realize that they need to get their financial shit together and that nobody’s coming to save them. Let’s get into it. But first, a word from our sponsors. If someone hears your story and truly takes its lessons to heart, how could their life change?
Jen Hatmaker:
Well, if they walk that all the way to the end of the pier, they may decide to finally get into the driver’s seat of their own story, maybe for the first time in their life. And that would be in every category. So, my deepest hope is that a reader would go, “I am done experiencing life as happening to me and I’m going to exercise agency in basically every meaningful category of my life for the rest of my life.”
Tori Dunlap:
One of the things you said early on in the book that I can relate to so much, because my background’s in theater, my background’s in marketing, we love this story. You said we want the story of our lives, not necessarily our actual lives. What was the story you thought you were living and what was the reality?
Jen Hatmaker:
Well, I certainly thought that I was involved in a monogamous, faithful, healthy, long-term marriage. That was the story that I wanted, it was the story that I helped write, and it’s the story I hung onto against all evidence to the contrary. So, even as that story was literally fraying at the edges in front of my eyes with every single alarm bell going off internally for me, my inner wisdom absolutely raising every red flag it could get its hands on. I didn’t want that story. I wanted this story I wanted. And so, I decided to not know what I knew and rather hang on with both hands to the story I wanted. And so, because I was unwilling to both believe myself and then courageously face down what that would’ve required, which could have been as simple as really hard conversations, really intentional intervention, really major upheaval in our rhythms and communication patterns. Because I was unwilling to do any of that in favor of the story, life handed me my ass.
And so, reality went ahead and chose itself since I wasn’t willing to choose it. And so, there I sat in the rubble, going, I should’ve believed myself. I should’ve lived truthfully and in reality, because then I maybe could’ve done something about this story. But because I chose fantasy, it crumbled to the damn ground. And then I had to figure out how to build a true life, a real life, a stable life after that.
Tori Dunlap:
I know your story a bit. For somebody who hasn’t heard it, can you tell me about that moment in bed in the middle of the night, that moment of realization?
Jen Hatmaker:
It was July 11th, 2020. A lot of people, a lot of women have a date. And whatever that date was depends on what went on in our lives. But there’s a date a lot of women have, and then there’s a before that date, and then there’s an after that date. Health, marriage, whatever it is. But for me, it was July 11th and it was COVID, so everything was already really hard. Everything was already really tight, really lonely, really isolated. And I woke up at 2:30 in the morning, dead sleep, because I heard my husband at the time voice texting his girlfriend. And I knew that that message was not for me. And that was literally the end of my life as I knew it up until that day. That was the last night he ever spent the night in our house.
Tori Dunlap:
You had mentioned that you already knew. What was going on in your brain or body that prevented you from capital K knowing? What delusions were going on? And why do you think that was happening for you?
Jen Hatmaker:
Complicated answer, because there’s so many factors. First of all, I had been told from the time I was young based on the systems that I was raised in, that I opted in for later as an adult, that if you do this, this and this, you will get a happy life. Here are the ingredients to have a long-term, protected marriage. Do these things. That’s what you’ll get. Here are the ingredients to raise kids who don’t suffer or stray. Do this, this, and this, and then you get all these valedictorians. These are the things that a good girl does, and that good girl gets a good life. So, I did it. I did all of that. And so, some of my delusions were baked into that false theory, that we have done the right things. We have crafted a marriage and a family in such a way. We have put these guardrails around ourselves, therefore we are literally protected.
And so, there was a part of me going, this could not be true. There’s no way. There’s no way that this partner would cheat on me. There is no way that this level of betrayal, which was on numerous stratum, could ever just happen to us. We already solved for X. So, some of it was just my misplaced, old belief and false systems. And some of it was fear, because I didn’t want to know what I knew. That was a terrifying knowledge.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, because it meant you had to act. It meant you had to change your life.
Jen Hatmaker:
The disruption that that required was just not okay. I mean, I just thought I’d rather live maybe in this cognitive dissonance, in this internal turmoil, in this misalignment than bust my family up, than create five new children of divorce from really disrupting our entire ecosystem, because divorce breaks a million hearts. It’s not just the two of you. It’s my parents and his. My siblings and his. It’s all of our children. It’s our friend group. At the time was our faith community. There was a lot of people in our world that would be so brokenhearted by our disillusion, and we were just two of them. And so, that disruption felt too costly to me.
So, I thought, I think I would rather pay the cost internally by myself than pay that external cost inside our whole community, which actually isn’t true at all. They’re also paying, by the way, because reality is reality. It doesn’t matter what I want it to be, what I’m pretending that it is or how I am behaving co-dependently in my community to convince everybody else that this is okay. It is what it is, and that was already disruptive. That was already hard to witness, hard to be around, hard to be connected to, and so that was all a house of cards anyway. And it was just a fool’s errand to try to keep those cards propped up.
Tori Dunlap:
Obviously, as someone who writes, speaks, talks, lives about financial freedom and personal finance, I think one of the most compelling parts of this experience and what I’ve heard about, it’s just the fact that in addition to all of this, there was so much reckoning when it came to money and your own financial knowledge or maybe lack thereof. What was the money story you told yourself you were living?
Jen Hatmaker:
This was one of those areas in the post-mortem that I had to get really candid with myself about and really frank. Because the truth is, and you know this, you deal with women of all stripes and a lot of them are partnered or married, and so they’re not all single, charting their own course. A financial division of labor is not super uncommon in a marriage. A little. A little. There’s plenty of times where it’s even appropriate that one partner functions as the tip of the spear. The other partner is certainly involved and included. But in my marriage, and this was mine, as I examined my own complicity, my own contribution to where the edges were fraying, I just opted out. I handed that over carte blanche. I did not ask for visibility. It wasn’t withheld from me. It wasn’t like you’re not allowed to see [inaudible 00:11:34]-
Tori Dunlap:
It wasn’t the abuse.
Jen Hatmaker:
… or anything that I’m saying. I just didn’t ask. I didn’t ask, I wasn’t curious, I wasn’t involved. I thought, you’re handling this. I’m handling a million other things. What could go wrong? We’re never going to get divorced, obviously, because of the system we’ve chosen. So, you will be responsible on our behalf and I will trust that you’re doing it. And I demonstrated an absolute complete lack of curiosity, interest, investment. And by the way, that was a heavy burden to put on one partner. Hey, you be in charge of all of our money and I’ll just tra la la it over here. That’s not fair in any… I don’t care. Even if one person takes the lead, that is too big a burden to put on just one partner. So, my story was shrug. That was my story. Boop, boop, shrug. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m not sure how much money I make.
I don’t know where our retirement funds are. I’m not sure about what we’re investing. I couldn’t give you a real accurate reading on all of our bills or our debt. That is how zeroed out I was on our financial life. And what a catastrophe. What a catastrophe. I mean, there’s some blame to be placed on how some of that was going, but I accept the blame for going, I’m not a part of this. I don’t need to see it. I don’t need to be involved. I’m not interested in fact checking. I don’t want to be in these conversations. You do it all. And so, what a reckoning I had post-course.
Tori Dunlap:
I think your story is so common. It’s especially with women dating or married to men. And whether it is the systemic narratives that men are better with money or that I’m not good with math, so I’ll just let him handle it. Or it’s sometimes truly a interest in it, but maybe you have a partner who’s just like, “No, I’m the provider, so I’ll handle it.” Or the more vindictive, performing financial abuse. I think it’s so common. And I get messages literally every single day from women, especially who are 40 plus, who are like, “I have no knowledge of what’s going on.” Or, “My knowledge is so limited that you’re telling me things that I have never heard before and that even the financial basics are blowing my mind.”
So, do you think it was societal narratives? I also know, of course, religion is such a huge part of your story. Do you have an impetus that you can draw back to, to say, oh, that’s kind of where it started, that I thought I was bad with money or I thought somebody else should handle it? What was that catalyst?
Jen Hatmaker:
It’s interesting. When we were in the early years of our marriage… And of course, I got married when I was 19. A literal child.
Tori Dunlap:
Child bride.
Jen Hatmaker:
I was a child bride.
Tori Dunlap:
Child bride.
Jen Hatmaker:
I was a teenage bride, and un-ironically.
Tori Dunlap:
No, truly.
Jen Hatmaker:
So, I mean, I wasn’t even an adult. I was a college sophomore, and so I didn’t have any… neither one of us came into the marriage with any adult financial experience, because we weren’t adults.
Tori Dunlap:
And you probably weren’t earning money or at least not substantially full-time money.
Jen Hatmaker:
That’s what I was about to say. In the earliest years of our marriage, we were so poor. I mean, we did not have two dimes to rub together. There was no such thing as savings. I mean, we never made enough to cover what we owed. I mean, every month was a rob Peter to pay Paul situation. And so, really, really early on in our marriage, there was a short-lived season that I took the financial reins. I was going to be in charge of the bill pay. I was in charge of all of it. But because I can be and was certainly at that time rigid about debt, and wanting so deeply to be in the black, and out of the red, and to have a much more stable, robust financial experience than the one we had, which was like climbing out of garbage, credit card debt, and student loans and all that.
I would take whatever we made and I would not only pay everything that was due, I would pay down on it. And I was trying to chip away. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but I did it in such an extreme way that I would zero us out. And it’d be like, well, how do you suggest we pay for groceries now? And so, somewhere in that very early season of Jen just going whole hog on the finances without any finesse for two poor kids who needed to finesse it a little, I handed that baton over. And so, I never took it back after that. And so, I think we just settled into these roles, and rhythms, and went okay. And for a long time, more or less, it was functional. More or less, that’s your main thing. I have this main thing over here I’m doing that you don’t do much of. And we just sort of agreed upon it and never revisited it.
And we should have, because the way that our life changed from those early years of entry level jobs and scrapping together a monthly budget over the years was pretty monumental, the way that our careers changed, our income changed. Everything was so much more expansive and so many more moving parts. If ever there was just an obvious financial footprint that would’ve said, hey, this might be a good time to team back up on this stuff. And let’s get on the same page and create a financial roadmap that makes sense for the family. You would’ve thought I would’ve raised my hand and done it, but I can only point I think maybe a little bit to laziness.
And I say that in that I was so busy and overwhelmed with every other thing in my life, I just thought, look, if this one thing can be done without my constant decision-making and input, we’ll, God let it be? And then that was it. I don’t think I ever picked it back up again until I had to.
Tori Dunlap:
It is interesting. I’ve never thought about it this way until you just said. It’s almost like we have so many conversations on the show about emotional labor. The emotional labor that typically women are doing in relationships with men. The picking kids up for school and oh, it’s T-ball practice and it’s snack day, and I got to bring the oranges and the fruit snacks. It’s all of those things and women feel the burden of that so deeply. I would not be surprised if the conclusion is then, like you just said, oh, there’s one thing I don’t have to worry about. He can handle it, because he’s better at it. Or because I have too much on my plate, so let’s just give it to him because I have to project manage. If I’m compensated doing work, I have to go to work. I have to project manage there. I have to project manage my house. Here’s one thing I don’t have to worry about.
Jen Hatmaker:
100%. That is really how it felt. And that’s not a good reason and it’s certainly not an excuse.
Tori Dunlap:
No. But it’s understandable, considering how much we expect women to do in a more traditional relationship or even in a modern relationship. It’s still very, very taxing if you’re the partner with everything inside their head about how things work.
Jen Hatmaker:
That’s right. That’s so true. My compassion, not just for all other women who bear that burden, but even that earlier iteration of myself is pretty high. I remember the first time really in recent history, in the last 10 years, I heard even the term of that invisible labor at home. That wasn’t really a conversation we were having when I was a young wife and mom. That was expected. We were just expected to roll forward with the responsibilities that our mothers kept, but with the added responsibility of being a modern working woman. Nothing gave, it just added. And so, I remember when I finally started hearing people talk about that invisible labor, I could have wept with just feeling seen and understood for the first time. I could make a list this long of everything I did in a given week that wasn’t on a calendar somewhere. It wasn’t on a work list somewhere. So, anyway, yes. I think that among other reasons, I just thought this is one category I can phone in because somebody else is managing that labor.
Tori Dunlap:
So, you had mentioned that the first 90 days, so the three months after your divorce, you were handed just this mountain of tasks, but specifically financial tasks. Closing accounts, refinancing your home, learning how to budget. What was the most intimidating item on that list and how did you push through that?
Jen Hatmaker:
Geez, I can feel it in my bones when you ask the question.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, isn’t it interesting when people say that money is about math? It’s not. It’s about emotions. It’s about psychology. It’s about your trauma.
Jen Hatmaker:
Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s so interesting.
Jen Hatmaker:
Math is the last thing it’s about.
Tori Dunlap:
Truly.
Jen Hatmaker:
Anybody can sort through some numbers. That’s not actually that hard.
Tori Dunlap:
Nope.
Jen Hatmaker:
It is so emotional. And I went to a financial planner for the first time in my life after my divorce with actually no idea what we were… No idea, no expectations. I did not know what he was going to ask me. I didn’t know where we were going. I just knew I’m super overwhelmed about money and I need a helper. And I remember sitting in his office at his little round table. I hadn’t brought anything. He’s asking me all these questions. A state of all the accounts, and debt, and where’s your 401(k), and what are your shared investments, and do you have beneficiaries. And I remember just sitting there going, what the fuck?
Not only did I not know the answers, I didn’t know where to find the answers. It’s like you said earlier, when you’re giving people financial lessons 101, and they’re like, I don’t know what language you’re saying, that’s how I felt. It was so overwhelming that I went out to his parking lot and cried my eyes out. So, he gave me a list. I think that’s when he realized, oh, geez, we’re starting at the bottom of the mountain here with this one. So, he gave me a list of tasks. And he said, do all of this for 90 days and then come back to me, then we might be ready to start talking about investments and your future. You got to get a handle on your present, girl.
And so, all I remember from that season, it is such a fog of exhaustion and fear, was notarizing and scanning 7 million pieces of paper to get all my stuff in order, getting every bill put back in my name. Everything needed a notary. Like, you’re off the account, I’m on. Close this account. Open a new one. Pick out the right credit card, put it in your name only. Refinance your house. You’ve got to get this mortgage in your name only. Go through every single auto draft, auto deposit. Everything has to be canceled. Everything has to be redone, new accounts, new passwords. I swear to God, I have never worked so hard in all my life to get all of that wrangled. But once I did, because I mean obviously you know this, this is the sermon you preach, this is all knowable and it’s all doable. All of it.
It is all manageable. It is all handleable, literally every single bit of it. Once I got to that finish line of my list, it just kept growing. Of all the things, when people ask me a lot… I’m in interviews right now a lot for the book. They’re like, what are you the proudest of? I’m like, I think I might be proudest of the money and how deeply committed I became to being absolutely financially literate, responsible. I just decided to become a financial assassin. And I have. I have. My shit’s on lock now. And I am so aware of where every penny is, where it is going, how I am moving it around, what it’s going to look like in five years, what it’s going to look like in 10 years. And when I think that five years ago I was just like, I don’t know what our debt is.
I mean, it is a big reversal in my life. And so, what I want women to know is I promise you, you could not have been dumber than I was about your money. And so, if I can do this, anybody can. Anybody can. And it’s not just because I have a career that’s stable or that is able to provide for me. No matter what your amount is, you can still drive your own financial car and tell your money where it’s going. Anyway. The amount of security and comfort that it has given me to bring this out of the murky, foggy darkness, into the absolute light of day. Here it is, here are the numbers, here are the things. I can’t even quantify it, actually.
Tori Dunlap:
I always cry. I hope you’re proud of yourself. All of that is what I want every single woman to feel.
Jen Hatmaker:
Thank you.
Tori Dunlap:
Two things, one is that so many people tell me, I don’t look at my money because it stresses me out. And we call it the ostrich effect in my work, which is you bury your head in the sand. You act like your problems don’t exist, because they think, I’m not going to look at my money because it stresses me out. The stressful thing is actually living in the dark.
Jen Hatmaker:
Oh, my God. That’s so true.
Tori Dunlap:
You’re not stressed because of money. You’re stressed because you have no idea what’s going on with your money.
Jen Hatmaker:
That’s the truest thing.
Tori Dunlap:
So, the exact coping mechanism you have of, I’m not going to look at it, is the actual thing that’s causing you stress. And the metaphor I like to use is it’s like getting in a car without knowing how much gas is in there. And you’re just driving and you’re just raw dogging life. Just being like, I could break down at any time at 2:00 AM without cell reception on the side of the road with nobody to help me. That’s the thing that’s stressful. Not the I might not be able to afford that. At least you know it’s more stressful trying to live your life, wondering, could the car break down at any moment? Could I careen off a cliff at any moment? And the other part that I think is so powerful about your story is that I tell women all the time, you have two ways of looking at your money, either, oh, my God, it’s all me.
I have to make every fucking decision and I am in complete control. And that’s terrifying, because what if I screw up? What if I don’t know enough? What if I say something stupid in a meeting with a financial advisor? And then the other version of this is it’s all me. I get to call all the shots. I get to validate and grow my own strength in this. And the fact that you got to the end of these 90 days and you’re like, you just said I’m a financial assassin. And you can hear it in your voice that you’re like, I don’t take shit from anybody. I know what’s going on. I’m in complete control of my money rather than money controlling me. That’s the power. Not, oh, shit, it’s all me. It’s like, yeah, it’s all me. Here we fucking go.
Jen Hatmaker:
I cannot agree more. God, I cannot agree more. That is the truest statement. The huge question mark over it all was the source of so much anxiety. Where’s it all going? Is there going to be-
Tori Dunlap:
Do we have enough?
Jen Hatmaker:
… some left in 15 years? Hoping that somehow it all just sorts itself out behind my back without my visibility or investment is so insane. And so, it’s actually such a relief to have the knowledge. And even if you go, oh, wow, I’m not in as decent a place as I wanted to be or as I thought I was, even that is still a relief, because now you know what to do. Now you know how to steer your money and how to budget. And I have to still toggle that quite a bit. I mean, I have spent several months this year going, my income has shifted, has downshifted seasonally for a couple of reasons, and probably not long term, but in the short-term, therefore I need to change my metrics. But I know that, because paying attention. And so, I dropped several things. Damn, I’m like, let’s lower the temperature in all these categories for a few months until this rebounds, until this comes through or whatever.
And just the fact that I knew that was happening and all of a sudden I wasn’t looking at my bank account in shock or confusion, I just feel like we could handle anything. I think we can handle anything, as long as we know about it.
Tori Dunlap:
Can I ask you a very vulnerable question?
Jen Hatmaker:
Sure.
Tori Dunlap:
You can tell me no. I hear a lot from women that the moment it gets financially real to them, so the moment they’re sitting in the financial advisor’s office and they rattle off a bunch of things, that they feel extremely stupid, and very small, and that they just collapse in on themselves. How did you not allow that to happen and instead pull yourself together in the car after sobbing, but decide that was going to be an inflection point and an action point, not a, I’m going to continue to ignore it and I don’t want to feel stupid, so I’m not going to do this?
Jen Hatmaker:
Yeah. God, that feeling of humiliation is so real.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. That’s the word. It is. It’s humiliation, it’s shame, it’s guilt. Why didn’t I do this before? That is the number one thing I’m fighting in my work is that shame and humiliation. Why didn’t I know this? Why am I so stupid? Why am I failing? I don’t have anybody to turn to.
Jen Hatmaker:
God, I went through all of that. And the shame was so enhanced for me, because hell, I’ve spent 15 or 20 years coaching women toward wholeheartedness, and even independence, and autonomy over their own stories. And then here I have this entire really important category that I have absolutely neglected, and so the humiliation of that was real. I don’t want to give myself too much credit, because at least in my case, I didn’t have the luxury of going, I’m just not going to face this because I’m too embarrassed. I had to. I was divorcing. I had to. I had to sort out my bills. I had to sort out my bank accounts. I had to refinance my house. There was no option to continue to just shut that drawer. But then I think I also wanted women to know that it’s very self-propelling.
It may feel super overwhelming at the beginning. Not may, it will. It did to me at least, very overwhelming. The mountain was so tall. The task list was so endless. I had 50 tabs open on my laptop every single day, just trying to get it all sorted out. But once you knock off those first couple of financial tasks and you go, Done, I did that. It’s finished. It’s handled. That ball starts rolling downhill. Some of the fear, and unknown, and anxiety just gets taken out of the room at that point when you kind of go, this is knowable. It’s a pain in the ass and it takes time. This is going to take hours, and hours, and hours, and hours, and hours of your life, of course, but it is doable. And then the other thing that I found out really quickly is that, and you are such a prime example of this, you have helpers.
There are so many incredible helpers in this world right now going, let me hold your hand. I will teach you everything I know. I’ll help you. I’ll sit by you. I will advise you. I will mentor you. My bankers, my wealth planner, my online accounts, like yours that I followed, going check. Okay, get good questions to ask. The books, the resources. No one’s actually alone. So, if you feel alone, that’s actually not true. You don’t have to be at all. There is a host of experts willing to walk ordinary people through their own financial literate path. Thank you for doing that. I’m so serious. Thank you. I’m not joking. Voices like yours, yours exactly, and others who joined you, for me in 2020, 2021, it was like you held up a flashlight for me on the darkest path, where I’m like, I don’t know how to even take a step forward.
And I am so grateful that you bring your expertise to bear to the world, and you say, I’m here to help you, because you do and it matters. And I’m sitting here as living proof. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, God. Thank you.
Tori Dunlap:
That is so nice, because that’s how I feel about you. That’s so nice. Thank you.
Jen Hatmaker:
I’m not even being nice.
Tori Dunlap:
No, I know. I know.
Jen Hatmaker:
I am being serious.
Tori Dunlap:
That’s very kind.
Jen Hatmaker:
I felt that you and the other people like you who willingly offered your knowledge and your expertise to people like me, you were my best friends in that boat and you didn’t even know me. And you helped me row that boat to shore, and I’ll just never get over it. I’ll never get over how grateful I am at the opportunity to learn from you.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you.
Jen Hatmaker:
You’ve made my life better. Just period.
Tori Dunlap:
Wow. Wow. Thank you, thank you.
Jen Hatmaker:
Thank you.
Tori Dunlap:
I can’t get through this without sobbing. That is the feeling I want for every single woman on the planet, period. That is the feeling I want of ownership and of self-reliance. And not the self-reliance that’s like, I don’t need anybody or I don’t need help. But the self-reliance that’s wise enough to say, I don’t know this and it’s going to be really tough to learn it, but I’m brave enough to do it.
Jen Hatmaker:
Totally, totally. And everybody can.
Tori Dunlap:
Yep. So, my question for you that I was going to ask next, but it’s kind of perfect, is what did taking ownership of your money look like for every other part of your life?
Jen Hatmaker:
Totally. Oh, my God.
Tori Dunlap:
How has your life changed, your career, your relationships, maybe even your faith? What does your life look like now that you can say, yeah, I am in control of my money?
Jen Hatmaker:
It’s hard to think of a piece of my life it hasn’t touched, that it hasn’t altered. I think for me, it goes down to the foundational impact that taking control of my own money had on me, which was in a season of my life where I had felt, and I was, so betrayed, my entire life was absolutely dismantled. And that introduced so much fear, and loneliness, and insecurity into my story. Taking control of my money, which was really the first big mountain I climbed. I was still slogging it out in therapy on my heartbreak, but money was my big first leg of the race. And the way that it impacted me was that it gave me a sense of safety. And I had up to that point felt so unsafe in my life. I had been harmed and everything felt out of my control.
Other people were making choices that were dismantling my life piece by piece, and so I felt afraid. I felt unstable. And so, that financial independence, and knowledge, and agency helped me feel safe and stable. There is no way to explain how much feeling safe and stable translated to every other category. Because all of a sudden I could exhale and go, okay, if I am trustworthy with my own money, then I can maybe also be trustworthy with my healing process. I might be able to be trustworthy in my other relationships. I may be able to be trusted to be the author of my future all by myself. And it introduced a confidence into my life when my confidence had been shattered. Absolutely shattered. And so, I feel like it was the springboard that sent me leaping through the next 10 categories.
Tori Dunlap:
What is the cost of a woman listening, ignoring or not building her own self-trust?
Jen Hatmaker:
Oh, my God. I could talk about this for 1,000 years.
Tori Dunlap:
Me too.
Jen Hatmaker:
There’s a reason that we don’t. So, first of all, I have so much compassion for so many women who have outsourced all of that autonomy and spent their lives in fact-breaking service to everyone else around them. I know that that comes from a good place. I do. I know that that is at the deepest heart of it, well-intentioned. That is how women tend to operate in the world, which is everybody else around me is more important than me. I love everybody else around me so very much that I will sacrifice whatever it is that is mine in order for them to flourish.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and it means being a good girl. That’s what a good woman is.
Jen Hatmaker:
That’s absolutely the good girl playbook.
Tori Dunlap:
Selfless to a fault.
Jen Hatmaker:
Selfless. Selfless.
Tori Dunlap:
Don’t want, don’t desire, don’t need anything. Give everything of yourself away to everybody else.
Jen Hatmaker:
Everything, and whatever you need is paramount. And if what I have to do to make sure you get what you need or want is just full self erasure, then I’ll do that. I mean, I know for me growing up, both in my generation and in the religious environment that I was raised in, the banner over girls was selflessness. That was our north star. And I mean, if you caught a whiff of selfishness, boy, the kickback was fast, and furious and predictable. I swear to God, I’m 51 years old, to this day I will sometimes say something out loud that I mean with my full chest, and it is true, and good, and right, and I will still catch a little whisper in my brain of that sounds selfish that you said the word me one too many times in that sentence.
The rot is set on that mindset for sure, and it takes intentional work to reverse that. But there is a cost to living like that. And so, when we decide that we don’t want anybody else around us to ever pay their own cost, we will pay it for them. Whatever it is you want, we’ll fund it. Whatever it is you’ve already done, we’ll help mitigate the consequences. Whatever it is you want, we will bend over backwards to make it happen. There is a cost, but the cost is to you. The cost is to your soul. The cost is to your future. And frankly, the cost is to your greatest and highest good, what you could be bringing to this world instead of all that codependency. We are better than that. I’ll tell you that right now. We have more to offer than our codependent behavior on everybody else around us.
And so, it’s not just us who suffers. Frankly, it’s everyone else too, when they’re getting that limited version of who we are. Here’s what I know about women, because the trope around this is, oh, God, here come these feminists, just me, me, me, I, I, I. All they’re going to care about is themselves, whatever that all is. But here’s what I know about women, having led them for over 20 years, having been deeply embedded in a 99% female community.
What women want, that heinous idea, is almost universally so good for the world. We want good things. We want goodness for each other. We want incredible flourishing for our families and our neighbors. We want justice. We want equality. We want a world that is fair, and good, and right, and true. We want good things. So, yes, fuck, let us have what we want. If women start getting what they want, you’ll are all going to benefit from it. And so, in my lifetime, I would love to see more women get what they want, because I think that is going to be one of the primary cures to all that is ailing this failing culture right now.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. I always say that nothing bad happens when women have money, and it’s because of everything you just said. We want to feel seen. We want others to feel seen. We’re more generous. We are more empathetic. We’re more socially and self-aware.
Jen Hatmaker:
Responsible.
Tori Dunlap:
Responsible. And I think you said 99%. The 1% of women, and we’ve all met one or many that don’t seem to be girls-girls. And the only reason they’re not is because they have been fed the narrative that that’s how they get ahead. That’s the only reason they’re not.
Jen Hatmaker:
Of course.
Tori Dunlap:
That’s it. And so, really, everybody’s a girls-girl. It’s the narrative that we all have to compete against each other in order to have that one seat at the table. But I want to build my own table. I’m fucking tired of only wanting and having one seat.
Jen Hatmaker:
I love those tables. I sit at those tables, I build those tables. And by and large, my experience of women is exactly that. It is beautiful. It is inclusive. It is not ruled by scarcity. It is generous in nature. I mean, when you even just look at the money piece, like you mentioned. I mean obviously, you talk about this to your community, but you can just look globally at what happens. Just look at the data. You could have a black, dead heart. You do not have to care about equality or any of that. Fine. Have hate in your heart. Just look at the data at what happens when women have money and access to money.
Tori Dunlap:
Everything changes.
Jen Hatmaker:
The GDP changes rises in that country. Violence goes down. The whole-
Tori Dunlap:
Education.
Jen Hatmaker:
… country flourishes. Education goes up.
Tori Dunlap:
Everything’s different.
Jen Hatmaker:
Birth rates go down. It is incredible to see what happens when women get what they want. It is incredible.
Tori Dunlap:
This is not something I talk about a lot, but I had to ask you. I grew up Catholic. I went to 18 years of Catholic school. And I was a church every single Sunday, sometimes multiple times a week, because I’d go at school and then I’d go with my family on Sundays, and I got confirmed. I did the whole thing in college. I chose a Catholic college to go to. And then when I graduated college and started… I mean, I graduated college in 2016, so I should tell you a lot about where my head was, where I was 22 and coming into America with what I thought was our first female president. And of course, that’s not what happened.
Jen Hatmaker:
What a year. God.
Tori Dunlap:
What a year. And so, I was just having a lot of conversations, a lot of internal deciding of who I was and what I stood for. And as I became more and more feminist and more and more radicalized, there was so many parts of my life and identity that were at direct odds with the religion I grew up in and the one I was still practicing. And so, I don’t think I’ve gone to mass since 2018. And that has been a really both difficult, but also so easy decision for me. Easy to the point where it’s actually kind of nerve-racking or suspicious, because I’m like, if this was such a deep part of your life… I once calculated how much time had I spent in church over my life up to that point. It was a phenomenally high number. And the fact that I could let it go actually pretty easy, that racked me even more. I know that you have, and I think are still going through this kind of deconstruction of religion, of faith. What role is God playing in your life right now?
Jen Hatmaker:
It’s all very familiar what you’re saying.
Tori Dunlap:
I had a feeling it would be.
Jen Hatmaker:
Yeah. And there’s a lot of us here. You could swap out the denomination or the faith tradition and the structures are similar. We grew up in a similar worldview, similar limitations. Any high control religious environment is a ubiquitous experience that a lot of us had.
Tori Dunlap:
And I’ll say, my parents, although practicing Catholics, were the a la carte Catholics. Pro-gay rights, pro-women’s rights. It was not a conservative kind of viewpoint.
Jen Hatmaker:
I love that for you.
Tori Dunlap:
And I love that for me too, but also just the act of being in a Catholic Church, even if my own church in the Pacific Northwest did not subscribe, it was still the capital C Church doing all kinds of harm.
Jen Hatmaker:
Oh, my God. Literally, I was just on a couple of hours ago with Anne Lamott, and I literally just told her my personal parents, my earthly parents were actually loose, and fun, and not rigid. And my dad, he was sort of a type of pastor, but a very rogue one. And so, it was so interesting for me, because not unlike what you just said, my actual home was permissive, and highly loving, and functional. But the system that I was at, the church that I went to was not. The pastor on Sundays, the youth pastor on Tuesdays, Wednesdays. I went to church all the time. I mean, I’ve been to church. I have been to enough church for 700 grown adults put together. So, I am over-churched. And then I married the very first youth pastor that walked in front of my face, because that was a very prescriptive path for me. Marry young, because otherwise, how are you going to have sex? Because I grew up in purity culture.
Tori Dunlap:
Me too.
Jen Hatmaker:
So, that wasn’t allowed.
Tori Dunlap:
I signed a chastity card when I was 15.
Jen Hatmaker:
God bless. So did I. I mean, I didn’t live by it, but I signed it.
Tori Dunlap:
I didn’t either. Don’t know where she is. Ask God.
Jen Hatmaker:
I never knew her. I never knew her. But I maybe didn’t keep the pledge, but I certainly kept the shame. And that message landed. And then I’ve been in some form or function of ministry for a lot of my adult life. That was my comeuppance through my career was in evangelical subculture. And I’ve obviously migrated far away from that at this point in my life, as my faith has evolved and I’ve just evolved as a person. And politically and ideologically, I don’t have anything in common with that community anymore. And the breach is too… the chasm is too wide.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s too wide. Yeah.
Jen Hatmaker:
It’s too wide. But I mean, even as I lost my marriage and the church that I had helped found here in Austin was very progressive. A very liberal church, very all-inclusive. All the ideologies that I have grown to cherish and care about. When I went back after my divorce… And remember, I’m a founder there, so I can’t just be there as a person. I’m just not that.
Tori Dunlap:
You’re a fake-your-head.
Jen Hatmaker:
I just sat there triggered the whole time by everything, every word spoken, every sentence, every sermon, every song, what felt performative to me, what felt unsafe or untrue. And then I was bearing the weight of everybody else’s shock and sadness about my divorce. We were their pastors and their pity, which was even worse. And I just couldn’t do it. And I thought, I don’t want to be here. I have faith still, but this is not serving it. This is an enemy to any sort of nurturing faith that exists in my heart at all. And so, I was like, well, I am not going to be here simply because I feel like I have to. That is not who I am anymore. Because see, our entire previous conversation. And I haven’t been back to church, so it’s been almost five years. And church for me right now looks like CBS Sunday mornings with Jane Pauli. Never miss it.
Tori Dunlap:
The minute at the end of nature and quiet.
Jen Hatmaker:
That’s church. I have my coffee, I have my blanket, I have Jane. I sit on my porch swing with a book and I have brunch with my people. And that feels holy to me and that feels sacred. And I feel still loved and held by however you want to think about God, however you want to name God or think about how God finds us and we find God. The path to divinity to me has 1,000 roads and I bless them all. And so, right now, my path is Jane, porch swing and coffee. And that feels like enough. That feels like enough for me right now. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to church. I’m not sure. I just don’t know.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. That’s how I feel. I mean, it’s almost, I guess 10 years or eight years. And I don’t miss it, which tells me a lot.
Jen Hatmaker:
I don’t either.
Tori Dunlap:
If it wasn’t doing anything for me, there’s a million other things that do it for me. Church wasn’t really it.
Jen Hatmaker:
And there’s a million other things to do it for you in a faith context. If what you’re wanting to nurture is your soul and your spirit, if you are wanting to increase the capacity that you have to love your neighbor, and to be generous, and good, and true, and kind, and loyal, there are so many ways to really serve that part of your heart that doesn’t necessarily involve sitting in a pew. And so, go find it. If it’s a walk out in the woods, that’s your church. If it’s pulling up a beach chair and watching the waves come in, that is your church. If it is sitting around a brunch table with the people that you love most in the world, and giving each other the gift of time, and presence, and energy, and love, that’s church. So, the definition for me is quite wide.
The organized religion part for me feels unsafe and not healthy at this moment. And I don’t know how to separate myself from the version of it that is like Christian nationalism. I mean, I know how to separate myself from it, but that whole thing is just so painful to bear witness to and to feel even associated in an ancillary way that I just go, I cannot. I’ve got to be as far as the east from the west from that right now.
Tori Dunlap:
And I’ve heard it said too, for anybody listening who is not even spiritual, doesn’t believe in God or doesn’t believe in a higher power, it’s just like, what connects you with other people? What connects you to love. A couple years ago when I saw Liz Gilbert speak, she called it love in the room. How do you be love in the room today? And some people might call that God. Some people just might be, yeah, how do I be the best, kindest, like you said, loyal, generous, brave person I can? For me, that’s like nothing beats going to live music or to see theater, because that’s my background.
Jen Hatmaker:
That’s such a great example.
Tori Dunlap:
That is church. That’s church, 100%.
Jen Hatmaker:
That group emotion that you’re sharing with all those people in the room, that moment in time. Art is love. Art and the experience of art collectively is absolutely of a church. And so, I didn’t know your background was theater. Like musical theater?
Tori Dunlap:
Majored in theater. Yeah. I got a degree in straight theater, but have been in musicals and doing theater since I was five or six. And then singing before I could Talk, played piano when I was five. So, that’s my love. I’ve seen Leslie Odom, Jr. three different times, four. And there is no better church than that man’s voice. That’s the perfect example.
Jen Hatmaker:
Take my money, Leslie. Take my money.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, every time I’ve seen him, I’m just… It’s just, yeah, that’s church.
Jen Hatmaker:
He is a icon.
Tori Dunlap:
He’s incredible.
Jen Hatmaker:
I love musical theater and I love concert. I love everything you’re saying right now. I’m feeling warm in my heart just thinking about the last five experiences I had in a room like that with art in front of us. Beautiful. It counts.
Tori Dunlap:
I could literally talk to you for so long. But my final question for you. For people listening who are standing in the middle of an upheaval, divorce, loss of faith, shifting roles, a full identity crisis, what is one piece of encouragement you’d want them to take away from your story?
Jen Hatmaker:
God, you just described almost everyone I know.
Tori Dunlap:
We all go through it at some point.
Jen Hatmaker:
It almost all points of life. Are we going through transition, change or loss? Just pick a category. And if you haven’t gotten to it, just live longer. You’ll get there. And so, I hope that what people walk away with when they read Awake is that genuinely, I mean this as sincerely… This is as earnest as baby Jesus in the manger. No matter what you have lost, however precious it is, however shattered you are, I mean, it can just be the worst thing that you’ve ever thought of. Even then, your capacity to heal, to mend, to reinvent, to recover is so expansive. I am telling you, because I am not special. I’m just a person. I’m just a person like everybody else. Literally, I do not have some special capacity.
I don’t have anything that’s super out of the ordinary. And I am telling you that even then I believe that our best days can still be in front of us. It stunned me to discover, there was a minute that I thought my life was so ruined and everything I’d ever wanted, and hoped for, and built and dreamed of was gone in an instant. And I could not get it back. That I remember thinking, I’m never going to be happy again. And I said that and I meant it. I thought, I’ll patch my life together enough to be functional, but I will never have a spark. I will never be happy. I will never have the spark of joy that I had before. I’ll just muddle through. And so, it was kind of a surprise to discover that I did more than just recover. I actually flourished.
And I don’t love the system, but sometimes disaster is the best thing that could ever happen to us. But it just rattles the cages so hard that we are forced to reckon with whatever stories we are telling ourselves, whatever narratives we are self-selecting, whatever truths we are avoiding, whatever peace we think we’re keeping, which is actually at the expense of our own peace. When those things are no longer available to us and we’re forced to go, all right, what’s true, what’s real? And then finally, what do I want? Every one of us has that in front of us. And the good news is I don’t think anyone has to wait for a catastrophe to live like that.
I actually think you can live wide awake because you choose to right now in the light of day. You don’t have to wait for a crisis. And I hope that is what everyone chooses, that they go even right here in this moment of health and wellness that I’m experiencing, I still want to figure out how to be wide awake in every category. So, that would thrill me if that is what readers walk away within in their own stories.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you for your work. Thank you for your words. I have copy on my bookshelf. I am so excited to read it. Please plug away, my friend. Tell me where people can find your book.
Jen Hatmaker:
Thank you. It’s everywhere. It’s wherever you get your book. If you have an indie store that you love, we love to see an indie store get a little love from its readers. But it’s basically on every single platform. And I’m so honored to put it in the hands of its readers. Once you write a book and you hand it off, it becomes something new. It becomes something new in the hands and the lives of its readers, and that’s where it lives now. And so, I’m like a kid on Christmas morning, watching like this, just seeing what it’s becoming in all these lives. It’s just stunning. Thank you for having me on. Thank you again for all that you’ve meant to me. And the ways in which you have taught me, and led me, and encouraged me, unbeknownst to you, as I was rebuilding a financial stable life. And for all that you do for women. This is going to have generational impact. And so, I’m really proud of you and really glad to have spent this hour with you. For sure.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you. Thank you.
Jen Hatmaker:
You’re welcome.
Tori Dunlap:
Right back at you. And the book’s called Awake. And oh, boy, aren’t you? So, I’m so excited to read it. Thank you.
Jen Hatmaker:
Thanks.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you so much to Jen for joining us and for her just remarkably kind words. You can get her newest book, Awake: A Memoir, wherever you get your books. I’m so excited to read my copy. And am so hopeful that this episode, her story and our work continue to inspire you and continue to, oh, I was going to say force you, but sure, force you to get honest about your money, and about your life, and realizing that you are in control. You get to call the shots. And everything changes in your life when you know what’s going on with your money. So, if this is important to you, if you know that this episode would touch somebody else and give them the wake up call they need, I would appreciate you sharing the episode. Thank you so much for being here, financial feminists. Thank you for your support of our work, and we’ll see you back here soon. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminists, produced by Her First $100K. If you love the show and want to keep supporting feminist media, please subscribe or follow us on your preferred podcasting platform or on YouTube. Your support helps us continue to bring this content to you for free. If you’re looking for resources, tools, and education, including all of the resources mentioned in this episode, head to http://herfirst100k.com/ffpod.
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.
