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Diane Rene: 0:06

You're listening to the Decluttered Mom podcast, a podcast built specifically for busy moms by a busy mom. I'm your host, Diana Rene, and in 2017, I had my second daughter and it felt like I was literally drowning in my home Okay, not literally, but I felt like I couldn't breathe with all of the stuff surrounding me. Over the next 10 months, I got rid of approximately 70% of our household belongings and I have never looked back. I kind of feel like I hacked the mom system and I'm here to share all the tips, tricks and encouragement. Let's listen to today's show. Welcome to this episode of the decluttered mom podcast. I am really excited, you guys, because I've been talking for a while about starting to include more experts as guests on the podcast. As you know, a large majority of my episodes are just me, just solo episodes, and they're short and to the point, and I love those and I get good feedback about those. And then, really, except for one person, we have only had guests on that were members of my program and we talked through their entire decluttering journeys and everything like that. You guys seem to love those also, and we definitely have a whole nother round of those coming up soon, but we have been exploring more, adding guests on who are experts and topics that are not decluttering, but they're directly surrounding everything that I teach. So for today, I'm really excited because this is someone who teaches how to stop doing something that I have always struggled with, that I know a lot of you struggle with, and that is overspending. We talk all about the shame of overspending, why we overspend, and the expert that I chose for this topic Her name is Paige Pritchard and we're going to put all of her information in the show notes so you can check out her Instagram, and she has her own podcast and she has a membership also. So we're going to include all of those links in the show notes. But Paige is someone who I actually only recently discovered, but everything I was seeing of hers I was like, yes, this is what. This is what I need to share With the people in my audience and who listen to my podcast, because it's super, super helpful. So we cover all sorts of things. We talk about social media, influencers and how to avoid feeling influenced by products that we don't really want or need. We talk about the shame of overspending. We talk actual, real strategies, tips that you can take today and you can start using to start slowing down your overspending. This she page was just so kind, she's so informative, you can tell that she knows her stuff, and so she and I probably could have talked for like six hours on this topic, but I like to try and keep my episodes to 20 minutes or less. I think with these expert ones we're going to have to lengthen it a little bit, but we are going to do a two part series for this one. So just because it was an hour and that's just too long for my podcast, so we're going to do part one this week and then part two next week, and I hope you enjoy it. Please let me know and you're in my DMs If you if you like having these guests experts on, I'd love to hear it. We have several more scheduled over this next quarter that I'm really excited about. So, without further ado, let's play that conversation. All right, so I have Paige Pritchard here, and I actually found her through Carly, who you guys all know as a debt free mom. I found Paige a few weeks ago on her stories and I was really excited because she is an overspending expert. She teaches women how not to overspend, and that is something that comes up a lot in our community and, honestly, for me also, because I have ADHD and I have found that that is like we'll get into that, but but that is something that I have struggled with over time also. So, paige, welcome to the podcast.

Paige Pritchard: 4:51

Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Diane Rene: 4:54

Yeah, okay, can you just share a little bit about who you are, a little bit about you, but then also, how did you become this overspending expert?

Paige Pritchard: 5:04

Yeah, yeah, I'd love to Again. My name is Paige Pritchard. I am the founder of Overcoming Overspending, which is an online community and membership where I give you the tools and coaching to stop overspending impulse shopping, compulsive shopping and I guess we can just, right out of the gate, just define overspending. The way that I define overspending is really any spending that you're doing that's to your own detriment. So I think people hear overspending and they think, oh, overspending like spending more money than you have or spending more money than you plan to spend, which that's certainly part of it. But the way that I kind of view it in my world is overspending can be spending more than you have going into debt, but it could also be using shopping as a coping mechanism, using it to kind of like distract and buffer yourself from emotions If you're spending or shopping is creating problems for you outside of your finances. So, like the things that you talk about right, like, is it cluttering up your environment? Is it weighing on you mentally and emotionally? Is it creating tension and strain in your relationships? Is it sucking up a lot of your time? So I always like to define that out of the gate, because for marketing purposes it's like, oh, overcoming overspending, but really just think of it as like any spending you do kind of like to your own detriment. But yeah, so I guess how I kind of got here today is it really kind of starts with my own story and my own struggles with overspending. I'm 34 today, but when I was in my younger 20s, I was, without a doubt, a full blown compulsive shopper. I had just graduated from college. I got my first job out of college. I was making $60,000 a year. As a 22 year old, like I went from being a broke college student that had never in her life probably had more than $30 in her checking account right To being like, oh, here's a $60,000 salary. And on top of that, I moved back at home with my parents because I was in $40,000 of student loan debt, had no savings, and I was like, well, I'm just going to move it home and I'm really going to use this year to really kind of like, build a solid financial foundation for myself. I'm going to make a huge debt in these loans. I'm going to save up some money, because the truth was is like I virtually had no expenses, because a lot of the expenses that I have to pay and working about today. A lot of those were just covered by living at home with my parents. I was very lucky and blessed to be able to do that. And then my job covered a lot of the other traditional expenses that you have as an adult, Like because I was working at a car dealership. They gave me a car to drive. It wasn't my car, but they were like here, while you're working here, you can drive this car around. It's free advertising for them. But you know they're like here's a car, we'll pay for your gas, we'll pay for your insurance, we'll pay for your cell phone bill. So I really went into this year being like this is going to be great, fantastic. I'm going to make so much progress. And, to make a long story short, I didn't. I impulse shopped my way all of my salary. I impulse shopped away my $60,000 salary. The end of that year came and it was time to move out. My parents were like okay, like little birdie, it's been a year like fly go and I couldn't even afford a security deposit on an apartment to move out of my parents' house. And my parents are looking at me like what do you mean? You can't afford to move out. Like what have you been doing for the past year? And essentially like kind of what happened? Is that first trip? I remember it like so distinctly. It's like that first trip that I made that I went up to like the Ritz-Siemal in Dallas to kind of like buy myself a corporate wardrobe. I spent my entire first paycheck on a new wardrobe because in my head I had this ideal of like what it meant and what it looked like to be a corporate girl. You know, I had like how to lose a guy in 10 days and devil wears Prada in my head. You know I'm like a 90s girl, right? So like a group in the 90s and the early 2000s watching movies like that. And I remember spending my entire first paycheck on a new wardrobe and thinking like, okay, this is all I'm gonna do, this is all I'm gonna spend. But that first shopping trip, it was just like the euphoria that I felt and also I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I was able to go to like Nordstrom's and Anthropa, like all of these stores that previous to that were never a possibility for me, ever. It was like, oh, we don't shop there, it's too expensive. And now I was making all this money and it was kind of like a surge to my ego of like, oh, look like I can go into Nordstrom's now and Anthropology now and I can actually afford to buy stuff here. And that first shopping trip really kind of opened up the spending faucet for me and what started as one shopping trip basically turned into multiple shopping trips a week. It was not uncommon for me to just leave the dealership on my lunch break and go up to the mall and just like very casually, just like stroll into J-Crew and Banana Republic and just drop $300 here and $500 here. And I was always in my head I was like, well, I have the money, like the money's like sitting in my checking account. I guess the good thing is is that I didn't go into debt that year, but I pretty much did spend everything that I had, and so that year it was like $60,000 was just in my closet. It was like I had a killer wardrobe, right, I had great shoes and the bags and the accessories and the wardrobe, but I had no money. I had made no progress on my loans, I had saved none of it. And that was kind of like my breaking point where I realized if I don't do something about this now, I'm gonna be broke for the rest of my life. And I don't wanna paint it like an overnight success, because it certainly was not, because, again, that was when I was like 22, 23 and I'm 34 now. So it wasn't an overnight thing. This has been a commitment over a long period of time to solving this problem. But I will say that when I first started going out and searching for solutions, the solutions that I would find weren't super helpful to me because they were very surface level and at that point for me the issue ran much deeper, right, like the issue was like an internal issue, an emotional issue, a self-concept issue, and the only advice that I could find was like, oh, just unsubscribe from emails and just like delete your credit card out of fill. And I was like but you don't understand, like I don't need to be getting the emails, I'm just gonna go up to the store and like I know my credit card's by heart. So you telling me to delete my credit cards, like that's not helpful. So it really was kind of like a blend of. I was like okay, the solution here probably lies in the middle. There absolutely is kind of like a mathematical, kind of a little component of this, because there's just a mathematical reality with money, of what you have coming in and what you have going out, but it was also like this huge behavioral piece that I felt was missing. And so that's what I've been working on for the past decade. I think that with I'll say like, in the past five years, I feel like there's kind of been a perfect storm that has really brought this issue to a head. I will say one is just the rise in technology, so like Amazon, like how easy is it to just shop now and how much have we become accustomed to like seeing something, buying something and having it at our doorstep in a matter of hours, days at max. So the rise in technology, the rise in social media has been huge, like the rise in Instagram, the rise in TikTok. It's just like the level of visibility that we have into people's lives that we didn't even have five years ago. And then I'll say the pandemic too. The pandemic was kind of like I felt the straw that broke the camel's back when we were all stuck in our houses, couldn't go anywhere, couldn't do anything. So what did a lot of us do Like we shopped. We went online and we shopped and that's what we did. So this has really kind of come to a head and it's just a huge need that I saw in the personal finance space and it's just something that no one really talks about. Like people would come to me in secret being like, hey, like I'm in $10,000 worth of credit card debt or I have all this debt that my husband doesn't know about, or it was just like secret, like nobody wanted to talk about it, and so I was just like listen, I've been there, I get it, I understand and I'm not afraid or ashamed to share my story anymore. So if I have to be the person that goes and runs through the brick wall to do it, I'm happy to do it to help you guys. So that was kind of the birth of it.

Diane Rene: 13:53

I love that Okay, I feel like we can go so many directions because there are so many things. You said that.

Paige Pritchard: 13:58

I was like wait, I'm sorry, I know that was a lot.

Diane Rene: 14:00

No, no, no, no, no, no, it's great. So something that you were just talking about with the shame Like I think that I think a lot of people do feel shame in overspending. But what I want to go into is like I think that as moms I think moms especially because they're buying for their kids, right, and so they have like one element of like feeling like they're taking really good care of their kids by buying all of these things for their children. And we deal with this in the decluttering space too, right, because it's like we want to buy them all the latest and greatest toys and get them into all the activities and things like that, because we want to be good moms and we want the best for our kids. So like the intention is good, but then it's like weighing that with all of the feelings of like shame or guilt or dread, even when you get that credit card bill or when you look at your bank statement, and there's what I have found from talking to people is then there's even another layer in some families where they're doing all of this and they're not telling their spouse, and so then their spouse, you know, there's like there's so many layers here, and so when you said shame, I think that you just hit the nail on the head. I think that there is so much of that and there and the shame is there for like so many layers of reasons.

Paige Pritchard: 15:28

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I would say shame is the most prominent emotion that I deal with with the women in my community, right, like I have a process that I kind of walk people through and shame has its own like step in the process, because I'm telling you like pretty much everyone I come across is dealing with almost just like a debilitating level of shame, right, and so it's very prominent. But the biggest thing I have to say about shame is this is what I tend to see is, first of all, shame thrives in the darkness. Right, I didn't come up with that. Someone else, like much wiser than me, said that it could have been like Brene Brown or something like that. But I've heard it said many times, but it's true. It's like shame thrives in the darkness, and so it's not like you have to go out and like shout this to the whole world, but just kind of like getting yourself in the presence of other people who can kind of like sympathize with what you're going through and can understand what you're going through, and where you also feel safe, just to come out and say like this is the situation that I'm, that I'm in. Even just like like coming out with it just will bring like a huge weight off your shoulders. But the other thing I see with shame too is that we compound the shame. It's almost like we feel shame about our shame, right. I call it kind of like creating like a negative emotion sandwich. It's kind of like you feel shame and then you feel shameful for feeling so ashamed, and so I always tell the women in my community that I'm like Listen, you have to. I want you to treat your shame almost kind of like a house guest. That's like coming over to your house. It's like you know the house guest is coming. When they get there, you're going to let them in. They're probably going to stay for a while, right, they're probably going to stay for a couple of days, but there is an end point, like there is an end point that they're going to leave once they've kind of like stayed their welcome. Like all house, all house guests eventually end up leaving and that's how our emotions are right around our spending. It's like these emotions are always going to leave and always going to dissipate if you allow them to be there, if you don't fight against them, if you don't resist them and also if you don't judge them for being there, right, it's like if you don't feel shame about the shame or if you don't feel judgment about the shame, and I want to offer this to like. This is just kind of a little like lighter trick that I always give with money. I feel like shame can be so intense because with money, we view money as a very like finite resource. That's very like black and white and because of that there's so many rules that we associate to money and it's always kind of like am I following the rules or am I not following the rules? Right, this is kind of like the, I guess, like the square that we always try to like fit ourselves in is like am I being good or am I being bad? Am I following the rules or am I not following the rules? But I always like to view the past choices that I've made with money because, trust me, there are many choices that I've made with money in the past that if I like truly like. I know people say like, oh, no regrets, like I have regrets. Like if somebody is like, would you go back and do things differently? I'm like, for sure, there's a lot of things that I would go back differently if I had the opportunity to do that. Of course, we know that we can't and so it's not helpful to like ruminate in that. But what I always do is like, I always think about the past version of myself who made those choices, and just having a lot of like compassion for her, because I know, at the end of the day, that it was never like exactly what, exactly how you put it. You put it beautifully, like it wasn't done maliciously, right. 99% of the time it was coming from a good place. You were trying to do the best thing for yourself. You were trying to do the best thing for your kids or for your family, and so, knowing that it's like can we have compassion for that past version of ourselves? I always think of it as like. When you look at a photograph of yourself like 10 or 15 years ago, the first thing you always notice is like what you're wearing, and you're always kind of like oh my gosh, look at that outfit I was wearing. Like, isn't that so funny that we used to like, think that, like looked good or whatever. And it's like. That's how I want you to think about your past choices with money. It's like, think about it like the old outfits that you used to wear. Because when you think about it that way, you don't look at a photo of yourself from 15 years ago and go, oh my gosh, you were so stupid, how could you do that? Like that was so dumb of you to wear that stupid outfit. Like you should have known that it's like no, like you can almost kind of like laugh with yourself about it because you're like. Although it's not a choice that I would remake today, I can remember at the time how I thought that that was a really good choice and because of that I can have a lot of compassion for for my past self who made that decision.

Diane Rene: 20:22

Yeah, I really really like that and this isn't totally the same, but kind of in the same vein. I guess. For a long time I had my phone background as a picture of me when I was like seven years old and just the words be kind. So it was like a reminder of like every time I looked at my phone. And I did that because I was like I'm going to look at my phone more than I'm going to look in the mirror in my bathroom and so it was just a reminder that like that like little girl is still in there and like that's who we are right, and so like would I say the things that I'm like, the mean things I'm saying to myself, would I say that to seven year old me, 100% not, you know, I would be encouraging, just like I am to my own girls and so kind of. In that it's just kind of along the same lines, is like showing that compassion and grace and kindness. And I also really loved what you said about surrounding yourself with people who are in the same type of time or struggle, because that's something I see constantly in my program is because people share before and after all the time, right, so I cannot tell you how many times I get DMs or emails from people in my program and they're like just knowing that I'm not the only one who struggles with this, or I'm not the only one whose home looks like this was worth joining the program, just because it like lifted this feeling of like so much guilt and shame.

Paige Pritchard: 21:55

Yeah, 100%. I mean it's like the same thing in mind, right, like right now, every single month we kind of focus on a different topic, and it's this month we're focusing on debt and, like one of the exercises that I had everyone go through is just like share how much debt you have, which, of course, everyone was like yeah, nobody wanted to be the first one. You know what I mean. It was like kind of like waiting for like everyone else to say anything. But I told them I'm like look, it's just gonna take a few brave soldiers to kind of like be the first ones. But as soon as a couple people started coming out, it was like I'm in $30,000 worth of credit at Cardette. Like there's many women in my community who have had their houses foreclosed on, who have gone through bankruptcy, right and to your point, they're just like. It almost just feels like okay, I feel like I can take a deep breath, just knowing like I'm not alone and I'm not the only one, cause, like I said, that shame is going to just thrive when you feel isolated. It's gonna thrive in the darkness. It's gonna thrive when you feel like you're the only one and you're not right, like you're not the only one with kind of like a messy, cluttered environment. You're not the only one in debt. There's many of us out here.

Diane Rene: 23:05

It's like you just gotta find your people right, exactly, I hope you enjoyed the first part of the conversation here with Paige. Next week we're gonna jump into all of the questions that you guys okay, not all of the questions you guys submitted, because you submitted so many, I don't even know how many I don't I didn't count, but it was a lot of questions. So I asked some of the most common questions that I was getting over and over, and also just ones that I was like, ooh, that's a good one, and also just questions I had. So we are going to go over all of those. It's kind of I threw a lot at her in the second half of the podcast, which will air next week. I hope you have a great rest of your week and we'll see you back here next week on the Decluttered Mom podcast. Thanks for hanging out and listening to the Decluttered Mom podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean the world If you could write a review or share this episode with a friend or your Instagram stories. And if you're on Instagram, be sure to follow me at thedeclutteredmom and send me a DM to say hi. I'd love to hear what you thought about today's episode. I hope you'll come back next week and hang out with us again.