What’s it like to pay off $50,000 in debt, ditch your 9-to-5, travel the world, create educational content, and build community in the process? Teresa Au speaks to Financial Hype Woman and content creator Berna Anat about how she did all that and how she’s planning for tomorrow. Berna also shares how our emotional relationship with money impacts our decisions, her strategies for budgeting, saving and retirement, and what to do when the creator life doesn’t love you back.

What you’ll hear in this episode:

• Learn why Berna told the world she was $50,000 in debt
• Shame about debt
• Why Berna decided in 6th grade not to be self-conscious
• Berna’s background as a child of immigrants
• Why DMs are like a secret
• The age at which our emotional relationship to money is formed
• Ways in which we indirectly understand our family’s finances
• The paradox of the Frugal-Flex mentality
• Why Berna wanted to write a fun book about money
• How your emotional relationship to money shapes your behavior today
• Financial basics vs social media buzz
• Berna’s leap to becoming a solopreneur, via Zanzibar 
• How Berna found her sweet spot as a content creator
• Finances as a means of activism and empowerment
• Budgeting on an unpredictable income 
• Retirement planning  for creators
• Who’s on your money squad?
• Getting the most out of working with an accountant
• What an agent can do for you
• A fun trick to help you negotiate better deals
• The traditional dead season for brand partnerships
• Financial worry and the creator life
• Recent changes in the creator economy
• Measuring your impact rather than your income
• Why it’s so important to celebrate your money wins
• Berna’s One Word for 2023

Berna Anat is an author, producer, Rich Auntie in Training, and award-winning Financial Hype Woman, which is her made-up way of saying she creates financial education media that lives at @HeyBerna all over the Internet. After slaying her $50,000 debt, she saved up to quit her 9-to-5 and has been traveling the world trying to make money fun again ever since. Berna’s 2023 debut book MONEY OUT LOUD: All the Financial Stuff No One Taught Us, is a Bookshop.org Bestseller and has received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist.

Teresa Au (@tautastic) is an executive for community engagement and driving customer empathy at Adobe. Her career spans diverse creative fields, primarily in New York’s fashion industry, as well as architecture firms, and now Silicon Valley tech companies. She has always prized working with distinctive design and the interesting people behind it–from designer Elie Tahari to start-up CEOs. 

Learn more about this podcast, and find transcripts and links, at adobe.ly/inthemaking. In the Making is brought you by Adobe Express and Adobe Creative Cloud. 

Past episodes of Wireframe can still be found in the show archive within this feed, or online on Behance. 

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