the place to be to create a business and life you love. I’ve got a question for you. Do

you ever feel like you self sabotage around money? Ever wonder if you have some limiting

beliefs from childhood that are holding you? Whether you’ve got mountains of debt or

you just can't seem to get ahead? Most of us have a next financial level that we would

love to get to. If that sounds like you, you are in for a treat today because you're going

to learn about four money beliefs that may be holding you back and how to fix them.

Kate Northrup is the bestselling author of Money: A Lost Story, Untangle your Financial

Woes and Create the Life You Really Want. She created financial freedom for herself

at the age of 28 through building a team of more than 1,000 wellness entrepreneurs in

the network marketing industry. Her philosophy is that if you free yourself financial, you

can be fully present to your purpose on the planet. She's been featured on the Today Show,

the Huffington Post, Glamour and more.

Miss Kate Northrup, thank you so much for being on MarieTV.

Kate:           Thank you so much for having me.

Marie:                     I just got to say once again. Money: A Love

Story, amazing book by Kate. If you don’t have it, go out and get it ASAP.

Lets talk money because we’ve been friends for years and I love talking about money.

I think it’s an amazing topic, it’s an integral part of our lives and I'm really

passionate about it. So many people, especially this time in the world, so many people are

struggling financially and a lot of people aren’t, so there's really a possibility

for us all to get to that next level. I'm curious. Why are you so passionate about this

topic?

Kate:           I really see money as a tool for people to be able to show up

in a bigger way. Money is neither negative nor positive; it just is a tool for us to

make change. If we've got a lot of financial chaos going on, we’re worried about how

am I going to put food on the table, how am I going to pay the rent, where's the mortgage

going to come from. That takes up a lot of bandwidth, a lot of our creative bandwidth,

a lot of our power bandwidth and we’re not able to show up in the same way as if our

financial lives were in order and taken care so that we could then come over here and do

the things that are higher leveraged that are really of service. Getting it together

financially is really just a vehicle for being able to show up more fully in your purpose.

Marie:                     I agree with that 100%. You know my story where

I started off thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars in debt and it sucked;

it was really hard to think about how to create everything when I was “am I going to have

enough to pay rent or to eat” or anything like that. I know for you, you’ve come a

very far way in a short couple of years, personally financially. Can you tell us a little bit

about your story and how big of a change you’ve made in these past couple of years?

Kate:           Sure. I moved to New York when I was 22 and I promptly got

myself into about $20,000 worth of credit card debt, probably a little bit more at some

points, and I didn’t even know that that was the number until several years in because

I had my head dipped so deeply in the sand avoiding looking at it. I was just like “I’ll

just spend and spend” and they were on things that were business stuff and courses; it’s

not like I had a closet full of Jimmy Choos, but it was still way beyond my means. I noticed

I was so unconscious about money and I was so avoidant and I was so scared to look at

the whole truth.

Marie:                     I have a question for you. Would you get bills

that they would come in and you just wouldn’t open them and you'd stick them in a drawer?

Did you pay minimums?

Kate:           Yeah. I knew what my minimum was on every card and I had a lot

of them, so it was like this shell game where I would just pay a little more than the minimum

which made me feel like I'm making a little progress, but I really wasn’t and I was

just in this quagmire and I felt really unauthentic because I was out running a business, I was

teaching women about different streams of income and thinking in new ways about cash

flows, but behind the scenes, I had all this financial chaos and I knew I wasn’t taking

responsibility for it. For the whole thing, it felt really awful and it was that way around

the time that you and I met and I was hiding it.

Marie:                     Really? That’s so interesting. You were hiding it

from most of the world publically and so how long did it take for you to reach that breaking

point where you were like, “I've had enough, I got to handle this, I can't do this anymore,

it just hurts too much”?

Kate:           It was about four years. I always was a good earner so it was

never like I couldn’t eat or anything. I could always just keep me little nose above

the surface so I could still breathe and it was about four years that I finally sat myself

down and said “You know what? Enough is enough,” and I realized that I was holding

myself back from being able to be in my full ability to make change in the world by being

in financial chaos. I knew that was a way I was keeping myself small and so I just finally

decided to do something about it.

Marie:                     Let’s fast forward. What are the numbers? How much

debt did you get yourself out of and how fast did you do it?

Kate:           When I really made some significant changes in my life, I was

in about $20,000 and six months later, I had paid it all off basically in one fell swoop

and doubled my income and doubled my savings and it was amazing what happened when I just

got my rear in gear and made some critical mindset shifts which we’re going to talk

about today and it all worked out. It’s kind of shocking.

Marie:                     Isn’t it amazing when that happens and when you

actually tell the truth and stop lying? It is so huge. I know it can feel so scary. It’s

not about money but back in my early 20s when I was engaged to be married to someone that

I knew I wasn’t going to married, but I was terrified of breaking it off because our

finances were co-mingled and I was just so scared. I only lasted about six months in

a lie but living that lie, I think we've all experienced that on some level where you know

something is not right, you're hiding something big but you don’t have the courage quite

yet to break through.

I love this topic because we’re going to dive into these money beliefs; they're almost

like money lies that we’re telling ourselves, and if you could just tell yourself the truth,

there's this incredible opening that can happen and literally your whole life really can change

just by changing something on the inside.

Kate:           And fast. It doesn’t have to take a long time.

Marie:                     I've had some stories from clients, from friends

and people that we've had some tough money conversations, not tough between us personally,

but just being there and supporting them through it and watching how quickly things can turn

around. I've had some people that have been in $100,000 or $200,000 in debt, even if that

number doesn’t go away as quickly as yours did, it goes down really fast but more importantly

who they are in the world changes significantly.

Kate:           That’s the whole point; it’s not about the money.

Marie:                     It’s not about the money and it is about the money.

Let’s get into it. You say we’re going to focus on four beliefs today and the first

one that hold us back is someone else should or will do this for me.

Kate:           We take our financial power and we just give it to somebody else.

It’s so much easier to just say “will you just do this for me” or “hey boss,

can you just do this for me” or “hey prince charming, future husband who hasn’t showed

up yet, he’ll probably take care of it for me,” so I’ll just bide my time and keep

being irresponsible until that point. For me it was that I hoped that my mom would just

take care of it for me someday. It’s so embarrassing to even just say that right now

but it’s true; I wrote about it in my book so it’s out there.

That is symptomatic of us really feeling like we’re not enough to do it and it’s just

saying “this is too scary, I don’t have what it takes, I'm not smart enough,” and

so we wait and we never turn on our full potential because we’re hoping somebody else will

swoop in at some point and save us.

Marie:                     It’s a big one. There's certainly been areas in

my life where I was thinking that someone else was going to handle it for me and I'm

pretty sure money was it back in the day and now it almost feels like a different human

being that used to think that way, but it is a big one.

Belief number two: I'm not good with money. This is a big one.

Kate:           This is a really big one. Have you ever seen a baby be born

and be able to talk and walk?

Marie:                     No. On YouTube sometimes.

Kate:           But that pretty much never happens. We've all learned the skills

we have and so to think like you're just not good with money is holding you back. Our beliefs

become our actions, we act in accordance with what our beliefs are and then our actions

obviously create our results. That’s just kind of a basic equation for life and when

we think I'm not good with money, we’re setting ourselves up for failure and we actually

avoid taking financial steps because we have that thought.

Instead you can take really small actions to start to build your confidence, and the

one that I did, again I was really pretty remedial with this, so when I started off,

I was like “I just am going to check my bank account balance everyday,” and when

I do that, I'm going to give some gratitude for the ways my life is abundant. I knew if

I could just check in with money daily and start being in that relationship and paying

attention to it, it would be powerful. When I started doing that every day I set a little

Google calendar alarm, 8:30 am, ‘check your bank account balance.’ My income increased

and I stopped spending more than I made. It was just like paying attention pays off and

I started to be better and better with money because I was paying attention to it.

Marie:                     I love that. Also, the things that we tell ourselves,

we joke around a lot about it here on MarieTV. There are some times where we’re shooting

an episode and literally I'm flubbing this line that I really want to get across again

and again and we’re all joking and every explicative comes out, and I say “I got

this.” I tell myself “I got this,” and wouldn’t you know nine times out of ten,

I'm like “bam” and I get it and I deliver that line. It’s the same thing with “I'm

not good with money.” If you tell yourself you're not good with money, you're never going

to take the steps to do anything about it and it’s almost like you just got blinders

on and you're never going to take them off.

I love that simple step of just checking in daily and the other thing I like about it

is it can remove the fear. I know for me there was a time when opening my checkbook was really

scary and it actually produced physical sensations of wanting to throw up because there wasn’t

enough in there, at least that’s the story I told myself. There was actually enough in

there because here I am, I didn’t disintegrate and I wasn’t getting taken off to jail or

something, but that was the feeling.

Kate:           We can train ourselves like Pavlov’s dog to spend that time with

our bank account and look at it and then automatically say, “I'm going to name three things in

my life that I'm grateful for that feel abundant.” You're training and rewiring your brain so

that you're associating looking at your money with feeling good.

Marie:                     I love that. Money belief number three: people

with money are greedy or it’s not spiritual to have money.

Kate:           I know that this is one you actually covered with Marianne

Williams in your audio, which was so fantastic. When we have a judgment against somebody for

having something and it’s very common with money, there's this whole lack mentality of

rich people are greedy, they’ve stepped on other people to get there or something.

First of all that’s assumption. We never know really how people got where they're at

and chances are pretty good that they worked hard to get there and they deserve it because

of the time they’ve put in.

When we judge them, automatically our subconscious mind will never allow us to have the abundance

or prosperity that we want if we’re judging other people for having it. Why would it let

us be the evil person that we’re saying they're bad because they have money or they're

selfish or they're dishonest?

Anytime that comes up, and also, anytime it comes up “it’s not spiritual to be rich

or to have money,” money is a stand in for what we value. If somebody wants something

that you offer, like B-School for example, and they value it according to the amount

that it costs, that’s a service. That’s an exchange of value for value that’s tremendous

and the value they're receiving in their life is huge and then you get to receive that in

exchange. That’s all that money is; just trading value for value. When we add value

to somebody else’s life, to me that’s a spiritual act to say, “I see that you

have a need and I have something I can help you with” then to receive an exchange for

that is how it should be. That is the flow, so if we start to see money as a means of

value exchange and as a means of how can I look at the world and say where can I add

value, where can I help somebody, then the whole thing begins to be rewired and we realize,

“I will become more prosperous to the degree that I am able to add value to somebody’s