Creating a No Budget Philosophy to Building Wealth

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In this episode, guest expert Whitney Morrison shares the ins and outs of her no budget philosophy — including both practical wealth building strategies and key mindset shifts to make it happen.

Whitney Morrison is a Certified Financial Planner who helps people reach their goals by creating a money plan based on the foundations of wealth-building while also attending to the emotional, psychological, behavioral, and relational narratives that are intertwined in the process.

Website // Instagram // Build Your Personalized Money Map

The episode:

Katrina Widener: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Badass Business Squad podcast. I'm your host, Katrina Widener, and today I am here with Whitney Morrison. I am so excited to dive into our topic today. It is all about building wealth, which all entrepreneurs want, but it's a no budget philosophy to building wealth. A low restriction philosophy to building wealth, which I think is going to be super, super impactful for everyone listening. So thank you so much Whitney, for coming and joining me today.

Whitney Morrison: Yes, I'm so happy to be here.

Katrina Widener: First of all before we dive into everything, I'm going to have you tell me a little bit about you and your business. But then everyone, we're going to also start a little bit with just like Whitney's personal story, so you can really understand how she came to this particular philosophy around money, which I'm really excited to dive into. So really quickly if you could just tell us who you are and what you do, then we can dive in.

Whitney Morrison: Yes, absolutely. So I'm Whitney Morrison. I'm a certified financial planner, which basically just means I took a shit ton of tests as it relates to money, and I would call myself a money expert. I've been doing this work for about 12 years, and my business is holistic money. What I do in my business is actually much deeper than just traditional financial planning because I found with myself and even with my clients, that giving them a money plan, sitting down and being like, "Hey, here's your money. Here's what you need to do," isn't actually enough to get them into the action of building wealth.

So the work that I do with my clients takes a holistic approach to wealth building by addressing what I call the three dimensions of wealth. Which are inner wealth, outer wealth, and higher wealth. Inner wealth is connecting your money with your internal abundance. Outer wealth is connecting your money with your external environment, and then higher wealth is connecting your money with your higher purpose and what it is that you really want to create in the world. And I find that those three dimensions are actually what work together to not only have people build wealth, but also build the life that they love and feel really good with money.

Katrina Widener: Thank you so much for sharing that. I think that there's going to be a lot of people who are like, "Okay, cool. This makes so much sense." It also just feels like a much... I don't know... kinder way of approaching money? If that makes sense. I was going to say a holistic way of approaching money, which would make complete sense.

Whitney Morrison: Yeah, I like kinder. I also think it's just more integrated and I think for a lot of my audience, they hadn't necessarily felt comfortable with money or wealth. And I think just going into my personal money story... I'll just segue into that now because it really did inform the work that I do with people with money.

So like I said, I've been a financial planner for 12 years, but I've only really been a good financial planner for like five of those 12 years. And a big reason why was because, of my relationship with money. So for the first seven years in my job as a financial planner, I felt like a huge fraud because I was helping people with their own money and helping them build wealth when in the background, my own finances were shit. So it was an interesting experience for me because I knew, like I said, I'm a certified financial planner among many other certifications, series six, series seven. So I had all of the knowledge that I really needed to be good with money, but I just could not get my own money shit together for a long time. It really took me taking a different approach to money and wealth to get to where I am today.

So seven years ago I was in debt, no savings. And when I say debt, I mean credit card debt, a lot of it. Today seven years later, I have a seven figure net worth and the process to get me from point A to point B looked so different than the education I received as a financial planner. And I was like, "Okay, I know I can't be alone out there." I know there's gotta be a lot of other people who intuitively know what to do. Like, "Hey, you gotta spend less than you earn to build wealth." Like, "Okay I know how to do that. I know to do that, but I'm not doing that and why?" That is the work I do.

That's what I help people with. Really understanding their relationship to money, how money feels to them, how they use money, what's important to them with money, and unpacking all of that to get to the essence of what they want to do with their life with money. And I had to do that for myself to get to where I am.

Katrina Widener: Thank you so much for sharing that. I think that there are so many people out there who, like you said, like you can't be the only one who resonate with that story. Who are like, "I know technically what to do, or I've tried a budget, or I've tried all these things and yet it feels insurmountable, or it feels like this like big stressor," right? So often money feels like a stressor to people, and especially in the entrepreneur world where you are the person who is solely responsible for bringing that money in. Of course it feels like this huge thing to you. So I love that. I love that approach.

Just to dive even more in, what would you say are some of the biggest shifts that you've made in your philosophy around money? What are the ways that you approach money now that are so different from what you were doing in the past?

Whitney Morrison: Yeah, that's a good question. The first thing that I really had to unwind is I really believed that building wealth meant cutting back. I thought it meant restriction. I thought it meant saying no. I thought it meant not being able to live a great life. And I really, really had to do some work on that foundational belief. Because what happened for me is every time I thought I wanted to be good with money, what it actually looked like was me being miserable, you know? And then I would be like, "Fuck this. I don't want to have to cut back all the time and feel like I'm saying no and not get to live the life that I want today. And so I'm just going to avoid my money and I'm going to just do whatever I want."

But then the worry when I was on that side of the coin got really big and then I'd switch back over to, "Okay, now I need to be good again. And now I gotta be good with my money and I gotta say 'no' and I gotta stop spending so much." So it's like my whole relationship to wealth building was all about restriction. And I had to really start to understand that wealth building is not about having less in your life, it's actually about having more in your life.

And it's about expansion and making room for more and creating more, and being willing to receive more. Like that was a hard lesson to learn because it was incredibly uncomfortable. Because it really started to make me question my worthiness. My worthiness to really receive large amounts of money, and actually have large amounts of money in my bank accounts and be willing to be with that. Have capacity to have money in my accounts and even derive pleasure from it, because I'd never had it before. Because when I had money in my accounts I was like, "Shit, I need to go spend it because it's all going to go away anyways," you know?

Katrina Widener: Mm-hmm, definitely. Definitely. So what would you say was the catalyst for you switching your mindsets. Was there like a moment where you're like, "Okay, I need to just get this figured out?" Was there like an "aha" moment where someone like dropped a truth bomb and you're like, "Oh, this finally clicks. I know what steps to take." What was that moment like for you?

Whitney Morrison: It was seven years ago. I had left my job at Wells Fargo Advisors and I started to work for this content creator who I so deeply admired, and was willing to get paid peanuts to work with her. She paid me $1,500 a month, and I moved outta my downtown apartment. I moved into this house where I was renting a room for $500 a month, but I still didn't have enough to build wealth. And I got really fed up and started spending a lot of money, and then I literally did not have any money. I had to ask my mother to pay my rent for me, and I was like 27 or 28. And I was like, "Okay, what is happening here? You are supposed to be a financial professional and you are calling your mom because you're in debt. You have a job that pays you shit, and you are willing to accept so much less than what you're actually worth. What's going on?"

It really was the phone call with my mom. Because that to me was... I was just embarrassed having to call my mom and ask her to pay my rent. So I really had to like look at myself and say, "Okay. We're not going to continue to accept so much less than what we're worth." Money is actually very important. It's gotta become a priority and you have to be able to work on how you can receive more, and use it in a way that's going to get you more of what you want in your life.

Katrina Widener: Yeah, I am sure that there are people who are like, "I've been there, or I feel that, or I've had my own moment like," Yes. It's very powerful also to share that because everyone knows what it feels like to be embarrassed or to possibly even have that exact moment, right? Or something similar.

So what were the like first steps that you took after that moment to be like, "I need to make a change." And obviously I'm giving the caveat, she's not giving specific financial advice to you right now. I'm just curious, like what were the very first steps that you're like, "I need to make a change. Here's how I'm going to do that."

Whitney Morrison: Yeah, it's a great question because I often think my financial journey has literally created the foundation for my process that I work with my clients on and that I teach in my course. There are four phases of wealth building. First phase is survival phase, which is where I was. I was in that phase where I was living on credit cards. I wasn't making enough money to actually pay my bills. So the first step in the survival phase for me was I had to figure out how to make more money than I was spending. I had to like have more than what was going out. There's really two ways people can do that. You can increase your income or you can decrease your expenses. But in that survival phase, the whole thing you gotta do is you just gotta figure out how to stop living on credit cards by either increasing your income or decreasing your expenses.

So the way that I chose, because I went down the decreasing expenses route, is I was like, "Fuck getting paid $1,500 a month."

Katrina Widener: Yeah! Yes.

Whitney Morrison: Yeah, and and I really made a decision where I was like, "Whoa, I don't have to work for this content creator any longer. I can go find a job." And at that point, that was the next step that I needed to take. I wasn't in a sturdy enough place within myself to start the business that I have today. I needed to build my foundation first. So honestly, I had another person ask me this. They were like, "How did you go from $15,000 a year to..." I got a job at Wealth Simple, which is a FinTech startup paying me $120,000 with a bonus. I had never made that amount of money in my life. I had zero evidence to support that I could actually go do that.

But what I did is I decided that what I could bring to that company was a lot more robust, because I had learned a lot from the content creator. She was actually a money content creator. I'd learned a lot about building audiences and so I just, I took those skills. I was like, "Okay, these are valuable skills. How can I leverage this uniquely and position myself uniquely at a financial firm so that they see me as more valuable than just a standard financial planner." And I just decided I'm not accepting less than a hundred and it, I got 120 in a bonus.

But I think the biggest thing there, it was the decision that I made and the idea that I really started to understand like, "Okay, if I want to make this money, I have to leverage my value. I have to leverage my value strategically to position myself in that way." That's a skill most entrepreneurs get taught, but employees need to know that skill too.

Katrina Widener: I'm glad that you mentioned that too, because I know that there are entrepreneurs who are listening to this who are probably not thinking about what their differentiating factors are and actually leveraging those. Obviously as entrepreneurs there are so many different aspects to charging more or bringing in more clients, and I talk a lot on this podcast about not trading your time and energy for money. Being able to say like, "I'm not going to make more money by just devoting more and more of my time because," that is the number one resource entrepreneurs give up in terms to try to find more money, is their time or their energy.

But also like how do you sit down and say, "Here are some of the truly badass skills that I have that other people in my industry might not have." right? I look at myself as a business coach. I started out as a magazine journalist with search engine optimization, actual experience in my role with writing and editing. I was a social media manager. I was a marketing specialist. I'm not just a business coach. I also have this vast experience behind me that led me to where I am today, and standing firm in those qualities and truly deciding that you're worth those things, right? It is that self-worth aspect. It's not just saying, "Okay, I guess I'm going to like say that I'm going to raise my prices because I need to make more money." It's saying, "No, I am truly adding my skills and qualities into the mix and pricing myself accordingly are getting paid accordingly," with that in mind, so I'm so glad that you mentioned that.

Whitney Morrison: Yeah, and I'll say that on my path to making more money, starting my business initially I was charging $500 for one-on-one financial planning. And then I coached myself to start charging $1500, $3000, $5,000, and I just started charging more and more. But I'll say in the beginning, I didn't have what you just described. I didn't have that self-worth really built up inside of me and I didn't feel grounded and aware, and really understanding of my own value. I was just kind of absorbing messages from the coaching world that's like, "You want to make more money, increase your prices."

It actually worked for me temporarily, because I ended up making a lot of money very fast. But it was the most painful, uncomfortable way I made money ever. Like making money... you wouldn't necessarily connect it with pain, but to receive that money and feel like such a fraud? Like people would give me money, I'd be like, "Fuck. Oh my God. Okay. All right. Um... I am a terrible person. I can't believe that I just took all of that money from them and now I'm going to try to help them with their money, and they're not even going to do that great." like totally just bringing myself down. And so my high income year really came to a halt and now it's been a fascinating process. Because my first year? Rocket ship, $300,000. This year which is my second year in business, $160,000. Half of that, much less pain though. Much less pain. So it's just very interesting. Like the work that you're describing, how truly important it is to making money and building wealth.

Katrina Widener: Mm-hmm. I think that that's... Ooh, I'm not going to remember who talked about this, and I apologize to the person who first brought this up. It's in a book I read. Can't remember the name of the book. But they talk about our subconscious mind is if we have a thermostat setting. Our thermostats are basically saying like, "I have this constant temperature that I've set it at. And maybe I've set it so it goes down a little bit at night. Or in the summer, maybe it's like different, right? But you set it and then you walk away." And our brains do the same thing where it's like, "This is what I'm used to, so this is what I am setting my thermostat." When in reality, all you have to do is go in and raise that in order to be able to bring in more, to be open to more, to be open to more abundance, more joy, more grace, more ease, whatever it is you're looking for. But you have to do the hard work to change that subconscious mind and change that thermostat setting.

Whitney Morrison: Yeah.

Katrina Widener: And it's hard!

Whitney Morrison: It's hard because it is supremely uncomfortable. The process of receiving money, especially large amounts of money, I really connect it with the process of loving myself more deeply. And so when people ask me, "Why do you want to make a lot of money?" First of all, I love money. Because I want to do all the amazing things in the world that I can with money. But what's actually closer to my heart and what actually feels most true for me is that for me, making more money is an exercise and loving myself more deeply. Because it requires that I am willing to be more visible, that I'm willing to be more seen, that I'm willing to say the "wrong thing", the wrong thing to the wrong person that potentially offends them even if it's not my intention. Or it actually is my intention, and I don't like that I did that.

The process of receiving more money is the process of loving yourself more unconditionally, especially in entrepreneurship. Because you have to be willing to love yourself even when you do things you don't want to do. Or you say the thing that people don't like, because the more money you make as an entrepreneur the more visible you become, the more impact you're making, more people have things to say about it and think about it and get mad about it or happy. You know what I mean?

Katrina Widener: Yes.

Whitney Morrison: So, yeah, it's totally that. It's inextricably linked, I believe.

Katrina Widener: Yes. Yes! I think that this is why it is so important, and I'm so glad that you came on the podcast today to talk about this different approach to making money. There's also a more feminine energy around this approach to making money where we've typically been taught the masculine way of making money, right?

It's typically way more around like "Push hard and hustle and work and do this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah!" And it really is like you said earlier, a very integrated way of making money. Because we often view money as if it is the specific silo of our lives that isn't connected with anything else except for our work. Being able to say like, "No, every single part of my life is interconnected, including my self worth and how much money I come in." How does that not feel just supremely obvious?

Whitney Morrison: It wasn't forever for me. I remember being like, "Yeah, I want to do more holistic work with people with money." But it like was not clear how the money that I made was connected to my inner work. Like I didn't understand it for so long. And now that I'm in it I'm like, "Oh yeah, I get it."

Katrina Widener: Mm-hmm.

Whitney Morrison: I get it! Your inner work is a direct reflection of the amount of money you make. Truthfully, I really believe it's your inner thinking, like the way that you think about money, the way that you think about yourself, your value. All of that really determines the amount of money that you make and keep and what you do with it, and what kind of life you build.

Katrina Widener: Thank you so much for talking about this and sharing that. Of course it's... it's time to wrap up the podcast. I mean, we could continue talking about this for a really long time.

Whitney Morrison: Yeah.

Katrina Widener: Really what I want to kind of have everyone walk away with, is just a way that they can maybe learn more from you or get more in your world so that they can continue on this. holistic journey with their money.

Whitney Morrison: Totally.

Katrina Widener: So how can people find you after the call, hang out in your space, et cetera, et cetera?

Whitney Morrison: Okay. First thing that everyone can do, and that I highly suggest everyone do, is to take my money map training, which is my no budget approach to money planning. And I think the reason why this training is so wonderful is because it really teaches you how to manage your money. But really how to manage your mindset around money. So managing money doesn't feel so bad for you in your life. And it's way simpler than budgeting. There's like no spreadsheets, no categorizing expenses, no how much money you spend on cat food versus entertainment versus going out to eat required.

It is simply looking at the three main places you want your money to go in your life, deciding how much money goes there now, how much money you want to go there in the future, and then streamlining and automating all of it. And throughout the training, I teach you the system, but also the mindset of the system. Which that in itself will change your relationship to money and managing money. So start there.

Katrina Widener: Perfect! And then how about what's your website? Social media links, where can they find you there?

Whitney Morrison: Sure. My website is www.holistic-money.com and my Instagram handle is at @holisticmoney.

Katrina Widener: Perfect. Thank you so much Whitney, for coming on here. I've really appreciated it and really enjoyed our conversation.

Whitney Morrison: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Katrina.