11. Part 1: The Chipmunks Made Me Talk About Debt

From my back deck in western Connecticut, surrounded by birds, dogs, and the occasional chipmunk chaos, I share why I am stepping back into personal finance after a deep season of sharing somatic breathwork and healing work. 

I walk through my real money story, from being raised by a single mom where “we can’t afford it” was a common refrain, to earning my own income early through babysitting and building a hands-on envelope budgeting system. 

I share about student loans, financial literacy, and what it means to actually know your balances when you are the one signing for the debt. I also unpack credit cards and how easy it is to drift into overspending when money becomes invisible.

Finally, I reflect on personal finance coaching, the external noise that pushed me away from money conversations, and why I now believe the future is both: clear money management plus nervous system support so your money capacity can expand without burnout.

Join us for Rewiring Wealth coming up LIVE! Doors close July 26, 2026.

Connect with Sara on Instagram here.

Transcript

Backyard Hello And Setting

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, hello. Welcome back to the podcast. Today I am sitting on my back deck to bring you this really important episode in the series to come. You may hear the birds in the background or my dogs. I'm gonna do my best to pause if the dogs start barking at animals. We have a beautiful, I want to call them a colony, but I don't think that's the correct word, population of chipmunks on our three acres of property, and every so often the chipmunks pop up and the dogs go crazy. We also have black bears that wander through our yard on a weekly basis at least. Um, the neighbors sent a really cute photo a couple weeks ago of about I would say a mile or two miles off of our property down the street was a mama bear and a baby bear. So um I live in Connecticut. If you don't know that, I am in western Connecticut, and yeah, my husband and I own a beautiful three acres um with our forever home. It's so funny. I bought my first house with my ex-husband in 2019, and I always knew like that was my first home. I'm like, alright, I'm buying my first home, this is not where I'm gonna be forever. And then I got divorced. I stayed in that house because it was in my name, and my ex-husband was fine with me staying there and him moving out, and then I met my now husband, and we both owned our own houses at the time, about 30 to 40 minutes from each other. And when we became pregnant, we decided to look for a house together and did lots of house hunting. And when we toured this one, I just knew. This is the house, the wooden floors, the exposed wood wooden beams. Oh, there's beautiful brick. We have a beautiful brick fireplace. Oh my gosh. And our dining room. We actually have three fireplaces, another dining, another fireplace in our living room, and then a fireplace in our bedroom. Funny enough, we have lived here for over three years yet, and we have not once used a fireplace while I have been in the house. My husband has used the fireplace during emergencies and winter storms when my daughter and I have gone to see at my mom's to have heat when we've had like day-long, days-long power outages. Um, and he's used the fireplace to keep warm, but yeah, actually, I haven't used them. But yeah, all of this to say it's just so incredible to be on my back patio. Hear all of these birds. The birds have been so loud recently. It is summertime. We did have, oh, we also had a nest next to our deck, a nest with uh, I think it was four babies. We were seeing three at one point, and then at the very end, I think I saw four, and I saw them when they were see if I can get this right. Fledglings, not nestlings, because nestlings, I did all this research, don't have feathers, and these babies were pretty big with feathers. Um, and I just knew my daughter wanted to take her little camera and go take a picture of them. My husband was like, Okay, you can do it this afternoon after school. We have to charge the camera, so charge the camera, and I just knew, and I was like, today's the day they're leaving, today's the day they're gonna be out of the nest and go off on their own. And sure enough, that afternoon, when I went to go look, all the all the babies were gone from the nest. They must have taken off and made their way into the world. So it's just really cool to be back here, to be in nature, to have privacy, to be with Mother Earth in a way that is so grounding, so relaxing, and yeah, to have this conversation today.

Why I Am Returning To Money

SPEAKER_00 4:56

So if you don't know, before I started my brand Remothering Mamas, you can find us on Instagram if we're not already connected at Remothering Mamas in 2023. After I had my daughter and gave birth to her at the end of 2022, and I was like, oh my gosh, all of this work that I'm doing with women around personal finances, I was a personal finance coach, I need to bring this to mothers, and then I became certified in somatic breath work and really shifted out of personal finances and into somatic breath work, and I think that I was getting a lot of external noise that was confusing around being a personal finance coach and not feeling confident in myself and my abilities, and so I made this shift that was beautiful and necessary and so powerful to my healing with the somatic breath work and to be able to bring that modality to women. And now, three years later, I'm coming back really um, I'm at a loss for words right now. I'm seeing an image of like digging your foot into the soil, like um not burrowing, but like standing your ground. And I'm coming back into that with my passion for personal finances and money and the importance of it. So,

Growing Up With Tight Money

SPEAKER_00 6:39

my background, um, when I was in high school, actually before high school, um, middle school, I started babysitting. I knew I had always grown up around kids. My mom was the center director of a corporate daycare, basically my entire upbringing. And so I was naturally just around kids all the time. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna be a babysitter, I'm gonna help out these families that I'm around all their kids all the time, anyways. And so I went and got like my babysitting first aid CPR certification. It was specifically for babysitters, which is really cool. And at 12 year olds, 12 years old, I went on to babysit for families regularly and start making my own money. And I was like, all right, as soon as I'm 16, I'm gonna get my first job and make more money. Now, if you don't know, if you haven't heard on previous episodes or seen in my content, um I was raised by a single mom and money was expressed as tight as we couldn't afford things. Um I knew she she made it very clear she was living paycheck to paycheck. And I always think it's important to state like she did put me in competitive gymnastics from the age of three until 13, and who knows? I'm sure it was expensive, how much that cost to be in practice three days a week, to go to competitions on the weekend, to have a leotard and our warm-up suits and our duffel bags and our grips for the bars and all the things that come with being a competitive gymnast. So my mom did invest a lot of time and money to put me into that sport. But then when it came to things like new clothes, it was like, all right, the beginning of the school year, you get new clothes, that's it. That lasts you the school year. The next year, right, you'll get more clothes. If you want anything else, it's really like around Christmas time. She also did, um, which I did not appreciate as a child, take us to Disney at least five times, Disney World in Florida. And so her money went there as well. But again, there was a lot of like, oh, we can't afford this, or not right now. Um so I decided in high school, all right, I'm gonna get my first job, I'm gonna start making money, and I didn't know at the time about scarcity mindset, abundance mindset. I just knew I'm gonna learn how to not live paycheck to paycheck. I'm going to learn personal finances inside out and out, and methods for essentially stewarding money, using money in ways that serve me, get me out of the lower middle class, and can make life better.

The Envelope Budget That Worked

SPEAKER_00 9:52

And so what I did was I literally studied personal finances and in the beginning, right, being young, I had a bank account for direct deposit, but really what I enjoyed doing was setting up a physical envelope system. So I had envelopes for all my different needs. An envelope to put gas in my car, an envelope to put money in for when it was time to pay for the car insurance. I had an envelope for savings. What I was saving for, I don't remember, but I know that that was something that I put in there. I had an envelope for just miscellaneous spending if I wanted to go clothes shopping or go to the movies with friends or go out to dinner with friends. I had that. I think I had an envelope for Christmas gifts to save up money to get folks gifts when it was time for the holidays. And so I really like implemented the system and began learning about personal finances.

Student Loans And Knowing Your Numbers

SPEAKER_00 10:49

Then I went into college and I had to take out student loans on my own because my mom wasn't able to co-sign for me due to um, I'll just put it simply, her financial situation. And so signing all of my federal loans was on myself. I was, I think it's called an independent student. Um and I just had to sign everything myself. And I didn't realize like how uncommon that was until I was actually in college. I had roommates, and I was like, yeah, I'm taking out like $25,000 a year to be here for room and board and classes and all the things. And then plus, I still owe money every semester, and so I'm a part of the federal work study program to make money on campus and go to the bursar's office and pay my balance every two weeks when I get paid, and I chip away at the money that I still owe for my tuition every two weeks. And I remember friends being like, wait, how do you know how much you owe on your student loans? And like, because I had to sign for them. Like, I just I had to know, I had to know. I had to know how much they are because I'm signing for them. And they were like, oh, well, my parents signed for them, and I just kind of like co-signed for them. And I was like, Oh, you don't know how much student loan debt you're taking out? And they said they had no idea. All they know is that maybe they didn't really qualify for financial aid because of their parents' income, and they were taking out like an exponential amount of student loan debt, and it just like baffled me that these women I was going to college with had no, really no grasp of their debt and their personal finances, and so that was really eye-opening. Um, something else I did in college was I got my first credit card to build my credit score. I really tried to make sure I was constantly paying off the balance every month, but I noticed how easy it could be to fall into just swiping and using your entire credit card balance without realizing. Thankfully, it didn't happen like too extreme. I think over the years I racked up like $10,000 in credit card debt, but then was able to pay it off. But just to see like how easy it could be for others to fall into that. So then when I graduated college, I had again a pretty good understanding because I was receiving money throughout college by working, my work study jobs. I had multiple of them, and then saving money again, gas in my car, car insurance, groceries, just little things here and there, paying the balance on my tuition that I owed that my student loans didn't cover. And I graduated and I was like, okay, I think with interest, I graduated with $87,000 of student loans. Now, this was federal loans plus one private loan of $10,000 that a family friend, thank God, was able to sign for me to help cover my freshman year and housing. Um, and so that one, so then okay. Then I got into how to pay off student loan debt. I know about personal finances, receiving money, budgeting, spending money, staying within your budget, savings.

Paying Off Debt With A Plan

SPEAKER_00 15:17

Now I have this massive accumulation of debt. So now how do I get out of this debt? So then I started studying how to pay off debt and how to pay off student loans. And the way that I did it was I first looked at interest rates, and I was like, okay, my private student loan has the highest interest rate compared to my federal loans. That's the one I'm gonna tackle first. And so I got my first job a couple months after graduation, working full-time, making a full-time income, and completely got slapped in the face about oh my gosh, I worked it this hard to sit in an office 40 hours a week. And it's funny because 10 years later I am still in corporate. I did take about a two-year sabbatical between 2021 and 2022. Um, it was about a year and a half sabbatical, but yeah, so now I'm back in corporate. And I do, I do love my job. I love my boss and my coworkers, and our clients are pretty great. I do something called uh business continuity consulting. So yeah, so I was working this full-time job out of college, making pretty decent money. And I was like, all right, I'm gonna pay off this student loan with the highest interest rate, it's the private one, and our family friend who I grew up with her, she was always like an aunt growing up, but I didn't feel super close to her, and I was still like in awe and amaze that she co-signed this loan for me of that much money. Like, I was just like, holy crap, like it was a it was a very big deal, and so I wanted to show her my gratitude by making my payments on time, paying extra. So um lived at home for a little while and really got tight on my budget. Money that was going where and any extra money, I don't think I was saving any money at this point, any extra money straight towards that student loan. So paid off that student loan within, I don't know, within a year, two years, from $10,000 down to zero through all my extra money at it. And then I went on to my federal student loans. Now I've been paying the minimum balance, the minimum monthly payment on them. But I said, okay, instead of looking at interest rates, um, that one took so long, if what felt like so long to pay off, I want to pay off another one like quicker. So instead of looking at the highest interest rates, now I'm gonna order them, put them in order for the lowest balance. It's important to note I am a Virgo son in astrology. And as a Virgo, I love numbers, I love analyzing things, I'm very detail-oriented, I love organizing things. So organizing my student loans from lowest balance to highest balance was fun for me. Like something I enjoyed seeing the numbers, enjoyed organizing it, enjoyed figuring out my budget. And then I paid off my student loan debt. And around 2018,

Coaching Women And A Major Pivot

SPEAKER_00 18:37

um, 2018 is the year that I got married to my ex-husband. I also started posting on social media about how I was paying off my student loan debt and how excited I was. And all of a sudden, I had women reaching out that I went to college with asking, How did I pay off my student loans? Like, how did I actually make that happen? And I was like, oh my gosh, I know about the coaching industry. I had worked with a confidence and clarity coach for a couple months. I was like, I can be a personal finance coach. I love math, I love numbers, I love working with people and helping people. This is something that I can do, and so I began coaching women that I knew on their personal finances and on abundance mindset and on how to pay off their student loan debt, and it was so much fun, so much fun. And then at the end of 2019, when I decided that I wanted to get divorced and was just going through a time of all right, something's gotta give this emotional internal chaos I feel. It needs to change and talk therapy on and off throughout my life. Hasn't done it, so I need to try something different. And so I joined a local peer support group near me. This is where I experienced somatic breath work for the first time. They would do guided meditations. It was, I'm gonna say kids, it was young adults my age experiencing similar inner turmoil to what I was experiencing. And we would gather in community once a month, sit in a circle and talk and open our hearts and meditate and be vulnerable, and it was incredible, and that was also life-changing. And at the time with the personal finance coaching, I was posting on social media make your money matter for you, your money matters, here's why your money matters, here's how to improve your finances, all these very practical tips and tricks. And I remember at one of the Pearson Port gatherings, we were talking about what we were grateful for. One of the women there who I had talked to her a couple times, we'd connected on social media, but I didn't feel like we had like really established a friendship yet. She spoke to how she was grateful for me and the content I posted on social media regarding personal finances because it inspired her to get her finances in order and begin focusing on paying off her student loan debt. And I was shocked. I was like, oh my gosh, somebody's actually reading what I post, and I'm actually making a difference in someone's life. Wow. Because at the time I wasn't having a lot of traction with social media, I was just working with women I went to college with or friends of friends. And so for this person that I like knew a little bit, but didn't have a history with, for her to say my education on personal finances made a difference in her life. Yeah, I was just in shock. And so from there, I was like, all right, I'm gonna keep doing this. And I went on to create group coaching programs, and no one signed up, and I was like, what is going on? Like one-on-one coaching was an easy sell. What's happening? And so I began talking to some female friends, and I began hearing this external noise of well, yeah, nobody nobody wants to work on their finances. Nobody wants to work on their personal finances or talk about their personal finances, it's too scary. And so I began to internalize oh, maybe nobody actually wants this. Maybe it was idealistic for me to think that I can change the world through talking about money and making your money matter for you and matter for the world. And so I stepped away from it for a while and transitioned into somatic breath work and healing through your body and healing trauma from your childhood. Still really powerful and something I am passionate about, but I'm more passionate about

Receiving Support And Closing Thoughts

SPEAKER_00 23:49

the work with receiving in our nervous system and opening our hearts to money and to being supported financially, materially. We need a roof over our head, we need clothes on our back, food on our tables, and that's just the necessities. That's just the basics. What if we could go beyond that? What if you could go from growing up in a three-story condo with two bedrooms with what felt like wasn't enough to living on three acres of property with a four-bedroom, three-bath house, and surrounded by people you love and an environment you feel like you can thrive in? What if your reality can shift through working with your body, with your nervous system, with your ability to receive, be supported, be held, and manage your money in ways that are in alignment with your values that works for you and makes the world a better place. What if? Yeah. Thank you for listening to today's episode. I'm really excited to continue this series, and I'll see you on the next one.