6.7 | Financial Fawning Has A Price Tag

> Isha Vela: Welcome to Waking Up Wealthy, the podcast for visionaries and rebels who are ready to revolutionize their relationship with money and create powerful collective ripples with the money they make. I’m your host, Isha Vela, trauma psychologist, somatic practitioner, financial professional and minimalist, bringing you practical money tools, unconventional wealth perspectives, and Aquarian era business strategies to guide you in building wealth that’s aligned, ethical and empowering. Let’s wake up to the true meaning of wealth together.

Welcome to the Waking Up Wealthy podcast. I am your host, Isabela. I’m a psychologist and sovereign wealth activist, founder of the Wealth Ecology Institute. And today I want to talk to you about the six principles of a matriarchal economy. And I talked about these six principles when I presented Money Matriarch Unlearning Financial Misinformation and Stepping Into Stewardship. I will link that video in the show notes below and you’ll want to watch it if you want specific ways you can use existing financial instruments to fund a matriarchal economy. And it goes into how you can use irrevocable trusts and bioregional funding facilities to fund entire communities and even whole ecosystems, regions. So it’s super, super exciting. And of course I’m here to help with the life insurance portions that go with that trust. One thing that’s become increasingly clear to me over the last several weeks is that some aspects of creating a matriarchal economy are a choice and, and a choice that you can make right the now. And I know that sounds too simple, and the reason it sounds too simple is because we’ve been taught that the system is so powerful and so all encompassing and so deeply embedded in everything that extracting yourself from it requires a war or years of pushing against something that feels unmovable and presents itself as unmovable. But that’s the patriarchy’s most effective installation. The belief that there is no door, no way out, that you’re so inside the system that leaving would cost you or could cost you everything. And to me that sounds like a bad relationship. One where leaving feels impossible, where the walls feel like they’re closing in and the cost of leaving feels bigger than the cost of staying, even if it’s extremely painful. And I remember feeling that myself in my marriage, feeling like, oh my God, how am I going to extract myself? How am I going to like even just the thought of separating our finances. Oh my God, it’s so complicated. And I was just so overwhelmed by the thought of that that it just kept me stuck in that place. And so, you know, that place of, overwhelm and survival can be. Can feel so powerful that you can’t even imagine what the other side looks like. Like the possibility of freedom and liberation. And then one day, because either you decide that you have enough or you feel courageous enough, you walk through the door, right? You find the door, you, or you see the door, all of a sudden you walk through it and you realize, oh, it was just a door. And you realize Looking back how trapped in the impossibility you were. And I think most women feel like this, most people feel like this when they leave an abusive partnership. And that’s how the system has power, right? And when we relate to the system in this way, right? Believing the system has power over us in, in this way, right. That keeps us stuck. And if we keep fighting against it, pushing against it and trying to reform it from the inside, we feed it our life force energy, essentially our attention, our outrage and our despair when we, when it doesn’t work. And I have no doubt that exiting the matrix will absolutely involve a fight in some ways, in many ways, we’ll have to fight to protect nature, to protect women and children from, harm and exploitation. And this is where having resources like money will matter the most. But right now for this episode, I want to just focus on the parts that are a choice, focusing on the things that you can control. I want to remind you that we are not here to fix the patriarchy. Obviously. I’m sure that, you know, if you’re listening to this, you’re, clear on that. But what I want to invite you into is that we’re not just replacing it, right? Which we are. We’re here to make it obsolete. And that doesn’t require a battle, it requires a decision. it requires many decisions a day. And most of them will be about asking yourself if you’re choosing relationship. When you make a decision with your money, for example, opening and running a rotating saving circle. I talked about that in another episode. It can be done with your most trusted friends. You can build an irrevocable trust, right? You can, set that up. You can buy from the woman down the street. You can buy from a locally owned business. You can pay someone fairly, whether it’s someone on your staff or whether it’s a VA you hired in the Philippines. Give her a really good pay tip, someone generously show up to your farmer’s market, right? Support the farmers. So many farms are going out of business. So each one of those choices is a vote to stay in relationship, relationship with humans, relationship with the environment, and build an economy that’s not, that isn’t based on an abstraction. And I’ll talk a little bit later about what the abstraction is, what it means. But I want to start by saying you can live matriarchally right now without having a farm and any of those things without having to burn anything down. You just have to choose something else and then do it again tomorrow. So going back to the relationship Analogy. This is the same as. I want you to think of it about this as like choosing yourself versus choosing to go back to the ex or choosing an X. You know, you’re dissentering, you’re decentering patriarchal finance and choosing matriarchal money systems. And let’s get into the details of what that looks like. So I’m going to share with you these six principles that make up a matriarchal financial ecology and offer everyday examples of what that looks like. Now, I want you to think of these six ways as circles that overlap, right? Almost like a sacred geometry. And the place where they all overlap, right, is relationship. So let’s get into the first one. That one is stewardship over domination. So you’re tending to resources rather than extracting them. This is the obvious one. Domination asks, how much do I take? Stewardship asks, how do I tend it so that it keeps giving? Right. It’s a, it’s so that it’s renewable. And the difference is not just philosophical, it is neurological. Because domination is a fear response, I would say a trauma response. And it’s based in scarcity. It takes fear because it doesn’t trust there will be more. It’s kind of like a FOMO response. Stewardship, on the other hand, is a regulated response. Is it’s, it’s a response built in trust. It tends, because it understands the relationship between care and abundance and it trusts that there is more. Right? That that will continue, that it will renew, that it continue to be like, distributed. And this applies to money, to land, to employees, to clients, to your own body. Right. A lot of the parallels that I draw around sustainability and, you know, not extracting and all of those pieces you can apply to your own life force energy, how you treat your own body. So for an example, as an example, a, steward does not fire her team because she’s using AI. And yes, there are people who are bragging about, you know, firing all their employees using AI and like hitting a quarterly target. Like, no, a steward doesn’t extract from the earth faster than it can regenerate. A steward does not run her nervous system into the ground in pursuit of a goal post that keeps moving. Right. Sometimes we think, oh, we have to hit a, a certain goal each month. And you know, sometimes you’re like chasing this, this goal, right? This specific money goal. And you then become so fixated on the goal that you end up extracting from yourself. Hey, real quick, before we get back to the episode, you keep saying you want an indigenous matriarchy now, and I believe you, but wanting it and building it, are two different things. And the gap between them is usually the absence of a system. So I built one. Sovereign wealth is a free blueprint for matriarchal finance and intentional community inspired and guided by indigenous wisdom. We’re talking financial counsels, rotating saving circles, barter economies, land based abundance, seasonal money ceremonies, and intergenerational wealth transfer. All of it organized into actual steps you can start taking right now. This isn’t new. This is a remembering. Our ancestors built wealth without banks, without Wall street, without any of their systems. And we can do it again with a modern twist. It costs nothing because the return to what’s sacred doesn’t belong behind a paywall. Download sovereign wealth using the link in the show notes and if you’re ready to take that fire into your business, I have something for you there too. Rooted to Rise is a step by step guide to organizing your business finances. So your soul led work becomes a matriarchal money machine. 10 steps, nervous system check ins built in a foundation for six figure scalability that doesn’t require you to abandon your body to get there. Two guides, one vision. Both free Download sovereign wealth and Rooted to Rise using the links in the show notes and let’s build. Okay, that’s the conversation. We don’t want you to do that. So stewardship is explicitly matriarchal and it is the energy of the provider who tends, not the conqueror who takes, right? Because we have this internalized colonizer, right? We have this, this taker energy inside of us. And I want to be really clear about that because this is the inner work aspect of it, right? Really looking at ourselves honestly and saying like, where am I actually taking? Where do I not give a about what I’m taking? so we have to be really clear on that. So this is really about care. And when women step into financial stewardship, they’re not imitating patriarchal wealth building, they’re replacing it with something that actually sustains. So what I want you to anchor in, in this moment, right? Like letting money move through you versus like owning it, right? Like the idea here is that you don’t, you don’t own it. you don’t own money. Money isn’t yours. It moves through you. So letting it move through you means not letting it sit in a checking or savings account. I know I’ve sat with several people who have larger sums of money and don’t know what to do with it because, you know, we haven’t received the education. But what you want to think about is giving each dollar a job. And I don’t care what job you give it. You can give it a job of mutual aid, you can give it the job of providing backup savings. You can, give it the job of funding education for yourself or for a child. but I want you to think of it as like, you know, have it working for you. And I think my feeling and my communications with money, money really wants to do that. Money likes a job, money likes intention, and attention. And so speaking of the attention piece, like have money dates, give money that attention. Think money of. I’ve said this before, like think of money as a relationship and enjoy thinking about fantasizing how you and it can co create something together. how you’re gonna do something. Yeah, how are you gonna create together? And so this also means like not letting an old IRA sit idle. you know, sometimes there’s old 401ks from previous employees that are just sitting around and they’re stagnant, they’re not really growing, they’re not really doing anything for you. so you want to really do something about that. So stewardship versus domination is really a question about ownership. Right? Like not thinking of money as something that you own, but something that you steward. Right. And land is not something we own, it’s something we stored. So the, the second principle is sustainability over extraction. And this is really looking at wealth built for the long game. And when I think about long game, you know, matriarchs always think about they obviously they’re holding their ancestors, seven generations of ancestors, but they’re also building seven generations forward. So the ones that are coming after. And extraction, as you can see, is a short sighted game. it takes the most of what it can as fast as it can with no regard to the consequences, no regard for the fallout. and colonial, colonialism is the macro expression of this burnout is the personal one. Right. We’re seeing this in data centers that are being built that are drying up rivers. I haven’t seen visual, evidence of this. I’ve only heard about it. but I’m quite sure that it is actually happening. and sustainability asks a different question. Sustainability, sustainability asks will this be standing in 20 years? Right in if I make this move, how will this, like, how will this sustain this over the long run? Will my children inherit a business or will they inherit a debt? Will this community be more resourced or more depleted by my presence in it? by the decisions I’m making today. And sustainable wealth is generational by design. It builds slowly, it builds intentionally with enough margin to weather disruption. And what I mean when I say that is about like having like a backup plan, right? It doesn’t, you know, we often think about, in business, for example, we think about like going all out, going, all in and, you know, burning the boats. And matriarchal, Matriarchal wealth and stewardship is not, is not that. at least it isn’t for me. It doesn’t require you to sacrifice your health, your relationships, or your integrity to maintain is the opposite of feast and famine cycles that extractive thinking tends to produce. And it is deeply, ancestrally female women have always been the ones thinking seven generations out, like I said, because we’re the ones who bear the consequences when the well runs dry. So as an external practice, you know, one of the things that I use is, you know, I’m building generational wealth for my kids and I’m using index universal life to do it. I, I’ve talked about this before, and it has different names depending on where you live. It’s not just available in the United States. I know that it’s available in Great Britain, I’m sure it’s available in Australia. But it’s basically cash value life insurance. Basically like a, like a life insurance policy that has a savings account inside of it. And it never loses money to the market because it is indexed. Meaning that. Right. It grows when the economy is doing well, when the market is doing well. But then it has downside market protection, almost like it locks in those gains when the market goes down. So many people open these when they’ve maxed out other accounts like their Roth IRA or their ira and they want to diversify into index. Right. Something that isn’t sort of going up and down with the market. And we call these million dollar baby plans when we open them up for our kids. I love that name. And I opened these because two reasons, right? My kids already hold matriarchal economic values, and I wanted them to be as resourced as possible when it came time for them to make those money moves. And I also opened this for them because, you know, before I opened it, I, I would hear them saying things like, oh, I want to, you know, when I’m this age or when I’m grown, I want to open up an orphanage. And it has like 10 beds and I take care of children. And we have this and this and this. And they were like imagining this mansion and this Garden and like this, huge playground. And I wanted to say yes to that because I know that when I had those dreams of like opening up a sanctuary for dogs, for example, like I was told, no, you can’t do that, or that doesn’t make any money or. Right, like all the no’s that we get when we are little. And let’s say you have a seven year old right now and you put in a hundred dollars until the age of nine or, and then rather $200 until the age of 19, $300 until the age of 29. $400. Right. Et cetera, et cetera. Every 10 years you scale up like a hundred dollars. That is the, the slow and sustainable way to do it. Obviously you can start it with a lump sum or you can put $500 a month. But the idea here is that by the time they’re 60 or 65, you’ve put in 266,000 of your own dollars. Right. And, and obviously they take it over eventually, but then they can borrow over, you know, they can borrow through the course of their life. Like let’s say in their 30s, they want to borrow against the policy. They can do that tax free. They can take out a tax free loan. And then if they don’t, let’s say they never take out money and they never borrow against the policy, by the time that they’re 65, they can take out or they can get paid over $100,000, of tax free income when they’re in retirement, like over the course of like 20 years, let’s say. So this is basically, you can use this as a family bank, you can use this as a retirement solution. But really like, when you’re thinking about it in a matriarchal way, you can think about it as, you know, a family bank. Right. And of course, if they’re, I’ll, speak about this later on in more detail. But if, you know, God forbid the child passes away or passes away at, you know, in their 30s, their life insurance, death benefit, the cash value that was in it goes into a trust, right? Into a family trust, into a community trust that then funds things that, you know, repairs on the home inside of a community or, I don’t know, some maybe that it goes to buying the, the plot of land next to the plot of land you have now. Right. So things like that. I’ll get into more details about that in a moment. But basically, if your kids want to fund the revolution, they can. That’s the idea here. Okay, so let’s go to principle number three, relational accountability over individual accumulation. These are trust based economies over competition. So individual accumulation is the story the patriarchal economy tells about how wealth works. Every person for themselves. It’s a zero sum gain, zero sum game. Your gain is my loss. And of course this produces competition, secrecy, exploitation and frankly like the loneliness of like getting to this goal and being at the top and being like, oh, there’s nobody else around. This wasn’t even worth climbing. Right. This is what happens to a lot of people when they, you know, they build the, you know, the multi million dollar business and then they’re like, this isn’t as satisfying as I thought it would be. Like I’m going to just sell all my belongings and do something else. And then they ended up end up giving it to charity or moving to Africa and opening up a school. Right, but the idea here is that your financial decisions are made in relationship. It’s made in relationship with your community, with your values, the people that your money touches. It means being transparent about what you earn and what you charge. Right. A lot of times in coaching industry we see people talking about really lofty money goals. it feels like, it feels fake and it’s not transparent. So it means that your pricing reflects what you need to be sustainable, not what you can extract from somebody’s desperation. Right. Again, using the coaching industry as an example, we saw a lot of people with $40,000 coaching packages when they didn’t really need to charge that amount. yeah. And it’s really investing in people you trust rather than abstractions you can’t see. And it also means, and this is an important one, being accountable for the impact of your wealth. So this isn’t about guilt, it’s about accountability. It’s about knowing where your money goes, what it funds, whose labor it depends on and whether that is in alignment with what you say you believe. And this operates on two axes. So the first axis is about consumption. So you’re tracking the thread backward. Where did this come from? Like where whose hands made it? whose land did this grow on? if it was grown with fertilizers, for example, who was affected by those fertilizers? Was, that labor compensated? And that is accountability to the past, to the supply chain. Right. To the people and the ecosystems behind what you buy. And I’ve, you know, posted multiple times like things I’m boycotting the boycott list. Right. I’m sure that you’ve seen that as well. So those are really good things. To follow because that is like, that is tracking the supply chain. So you’re already doing this if you’re boycotting and stewardship is tracking the thread forward. When I invest in this, right, Am I investing in oil, for example, where is this going? Who benefits from how I move this money right now? What does this investment build? Who gets to eat, who gets housed, whose community gets resourced? Because of how I stored this, right? And together those two axes create a complete relational accountability practice. So you’re conscious of where the money comes from and intentional about where it goes. So I want to say here, I want to stop for a second because I know that this often happens. People try to do it with the sense of perfection. And this is not a perfect process, right? Like the supply chains are so, I don’t even know how to describe this, but they’re so like interwoven that there are going to be things that you need to buy for your survival, for like basic living that are extractive. And what I’m asking you to do is not to be perfect, but just do the best that you can. And the best that you can is really freaking awesome. Okay? Okay. So when you are focused on individual accumulation, or when you make investments, or when you buy things, when you consume without thinking about the relationship, you are severing those threads, you’re severing the thread of relationship. And it abstracts the supply chain so you can’t see the cost of what you’re buying, or you can’t see the, the it abstracts the investment in the same way so you can’t see the impact of what you’re funding. And I think this is intentional, right? We are intentionally not shown the supply chain. It’s the thing that we keep, that it is hidden and we have be been becoming more awake to what that looks like. Like women who work in factories or children even, who work in factories and what they’re paid or what they’re not paid. So an external practice, like what this looks like in everyday practice is that, you know, maybe you start, putting a percentage of your income, right? Maybe it’s 1%, 2%, 3%, 5%, whatever percent you want, but a percentage goes to some sort of impact or you build impact into your offers, right? You say like, yep, a certain, percentage of my earnings from this offer go to this community. and recently I did a series of in person events here where I live. And all of the profits went to, you know, organizations that I already do volunteer work with. Right? So it’s, it’s going to buy school, supplies for a rural community. school. Or it’s going to pay for dental visits for an orphanage. Right. For kids at the orphanage. So as someone who earns US Dollars and lives, someone, lives somewhere that has a lower cost of living. Like that is absolutely an extractive dynamic if you’re not finding ways to build reciprocity into that relationship. And I talk a little bit about that in an episode where I talked about like, m. You know, like, ah, what is it called? I forgot what it’s called. It’s basically like, like arbitrage. You know, arbitrage without being a, you know, a colonizer. So another way that I do this is by not buying from white women. Like, I, I have a rule where I don’t buy from white women unless I can’t find a woman of color who’s like, who’s not teaching the same things. Right? So if, a brown or black woman is teaching the same things as this white woman is teaching it, and it’s still kind of like, yep, you’re teaching me the same thing. I want to learn this thing, then I will buy from the person of color. And some of the ways that you can build relational accountability into your offer is one, you can offer a sliding scale with a floor and a ceiling. So the higher end subsidizes the lower end. So you’re not discounting, you’re building a redistribution mechanism into the price itself. Then a second way that you can do that is to buy one, fund one. So that means that every full price client funds a subsidized or community spot. And that makes impact automatic. It can be really fun. the third is revenue tithing, right? This is the fixed percentage, 1, 5%, whatever it happens to be, of every invoice goes to a named cause mutual aid fund, a community that you’re already in relationship with. And that, a fourth way is collective pricing for groups. I haven’t practiced this myself, but it’s offering a rate for organizations, collectives or intentional communities rather than individuals. So it shifts the unit of transformation from a person to an ecosystem. Okay, so the fourth, principle is capacity over speed, building at the speed of trust, not fear. So this is about again, building wealth over time, playing the long game. Building at the speed of trust also means that the pace of your financial decisions is set by the depth of your relationships rather than the urgency of the market. So this can be the anti fomo, right? You don’t invest in something because the window is closing and oh my God, I got to get in there. You invest because you know the people, you know the PR project. If we’re talking about crypto, you understand the values, you’ve had the conversation, it feels good. So your due diligence is relational, not just analytical, although it needs to be analytical too. But it’s not just analytical. this also can mean that your business grows at the pace that your nervous system can actually hold. So it’s not faster than your capacity can to store what’s coming in. Right? Because sometimes this is what happens when someone receives a large lump sum that they’re like, their nervous system is not ready for, or their business explodes and they’re like, holy, I don’t know if I can hold this. Right. So you’re wanting to, you know, build your business as you with your nervous system. Right. And so if you’re in a situation where your business is expanding so quickly that it outruns your internal ecology, that can create an extraction dynamic. Right? So, that’s just basically, you know, that same process of extraction externally pointed inward. And what this looks like in an everyday practice is And I’m using the, the sort of the word trust as a little bit of a play on words because this is about the bioregional trust. And I’m so excited about this. I’ve been learning about that in the last two months. So most of us has, have been given two options. You know what to do with your wealth when you die. You either leave it to your kids or you give it away. And that’s basically all that’s on the menu. But there’s a third option, and it’s been available this whole time, I didn’t know. So remember that policy that I spoke to you about earlier that I, that I took out on my kids? This index, Universal life, it’s basically the million dollar baby plan. So this is the permanent life insurance protection that builds wealth while you’re alive. Tax free loans, accessible now. And when you die, it goes to, you know, there’s no probate, no taxes, it goes to the person that’s assigned. Right. The beneficiary. And so your family is protected, that part is handled. But then you do something else. You write into the architecture that a portion flows into a place, right? It’s basically a trust that belongs to a bioregion. So it’s governed by the people who tend it, it’s protected by law and it’s permanent. And from that trust, three things get funded at the same time. So one portion goes to the land. One portion goes to the people and one portion goes to the knowledge. So the part that goes to the land is about like, you know, making sure that, the land is protected, that there is, you know, that you’re planting certain things that you’re protecting it from people who want to come in, and take it, or, put chemicals on it or, you know, hunt, whatever, blah, blah, blah. The other one protects the people, making sure that they are, that they have health care, for example. And then the knowledge is making sure that, you know, kids have the education they need. Right? So those are just three examples. And this is basically a matriarchal economy made legal. Your children are taken care of. The land that your children will actually inherit is taken care of and ensures that it’s healthy on the long run. In the long run. And the community that will hold them, you know, is also taken care of. And so what’s lovely here is that you don’t have to choose between your children or the ecology, right? The land or the children. It’s all sort of like built in. So I hope that was really exciting. And now we’re going to move on to principle number five of a matriarchal economy. And it is circulation over hoarding. So this is wealth that moves through community. And the idea here is that money that sits, right, that is just kind of like sitting bored to tears in your high yield savings account, which is better than having it sit in a checking account. But money that sits still is not, is not wealth, it’s accumulation. And accumulation is fine if you are in the process of building from having less than what you need, right? Absolutely. Accumulate to a place where you are in overflow and then can give freely and generously. But this is really about like stagnancy versus flow, right? And it happens when we sort of like when we grip onto our money, when we are sort of in a scarcity, embodiment. So this talks about rotating savings, right? This is what it looks like, externally. This is one example, right. And again, I talked about this on another episode of the podcast, about alternative economies. But circulation over hoarding means also just investing in women owned businesses. It means participating in those rotating, credit associations, paying fairly, tipping generously, keeping money inside of communities that have historically, historically been extracted from. It means understanding that your financial flourishing and your community’s financial flourishing is not in competition. It kind of, it’s the same movement, right? So you’re really thinking about yourself in place, right? Your, your yourself as connected to your community, which is not, is not something that we’re taught to do. Right. We’re. I think that part of, white supremacy is really thinking of ourselves as like, really apart from the land that we live on, apart from community. So, so the sue, as I said in a, in an earlier podcast, is a group of people, who pull money together regularly. And then one person receives that pool at a time. So it goes in circles. Right. So like, you know, let’s say every, every three months there’s another person who receives it. Right. So we take turns. And an equitable SU works in the same principle as the traditional susu, except that the people who can give more, give more. and so not everybody contributes the same amount, and the contributions are based on capacity. So yeah, everybody participates, everyone contributes, everyone receives. But the structure is designed around equity rather than equality. Right. So that would be the difference. It’s just kind of recognizing that the same dollar amount, means very different things depending on who’s putting it in. And the accountability is still very much relational. And the trust, the. Right, the. Yeah, it is just a sense of trust. Like, and, and like, yeah, you’re going to be holding this, you’re holding this with me. Right. It creates a sense of togetherness and belonging and, and it explicitly redistributes within the circle. So you’re, you’re building a small wealth transfer into the structure. Right. And it’s logical, it’s practical. I recently heard of, ah, an example of these cooks, working for a particular restaurant in New York City. They were, they created this and they were basically funding each person’s new restaurant. I thought that was so, so brilliant. And you can do this with Index Universal Life policies. I’m, I love Index Universal Life, by the way. I, if you haven’t noticed yet, but let’s say you live in an intentional community with six families, and let’s say each head of household has one of these insurance policies, but really everybody in the house should have the insurance policy and a portion of the death benefit goes into that community trust. So it’s the same as the, the bioregional financing facilities, but it’s a community trust. And that trust sort of stays within this particular community of six families. And of course there can be like, bioregional and sort of like things that happen beyond the community, but it’s basically the same model and it stays sort of within this community. yeah. And so like the death benefit goes into that community trust. The community trust helps families who are in crisis or who have like medical bills, who maybe can go into the overhead costs of starting a business, you know, getting another piece of land, educational funds for the children. Same thing, right. And yeah, it’s just really like traditional tools that are used collectively. Right. This is what I love is like when we think, when we start to think collectively, we start to think like a lot more broadly. But we’re not taught to think this way. So the sixth and final principle is enoughness over endless expansion. And, and I’m so, so passionate about this one. This has been transformative for me, but really looking at sufficiency as a radical act. So when I talk about enoughness, it doesn’t mean that you’re settling, it doesn’t mean that you’re shrinking your vision or capping your desires. It is just the radical recognition that there is a point at which the growth needs to stop. And it means the same thing for a business. Like the growth of a business for how much you do with your body, it can mean for a community or an ecosystem, right? Where when you go beyond like where expansion just flips into extraction, right? You want to know where that line is and it’s going to be different for everybody. So this doesn’t mean like matriarchal economies are not anti abundance, it’s just anti endless. Right? It’s really just knowing where, when the harvest is enough and then letting the land rest. And that restraint is not weakness. It’s just like just the intelligence that ensures that there will be another harvest. This goes into the sustainability piece again. And in practice this means building a business to your actual capacity rather than an algorithm’s expectation. It’s pricing for sustainability rather than maximum extraction. It’s and knowing what enough looks like for your life and letting that be the measure, not someone else’s, you know, seven figure benchmark. Right. And you know, one thing that you would need to do in order to, on a very practical level, figure out what is enough for you. Because there’s, you know, there’s two sides of enoughness. There’s the enoughness of like, what do I actually practically need in you know, your unit of currency? What do I need in order to, let’s say no longer work? Or how much do I need to make per month to be able to save and invest? And then there’s the internal piece that’s like, how much does enough feel like for me? what would be, what would be like a good amount? And that’s, you know, like that is based on your internal scarcity work. Like how are you building enoughness in your body? So what I want you to do with do now is calculate your monthly expenses, right? Go through your entire expenses, and when you come up with that amount, I want you to double it, right? And that is approximately how much you actually need to make investments, build generational wealth and be in overflow. Previously it was like, okay, 25% of your income, you know, should be going to savings and investments, but now we recommend 50%. So if your expenses are low enough that, you know, 50%, you know, of the money you make goes to expenses and then you have 54 savings and you know, to. To invest, then that is perfect. and in terms of your financial independent num. Financial independence number, that is the amount you need to. And to like that you need to have invested to live off the returns indefinitely, right? And this is what people who are in the fire community, you know, financial independence retire early. This is, you know, what the, the first thing that they need to do to, to figure out like how much do they need. And the, the formula is your annual expenses divided by the withdrawal rate that equals the financial independence number. And the withdrawal rate is usually 4%. That’s like a really, conservative number. And that’s based on historical market returns sustaining 30 plus years of withdrawals, right? So if you need, let’s say if you need $80,000 a year to live, you would take $80,000, divide that by 4% to get $2 million and then you would need, okay, well I need to have $2 million saved to be able to live off that 4% every year. Right? But you want to take into account inflation as well. But what, you know, what you want to build in, right, as part of this, you know, matriarchal economy is that, you know, when you participate in things like rotating savings model, when you are, when you have land trusts built in, when you have collective ownership or something, then you don’t necessarily need to have that particular financial independence number because there are going to be other pieces of the ecosystem or of the architecture that are built in to lower that financial independence number, right? So the, when the resources are shared, right, It. You don’t need the individual financial independence number. Collective sufficiency is, is like another story. So I’m sure that you are already implementing some of these matriarchal principles, right? That you’re actually living them in your life right now. And you know, I’m sure that maybe you were reminded of some things or you were you know, some new ideas were sparked. And if you’re not doing any of these things, my suggestion would be to just do one a day, right? Until it feels easy and kind of like, yep, I’m doing this. This is just normal now. Then increase it to 2 until that feels normal. Then increase it to 3 until that feels normal. And onward, right? And these are the simple 1 degree shifts that render an entire old dinosaur of a system obsolete and to support the thriving of your economy. Like, think about it, like, making all of these little moves every day. It really is, like, it’s so, so powerful. And matriarchy really depends on ordinary people choosing relationship and not this abstraction. So, thank you again for listening. It is always my pleasure to be here with you. And I will see you in the next episode.