And somewhere along the way, you decided that once you hit that number, you’d finally feel okay.
Safe.
Settled.
Like you could finally breathe.
Here’s the problem: most people who hit the number don’t feel that way.
They just move the number.
Why does the goalpost keep moving?
looking for that goalpost rn
It isn’t a discipline problem, a savings problem, or even a math problem.
It’s a feeling problem.
Financial anxiety isn’t cured by a balance.
If it were, people with healthy savings accounts wouldn’t lie awake at 2am running worst-case scenarios.
But they do.
All the time.
Because the anxiety was never really about the money.
It was about what the money represented: control, safety, the ability to handle whatever comes next.
And no savings balance, on its own, touches that.
Saving is a behavior, but safety is a feeling.
how safety FEELS
Those are two different things, and treating one like it automatically produces the other is where a lot of people get stuck.
You can do everything “right” — save consistently, avoid debt, follow the rules — and still feel like you’re one bad month away from everything falling apart.
That feeling has a source.
It usually goes back further than your current bank balance.
Showing up in how you were raised around money, what you watched your parents do or not do, and what money meant in your house growing up.
So until you actually look at that, the number in your head will keep moving.
So what do you do with this?
I'm gonna tell ya...
You start by getting honest about where you actually are, not just financially, but in terms of how you think and feel about money.
You still save.
You still have goals.
You just gotta be radically transparent about WHY those goals matter.
(And honestly, you gotta keep lifestyle creep in check too, but that's a different newsletter.)
So if you need to know where your finances even ARE in the first place...
The financial health quiz is designed to get you started.
It’s not about your net worth or your savings rate.
It’s about surfacing the patterns underneath, the ones that are actually driving your decisions.
Takes about 3 minutes.
And it tends to show people things they weren’t expecting.
