In today’s Money Mocha, I have an audio clip of me teaching about my unique version of creating budgets, which I call “money maps.”

In today’s Mocha, I invite you into one of the most grounding and practical tools in my Art of Money methodology: the Three-Tier Money Map.

This is not your typical, dry, boring, anxiety inducing budget. This is a soul-rooted, flexible, and deeply personal framework that helps you chart your financial terrain—based on where you are right now in your life, and where your heart is longing to go.

Over the years, I’ve seen so many of us struggle with budgeting—especially those of us who are self-employed, caring for others, or living with inconsistent income. And honestly? A lot of the traditional advice just doesn’t work when you’re juggling a creative life, a business that ebbs and flows, or caretaking roles that shift with the seasons.

That’s why I developed this Three-Tier Money Map. It meets you exactly where you are. It’s permission-filled. It’s body-aware. And it allows space for your basic needs and your big, bold dreams.

Find the full show notes here: baritessler.com/podcast

The Art of Money 3-Month Financial Therapy Program is open! Find out more here: baritessler.com/art-of-money

It’s time to pour yourself a warm mug of comfort and clarity. This next sip of Money Mocha is steeped in sacred storytelling, creative bookkeeping, and a practice that might just change how you feel when you sit down with your numbers.

What if bookkeeping didn’t have to be boring?

What if the categories in your financial tracking could speak your language — the language of meaning, memory, and values?

Years ago, I had a dream that stitched together the threads of the sacred and the practical — a dream that arrived just weeks after my first money mentor, Tamara, passed.

In it, she gifted me a red velvet-bound ledger that cataloged her life not just in numbers, but in meaning. Each entry in her Book of Life was paired with a value — not just a dollar amount, but a reflection of her essence, her creativity, her care.

That dream became a doorway.

It invited me to ask: What if we could make bookkeeping an honoring practice? What if the way we track our income and spending could reflect what we cherish most?

Today’s Money Mocha introduces you to Values-Based Bookkeeping — a soulful and deceptively simple technique that invites you to rename your financial categories. Yes, rename them. “Rent” can become “Sanctuary.” “Debt” can transform into “My Big Italian Adventure.” Line items shift into love notes. Spreadsheets become mirrors.

Find the show notes here: baritessler.com/podcast

Learn more about my 3-month Art of Money program here: baritessler.com/art-of-money

Money touches every part of our lives, in one way or another, every single day. And every day we go about our lives making money decisions both large and small, we’re most often running some very old scripts unconsciously in the background, like an app that runs quietly in the background of your laptop.

These scripts are powerful, and many of them were created unintentionally far in the blurry, faded past of our childhoods. Comments your mom made at the kitchen while paying bills. Things your dad did when he got an unexpected bonus from work right before Christmas. That trip your family took to DisneyLand where your parents were arguing about money outside of the hotel room where they thought you couldn’t hear.

These scripts are part of your money stories, and those stories are so powerful they can cause you to make money decisions to this very day. There’s good news about these stories though: they’re not written in stone.

You’re writing your own money stories every day, every week, every month, and every year. And here’s the key: you have the power to start writing new money stories, new scripts, that can then run in the background, guiding you to make better money choices. And those better choices can lead to less stress and grind, and more peace and calm.

I’ve seen hundreds of students in my program write entirely new money stories. I’ve done it myself. And I’ve seen my husband make huge changes in his money relationship by writing new money stories.

Want to know how to write your own new money stories?

Listen in (or read) below to today’s piping hot Money Mocha: baritessler.com/podcast

To learn more about the Art of Money, head here: baritessler.com/art-of-money

Today, I bring you a lovely conversation I just had with my friend and colleague, Rick Kahler.

We just had a wonderful chat about all things financial therapy within the realm of financial planning, and I can’t wait for you to have a listen.

Of all my colleagues in the finance space, Rick is one of my longest running friendships. He’s one of the first financial planners I met when I was in the early years of developing my financial therapy method.

I credit Rick with being the first financial planner to bring therapists into his financial planning meetings.

He was very clear that money is such an emotional subject and that adding money psychology support was essential for his clients (especially for couples trying to navigate different money approaches in the delicate terrain of planning retirement.)

We first met in 2004 at Nazrudin, which is a think-tank for financial planners created by George Kinder and the late Dick Wagner. Rick loves to tell the cartwheel story which you’ll hear at the beginning of our interview, and the Nazrudin event is where my infamous cartwheel happened!

Rick is also a Financial Therapist and has also been on the board of the Financial Therapy Association since its inception in 2009. He’s been a guiding force in that community.

(I’m still not a part of the FTA, since I’ve been teaching my financial therapy method since 2001, before it was formed, and think all financial therapists should have a Masters in Psychology. I do, however, recommend them and they have a good directory to help folks find a financial therapist.)

Starting in 2013, I’ve had the honor of interviewing many of the “elder” money pioneers. Olivia Mellon, Karen McCall, Deborah Price, Barbara Stanny (now Barbara Huson), Saundra Davis, Vicki Robin and many of the next generation folks where I fit in, like Brad Klontz, Mikelann Valterra, Jacquette Timmons, and Rachel Robiasciotti.

Some of these interviews are on my podcast and the others live in my online program library (which people get access to when they join my Art of Money program.)

To date, all of my conversations with Rick have been on his Financial Therapy podcast. He was a guest teacher in one of the rounds of my Mentor Program, but this conversation is our first interview on my podcast.

I’m excited for you to have a listen to the conversation I had with him!

In the interview we discuss:

The realization that money work is so emotional for his clients

Why he started bringing therapists into his financial planning meetings

How important doing his own therapy has been for his life and financial planning practice

His favorite therapy modality - IFS (Internal Family Systems) and how he connects it to money work

Why do we both think the Enneagram (personality system) is so helpful for understanding your money behaviors and habits.

How he has written 7 money books and has plans for more on the horizon

And, some praise back and forth for our friendship over the years

Do you remember that scene in Lord of the Rings where Gandalf and Frodo and the whole fellowship of the ring crew were on a long, epic journey, and they were stuck at large stone doors, called The Doors of Durin, that had a riddle inscribed on it?

For hours and hours they sat before that stone door in the moonlight, trying to solve the riddle inscribed in stone in the elvish language. “Speak, friend, and enter,” was all the riddle said.

If they could solve it, the door would open and they’d be able to travel through the secret passageways that led through the mountain so they could finally destroy the ring of power once and for all.

In many ways, that scene is a perfect metaphor for the money riddles we all face from time to time.

We’re all trying to get somewhere on our epic journeys (a.k.a., our lives), and sometimes we end up blocked by an immovable stone door that has a seemingly unsolvable riddle about money etched on it.

The riddle might be something like “how can we afford to buy a house in this economic climate?,” or, “how can I bring in more money when I have a job where the salary is capped?,” or “how can we save enough money to send our kids to college with only a few years remaining?.”

Money riddles like this (which I also call “money koans,” like the koan questions you sit with in Zen Buddhist meditation practice), aren’t written in the elvish language on a big stone door, but they might as well be.

Just like Gandalf and Frodo and the whole crew sat there for hours trying to solve the riddle that would open the door, we often have to sit with our money riddles for days, or weeks, or months, or even sometimes years for the big ones.

Working with and solving these money riddles is the topic of today’s recording on the first volume of the Art of Money Mixtape I made for you.

baritessler.com/podcast

In this clip, I’m telling stories (which is my favorite teaching method) about the practical, external side of overcoming underearning.

There are mental and emotional internal shifts involved, and a good dose of creative brainstorming, but the focus here is on how we can shift our business models to open up new possibilities for breaking through money ceilings.

I hope you enjoy this third recording on the Money Mixtape. (And believe me, if it was possible to mail you an actual cassette tape with these recordings, I would 100% do that. But…who has cassette players anymore?)

Additional Links:

baritessler.com/art-of-money

baritessler.com/podcast

This second “song” on the mixtape is a clip from the first ever live 3-month version of the Art of Money program that I taught this past Fall in 2024.

It’s a brief overview of my approach to using somatic psychology tools, which forms the foundation of my unique approach to financial therapy.

And yes, this “song”/audio recording is just me teaching live in a recent class, rather than our pretend AI friends Jack and Julia talking about my ideas and concepts. You might hear from them again in the coming days, but that depends on the feedback we hear about their conversation we sent you a couple of days back.

This clip of me teaching is packed with techniques for how to use simple awareness of the sensations and emotions in your body to help unblock the things standing between you and a healthier, less stressful relationship with money.

Find out more at baritessler.com/podcast

As a Gen X’er who grew up through my teen years in the 80’s, long before the internet, social media, iphones, and Spotify, I can clearly remember making mixtapes for my friends.

Back then, it was no easy feat to pull off, and putting together a collection of hand-picked songs and giving them to a friend on a cassette tape was a sign of affection.

It was a way to say, “I see you. I know who you are and what you love, and I care about you. So I’ve made this collection of music that will bring you the kind of feelings I know you like to feel from music.”

So this year, my friend, I’m making a mixtape just for you.

Only, it’s not a collection of songs. It’s a collection of recordings that will take you on an emotional and psychological journey into many different facets of your relationship with money.

It’s…A Money Mixtape, Volume 1, and I made it for you

The first recording on this cassette is something you’ve never heard from me, and unless you’ve spent a good amount of time down in the AI rabbit holes over the recent months, you may have never heard something like this before.

Now, before I tell you what this is, the second I mention the phrase “AI,” I know that can raise some people’s hackles. There’s a lot of hate for anything AI related these days. Trust me, I get that.

My tech geek husband, Forest, has been way down in all the AI rabbit holes for many months now, so I’ve learned a bit about it all at the dinner table.

Here’s the bottom line: there are a lot of crappy ways to use AI tools to create crappy content, and you can make the use of AI tools worse by trying to pretend that what you’re creating with these powerful tools is real, or that what you’re publishing was created by a human, when it was created by an AI tool.

Doing that is just flat out lying. My own personal operating system doesn’t allow for any kind of deception like that, so, I’m doing what I’ve always done: I’m being open and transparent with you.

This first recording was made by my husband. He took an excerpt of a transcript of me teaching, fed it through a couple AI tools, and had the software create a podcast conversation between two people who are talking about the ideas I covered in the excerpt.

The first time I heard it I started laughing. It just sounds so incredibly human, and I couldn’t believe that this podcast conversation about my concept of “money stories” is not actually two people talking…it’s two AI bots.

AI tools are just tools. They can be used for good or bad, like any other tool. There are some not-so-great uses of AI, and some very good uses of AI. This, I hope you’ll agree, is one of the good uses.

Have a listen to this podcast conversation where Jack and Julia (yes, I just made those names up) are discussing my concept of money stories, how you can start to uncover your own stories, and how doing that can help you unlock a new way to relate with money.

As a Gen X’er who grew up through my teen years in the 80’s, long before the internet, social media, iphones, and Spotify, I can clearly remember making mixtapes for my friends.

Back then, it was no easy feat to pull off, and putting together a collection of hand-picked songs and giving them to a friend on a cassette tape was a sign of affection.

It was a way to say, “I see you. I know who you are and what you love, and I care about you. So I’ve made this collection of music that will bring you the kind of feelings I know you like to feel from music.”

So this year, my friend, I’m making a mixtape just for you.

Only, it’s not a collection of songs. It’s a collection of recordings that will take you on an emotional and psychological journey into many different facets of your relationship with money.

It’s…A Money Mixtape, Volume 1, and I made it for you

The first recording on this cassette is something you’ve never heard from me, and unless you’ve spent a good amount of time down in the AI rabbit holes over the recent months, you may have never heard something like this before.

Now, before I tell you what this is, the second I mention the phrase “AI,” I know that can raise some people’s hackles. There’s a lot of hate for anything AI related these days. Trust me, I get that.

My tech geek husband, Forest, has been way down in all the AI rabbit holes for many months now, so I’ve learned a bit about it all at the dinner table.

Here’s the bottom line: there are a lot of crappy ways to use AI tools to create crappy content, and you can make the use of AI tools worse by trying to pretend that what you’re creating with these powerful tools is real, or that what you’re publishing was created by a human, when it was created by an AI tool.

Doing that is just flat out lying. My own personal operating system doesn’t allow for any kind of deception like that, so, I’m doing what I’ve always done: I’m being open and transparent with you.

This first recording was made by my husband. He took an excerpt of a transcript of me teaching, fed it through a couple AI tools, and had the software create a podcast conversation between two people who are talking about the ideas I covered in the excerpt.

The first time I heard it I started laughing. It just sounds so incredibly human, and I couldn’t believe that this podcast conversation about my concept of “money stories” is not actually two people talking…it’s two AI bots.

AI tools are just tools. They can be used for good or bad, like any other tool. There are some not-so-great uses of AI, and some very good uses of AI. This, I hope you’ll agree, is one of the good uses.

Have a listen to this podcast conversation where Jack and Julia (yes, I just made those names up) are discussing my concept of money stories, how you can start to uncover your own stories, and how doing that can help you unlock a new way to relate with money.

Additional Links:

baritessler.com/art-of-money

baritessler.com/podcast

Under-loving, Over-giving, under-receiving. Under-no-ing, over-yes-ing.

It has everything to do with your experience of self-worth whether or not this is reflected in your salary or income.

Finding and claiming your sense of value is a lifelong process.

It unfolds over time in baby steps and leaps and then more baby steps.

Overcoming underearning requires both internal and external work.

For todays money teaching, I offer some of the internal practices that my community and I have found most helpful in growing our sense of value and overcoming underearning from the inside out.

(This is an edited excerpt from my first book: The Art of Money: A Life-Changing Guide to Financial Happiness)

So, which practices are you going to focus on today?

Pick one or two and start slowly and lovingly...

I am with you,

Bari

P.S. My three-phase financial therapy method includes Money Healing, Money Practices and Money Maps. This list of overcoming under-earning practices comes from the Money Healing realm where the internal work resides. We delve into the external practices of claiming your value by moving through money ceilings, learning how to work with cash flow dips and creating sustainable business models in the Money Practices and Money Maps phases of my financial therapy work.