The MapleMoney Show » Money Psychology

The Pitfalls of Keeping Up with the Joneses and How to Avoid Them, with Kelley Keehn

Presented by EQ Bank

Welcome to The MapleMoney Show, the podcast that helps Canadians improve their personal finances to create lasting financial freedom. I’m your host, Tom Drake, the founder of MapleMoney, where I’ve been writing about all things related to personal finance since 2009.

Did you know that if your neighbour wins the lottery, the chances of you going bankrupt increases by 2.4% for every $1000 they win. It’s an interesting statistic, and one that I get into with this week’s guest here on the MapleMoney Show.

Kelley Keehn is financial educator, and author of several books, including her most recent book, Talk Money To Me. Kelly and I sat down to discuss the very real struggle of keeping up with the Joneses, and why it’s so tempting to want the things our friends and neighbours have.

According to Kelley, it’s easy to feel as though your neighbour has more money than you, based on the car in their driveway, or the vacations they take. But chances are, they’re salary isn’t that much different than yours, you do live in the same neighbourhood after all.

The point Kelley makes is that you really don’t know your neighbours financial situation. Things may look great on the surface, but behind the scenes they could be drowning in debt. This is why it’s so important to not compare your situation to others.

Kelley compares spending on the things we want to dining at a buffet. You can only fit so much on your plate. You can eat anything, just not everything. The same goes for your finances. It’s ok to spend on wants, but you need to set a limit. One of the best ways to do this is by setting goals, and meeting with a financial professional to develop a financial plan.

Kelley and I also touch on the topic of pay equity, and why salary discussions are still a taboo subject at work. When it comes to women in the workplace, Kelley explains why they aren’t getting paid what they’re worth over the course of their career.

Our sponsor, EQ Bank, has partnered with TransferWise, to give Canadians a better way to send money overseas. The result is fully transparent and remarkably quick international money transfers that are up to 8X cheaper for EQ Bank customers. To find out more, visit EQ Bank.

Episode Summary

  • Keeping up with the Joneses 101
  • What makes us want what other people have
  • Why it’s so important to have a financial plan
  • Why you should never compare your financial situation to others
  • Pay equity – why women need to negotiate more
  • When you start making better spending decisions, prepare for backlash
Read transcript

Do you know that if your neighbor wins the lottery, the chances of you going bankrupt increases by 2.4 percent for every $1,000 they win? It is an interesting statistic and one that I get into with this week’s guest here on the Maple Money Show. Kelley Keehn is a financial educator and author of several books, including her most recent book, Talk Money to Me. Kelly and I sat down to discuss the very real struggle of keeping up with the Joneses and why it’s so tempting to want the things our friends and neighbors have.

Welcome to the Maple Money Show, the podcast that helps Canadians improve their personal finances to create lasting financial freedom. Our sponsor, EQ Bank, has partnered with TransferWise to give Canadians a better way to send money overseas. The result is fully transparent with remarkably quick international money transfers that are up to eight times cheaper for EQ Bank customers. To find out more, visit maplemoney.com/eqbank. Now, let’s chat with Kelley…

Tom: Hi, Kelley, welcome to the Maple Money Show.

Kelley: Glad to be with you, Tom.

Tom: You have a new book that came out recently called, Talk Money to Me. In it, you mentioned the idea of keeping up with the Joneses. And even more recently, in a Tangerine article you had mentioned a survey that said that for every $1,000 in lottery winnings, neighbors are 2.4 percent more likely to go bankrupt which really hit home to me because I wondered if this was a real thing. First of all, can you just tell me a bit about the book and how it relates to keeping up with the Joneses?

Kelley: Talk Money To Me was a real labor of love. I think I got it right at the 10th book with a great team at Simon and Schuster. Kids call it FOMO. And when I say kids, I’m dating myself at 45. The younger folks call it FOMO. My generation called it “keeping up with the Joneses.” The good news is you’re very unlikely to win the lottery and your neighbors are very unlikely to win the lottery. That’s good news because I’ve been digging into the research and the book goes into a little bit of behavioral finance and the neuro psychology behind how our brain is actually tripping us up. This was a study done by a U of A professor and, I believe, an Israeli professor that wanted to quantify the keeping up with the Joneses. As you said, if your neighbor wins—for every $1,000, the likelihood of you going bankrupt increases by 2.4 percent. I really want your listeners and viewers to get that and then ask the question, why? I don’t know the why because they haven’t got back to me. I keep hounding them every once in a while. But here’s my take on why it is that when we see people buying things we want, enjoying experiences that we want—And Tom, you and I grew up without the Internet. We didn’t grow up with apps, social media and things of that sort. So when you, your family and your friends saw other friends with stuff you wanted and having experiences you wanted, that was enough of a temptation. But now you see the worlds’ stuff. You see celebrities’ stuff. You see people that are not even within your socioeconomic status and now you want their stuff too. So it’s a very different, unusual time. There is an Italian researcher, Dr. Risa Loti, who discovered a terrible experiment years ago where they hooked up monkeys and put brain scanners on them. But what was so interesting was one day as they were scanning these monkeys, a researcher who had bought an ice cream cone and was licking it noticed the monkey’s brains lit up with pleasure as if they were eating the ice cream cone themselves. What I think is going on with the keeping up with the Joneses, when we see other people that have the stuff and experiences that we want, is a part of our brain also lights up as if we had it. There are these unboxing videos, as you know. Why would you watch a video of other people unboxing stuff? Because we get pleasure in it the same way as we do watching hockey games. If you like hockey, when someone scores a goal, that’s as if you scored a goal. There is a part of our brain that is hardwired for us to see and take pleasure in other people’s stuff. The book goes into that. It’s not the central thesis of the book but it is woven throughout; how do we curtail these hardwired impulses and desires, recognize them and then try to find ways to work around them.

Tom: Do you think there’s a way to turn that off? I’m pretty good with my money but I’ve always wanted a hot tub. It was already a little inset but my neighbor just got one so now it’s gone up a notch. It’s been at least 10 years of wanting one. Now that my neighbor got one, I really want one now. It seems unavoidable. Is there a way to kind of turn this off at all?

Kelley: You know what, I don’t think that it’s totally bad. For the last 15 years I’ve been an educator. I don’t provide advice but I was in the financial industry for 12 years before being an educator and I have to tell you, there’s the flip side. I had a lot of clients who had a lot of money. They were in retirement or retiring and having a very hard time spending their money. They had a very hard time figuring out what they wanted. I think this is also a great part of our brain that helps us see in people like us—things that are similar, like living in a similar neighborhood and having a hot tub. There’s nothing wrong with going, “Hey, they’re getting a hot tub. I want one, too.” Or, “They went to Paris, why don’t we?” You were just telling me before we started this that you rented a houseboat in B.C. and I thought, “Maybe I want to rent a houseboat in B.C.” It’s a great idea. There’s nothing wrong with it. First of all, you recognize it. Is that really a want of mine? That’s why it’s so important to write your goals down. Ideally, you have a financial plan. You work with someone like a certified financial planner and you’re saving for these things. So there is nothing wrong with wanting stuff. I also liken it to the buffet of life. We’re in COVID and probably never going to have a buffet again but imagine the days when we had buffets. You have a plate and a stomach so you go to the buffet. You can only put so many things on that plate. And even if you go back twice, you only have so big of a stomach. You can’t eat everything at the buffet. You can’t have everything. You can’t have great cars and boats and holidays and retirement—you just can’t. I think when we bring it back to values we understand when it comes to our health where you can have the chocolate cake and the glass wine but you can’t have them every night. We have to bring those same principles to our money. You can have what your neighbors have but within reason. And make sure you’re saving up for it and not putting it on high interest rate credit cards.

Tom: Exactly. I think one of the big things that people are missing here is that they don’t see the complete picture and your book brings this up perfectly. It’s this idea that with keeping up with the Joneses, you see that trip to Paris, but you may not know their salary. You likely don’t know their salary. You don’t know how much of a mortgage they have. There are all these different factors. And it reminds me of early on in my corporate career. I’d see everybody that works with me with probably very similar salaries, always going for happy hours, going on vacations… It just seems like I couldn’t do that and I never really understood that. Do you think we should be talking more about things like salary or even debt levels? Is that something that should be public knowledge or is that something you should keep to yourself? I’m honestly not sure which way I think on this.

Kelley: It’s really tough because being an educator for the last 15 years, writing blogs, and doing a lot of media interviews, the number one question I get from people across the country after a presentation is, “How is everyone else doing it? I live in the same neighborhood so how do they have the fancy car, putting their kids in private school… How are they doing it?” That’s the wrong thing to ask. We don’t look at a supermodel’s body. Anyone can get a supermodel’s body if you want to pay for the plastic surgery or starve yourself. You can get there. The question is, are you going to stay there and do you want that kind of lifestyle? There’s the whole FIRE movement, as you well know. You can scrimp and save and retire when you’re 35. You can live a lavish lifestyle but have a ton of debt to service it. The question is not how you’re doing compared to everyone else. Even if you knew someone’s salary, no one’s going to give you that complete picture. That’s why I think it’s important to work with a professional. And I know I was really lucky at an early age to have the bank job that I had because I got to peek behind the curtains. I had 28 branches I worked for at one of the big banks and whoever had a lot of money, all the bank tellers would refer them to me. I would figure out if they were going to invest or send them to trust of to a brokerage. It was so interesting, Tom, how often they would send a local celebrity in or something of that sort? I’d open up their file and see their net worth. I’d think, “I’m an investment manager. Why are you sitting across the table from me when you’re two million dollars in debt?” So yeah, you don’t if they got their parents to help them out with a down payment for their house or paid for their whole university. It looks like they’re coming up way ahead. And you’ve still got student loan debt. You just cannot compare. It’s a hard thing to do. And again, social media—I used to before COVID. Travelled all over the globe doing interviews. I had a lot of solo dinners. And I’ve got to tell you—I’m married, but when you’re single, on the road by yourself, sitting there eating by yourself, you have the opportunity to watch the dynamics of a lot of people. You’d see couples who were arguing, having a horrible time. But then, “Let’s get a quick little Instagram moment…” That’s the picture that goes on Instagram. And you think, “Wow, you have such a great relationship. How come we don’t have a relationship like that?” Meanwhile, that was just an inaccurate representation of what went on—what really happened. It’s because of social media that it’s exceedingly more difficult to not compare yourself to other people and to just decide what is it that you really want, what works for you and your family. What are your goals? How do you attain them and shut off all that noise? It’s very difficult to do.

Tom: Yeah, I still think one of most important and certainly one of most basic things in personal finance is just simple cash flow. Make sure you’re spending less than you make and that’ll take you so much further. If you want to compare anything, compare against your own salary and make sure that your spending and savings fits within that salary.

Kelley: Yes, but people don’t want to do that. The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, the watchdogs of the industry that regulate banks and things of that sort even issued a warning for Canadians (this was years before COVID) to stop using their home as an ATM. There are these re-advanceable mortgages where you have a traditional mortgage. You make payments which pays off your principal and your interest. Simple. Then people said, “I cut out the line of credit. Should I go variable?” And the banks would say, “Hey, let’s create an opportunity for you where you don’t have to make a decision. You can have a traditional 5-year term and also have a nice little line of credit on the side.” And the client thinks that sounds great. Then they came out with these re-advanceable mortgages. I’m not saying everyone is in these, but for the people who are, every time you make a mortgage payment you think you’re paying your mortgage off. You also have all this available credit that builds every time you make a mortgage payment. So people think, “Well, I just about have the mortgage paid off,” but they have a $200,000 line of credit. That is not paying your mortgage off. One of the characters in my book is a family that’s actually doing things right. They’re saving 15 percent of their salary but they’re spending 142 percent of what they bring in. And you wonder how that’s possible. It’s because they’re using their line of credit. They’re not crunching the numbers. They think it’s great because they’re automating their savings. They’re saving 15 percent. That’s fantastic. And then they’re spending 142 percent of what they make. It’s paying attention to all of the facets of your life and making sure you really have a true understanding of what you’re doing. If not, it’s like working out at the gym and then eating four hamburgers. Maybe you don’t have to work out as much if you just eat one hamburger?

Tom: I’ve seen that before, people that do the healthy lifestyle; I eat well, I exercise, but I smoke. You’ve got to handle all the different factors. The same with your money. One other thing I wanted to mention, just going back to salary for a second, if people did talk about it more, would that help with things? We hear a lot now about equality in salaries where women are not getting paid as much. Do you think it would be helpful if everyone talked about it or is it rude to ask someone? For example, I’ve got this certain salary and work with women, I wouldn’t want to feel like I’m putting them down by saying I get $5,000 a year more or something like that. But it could also help them up.

Kelley: It’s really touchy. Money is still such a very touchy issue. Back in the 1960s we used to whisper the word cancer. It was shameful before you and I were born. And today we run for the cure. We have Facebook support groups and things of that sort. But when it comes to money, even things like asking your neighbor what they paid for their home, their car or how much they spent on their vacation they’d say, “Excuse me! That’s a little personal.” Some people love to share, but we don’t have these rules. We don’t know when we can ask. And salary is so incredibly touchy for a number of reasons. It wasn’t that long ago, though, that a lot of employment contracts were so restrictive you weren’t even allowed to tell your spouse what you made. There was a study in the U.S. (believe it or not) where 43 percent of those on the survey revealed they didn’t know what their spouse made. If you can’t ask your spouse and really understand what your spouse makes… COVID really brought a lot of that home. I bet there were a lot of arguments and fights if you didn’t know what the other person owed or was bringing in. And when it comes to salary, it can be a huge detriment, especially to women. There’s a great book I love called, Women Don’t Ask. It’s an amazing book. I refer to it constantly. The author surmises, a woman not negotiating her starting salary and subsequent salary opportunities for increase stands to leave (on average) a million dollars on the table during her working lifetime. Now, men too, are not negotiating as much as they could but they’re negotiating a lot more than women. They also have some interesting stats. Again, I’m painting with broad brushes here but a lot of women will say negotiating is like going to the dentist or getting a root canal. It’s something awful whereas guys are think it’s a challenge. We’re not taught this in school. We’re not taught how to negotiate, when to ask for an increase. If you don’t even know what the person sitting in the cubicle next to you makes— Mind you, it might be in your contract that you’re not allowed to discuss it so you need to be careful as well. Let’s say you and I work together, Tom. And our contract say we can’t discuss our salary. You could innocently say, “Hey, Tom, I know we can’t discuss our salary but do you know anyone in a similar position that I could call up and maybe discuss what they’re making just so I can understand my career trajectory and things of that sort?” That might be a more comfortable conversation. Let’s say you’re a consultant in IT. You can say, “I’m not comfortable talking with you about that because our employment contract doesn’t allow for it, but you can call my friend Rick and he can talk to you because he has a similar job.” But until we start talking about it, it’s not going to get better. And employers love it. I’ve talked to so many recruiters that say they want to tell women to ask for more but they can’t because they’re legally bound to their client. Every recruiter I’ve talked to has said, “Hands down, women need to increase their negotiating skills.”

Tom: And I think they’d be more empowered to do that if they did know what that employer would pay. You can go to websites like Glass Ceiling and see similar salaries, but it’s still not quite as exact as a coworker saying, “Oh, you could be making this…”

Kelley: Or have more vacation pay, a higher title or a better corner office. There is always something you can negotiate. Too many people are not doing it—you’re right. And $5,000 a year might not sound like much but that adds up a lot with compound interest over your entire career. That could make or break your retirement.

Tom: Yes, exactly. Your stat of a million dollars, obviously, is a big difference by the end of your working career. Back on the spending part though, how do we get this mindset? Again, I’m talking about people going on vacations I didn’t seem to be able to afford. How do we get to this mindset of feeling like we deserve it—that somehow this feeling of deserving something is more important than the actual dollars in your bank account.

Kelley: You know what, people do deserve it. But again, here’s our brain hardwired to work against us. We have a present bias. We always think that today is more important than something for tomorrow. And there’s so many stats like the marshmallow effect—It’s those cute kids who just delay the gratification; researchers put them in front of a marshmallow, leave the room and say, “If you can wait until we come back you’ll get two marshmallows.” I believe it was Stanford experiment back from the 1960s. You see these kids trying their best to not eat the marshmallow and doing everything they can to ignore it and push it away. Of course, the moral of the story was, those that could delay gratification did better in life. They later did a follow up to this study and poor kids, who actually ate the marshmallow were smart to do it, because if you were raised without money, you didn’t know when something was going to be there or not. That’s one issue; we’re not taught to delay gratification. In more recent studies, it would be like, “Okay Tom. You can have a $25 Amazon gift card now or you can have a $50 Amazon gift card in 12 months.” Most people would say they want the $25 Amazon gift card now even though it’s double in 12 months. What’s going on is that when you think about yourself, a part of your brain lights up, of course. Part of your brain lights up when you think about your beautiful self. But when you think about a stranger, that park dims down. It makes total sense, of course. Why would your brain have any cortical real estate for a stranger? But when you think about yourself in just five years, 10 years, it dims down again. In one of my Tangerine articles I talk about how we can’t connect to our future self. You’re on the subway and you’re having your lovely $5 Starbucks coffee. What’s the likelihood you’re going to give it to a stranger? You’re not going to give your coffee to a stranger so why would you forgo your vacation today, for someone who’s a stranger in five or 10 years? But what’s interestingly an easy fix for that is there’s exercises you can do. We do it in the book and they’re really simple. You have to start to connect to your future self. For example, if your financial planner says to you, “Tom, where do you want to be in 10 years?” It’s very vague and you don’t know. But if they say, “Tom, you’re 43 right now. When you are 53—and not 10 years from now, let’s just take five minutes; how old are your kids? What are they doing? What’s your spouse doing? What do you want to be doing?” Then you start to talk about that… how much money do we need for that? If you do that every day for a couple minutes a day just for a couple of weeks, research has shown you start to build this relationship with that person. It starts to light up the pleasure centers of the brain. And what is that in reality? It’s kind of like if you tried to connect with your future self for your health and you drive by the gym every day saying, “Oh, man, I probably should go into the gym,” then you get a gym membership but don’t go. That’s when guilt starts to work for you because you realize you made a commitment. When you make those goals and don’t save the money and overspend instead, you actually feel guilt. You don’t feel comfortable. But that’s your brain working for you saying, “Tom, you sat down with your planner. You said you wanted to do this at 53 but you’re sabotaging your future self.” You can see how this little workshop has built some commitment to this other person but it takes a little bit of work to do that. Most of the time we just want to be grasshoppers and say, “Ah, I’m going on vacation and buying that new TV.” We just don’t want to do that work. So, doing that work for that future person helps to start to help us to manage the present bias. Then when we have a cognitive load like we have right now with COVID, we’re even more present bias. We’re saying, “I deserve this now because I’m suffering through COVID. I deserve this now because my kids are driving me insane and you haven’t been able to get out of the house,” and you’re buying that whatever it is online. When you have that cognitive stress as well, it really impairs all of that. Just even knowing you’re going to have a propensity to want to spend online or not follow your budget can be a gentle way to give yourself permission to be gentler as you try to achieve your goals while you’re going through this stress.

Tom: I love that idea. First of all, talking to a financial advisor is a great idea because you can set goals and work them back. Then it becomes very simple; how much do I need to save in a year? And again, staying within your cash flow, you’ve got a certain amount of savings and a certain amount of expenses so you only have so much left for the frivolous spending, which is okay, but it’s got to stick within the money you actually have. Are there any other points, especially around keeping up with the Joneses that we’ve missed? Any other little hints or anything that would help?

Kelley: Really have your goals; knowing what you want, knowing what’s possible—and you’ve spent time understanding the components. A lot of millennials will reach out to me saying, “I really want to buy a house but it’s too far reaching. It’s never going to happen.” And I say, “But you haven’t even tried. Did you go out into your neighborhood and see how much house is? Did you figure out how much the down payment is?” First of all, we don’t set goals. Second of all, when we do set them, we forget that there’s these teeny-tiny actions. There’s so many of them. Think about your will. To get your will done there are probably 25 little steps you need to do before you’re going to get your well done. So, there are probably 25 steps you need to do before you can understand homeownership. let’s say you set that goal. You’ve identified all the little steps. Now you’ve got a mission. And you can communicate that with your friends. “Hey, guys, I’ve got a goal of buying my house in seven years. I need this much of a down payment…” You don’t have to share all these details. “Can you help me get creative with how I can still have fun with you guys and still stay on track?” Maybe instead of going out for drinks we have some home parties. Maybe instead of going out for concerts, we just slash in half and do some other stuff. That’s another really important thing that moves the needle with keeping up with the Joneses is either encouraging your peer group to do something else, or to introduce new peers into your life. There are so many studies that have shown there are five people in your life that direct your life pretty much. You can have a friend in another city that if they gain weight, it effects the group. If they lose weight, it effects the group. If they start smoking, quit smoking, start drinking, quit drinking. And you’re think, how is that possible? That’s how powerful your peer group is. I can just share a quick little personal anecdote on that. I bought a very expensive luxury car when I was at the bank in my early 20s. I couldn’t afford it. Talk about keeping up with the Joneses… Everything I talk about in my book I also made all those mistakes. Back then I had wealthy clients so I had to look the part. I had a phone I couldn’t afford—I did every everything you can imagine. And I always had luxury vehicles. Thank goodness I kept them and didn’t make really stupid moves with them. But finally, I had one that needed to be traded in. I needed a new car. My husband asked me what I was going to buy and I said, “Another luxury vehicle, of course. Maybe a Lexus, Mercedes, BMW. I’m not sure which one.” He said, “What about other options like Hyundai or Honda.” I looked at him like he was speaking a different language, “Are you crazy?” He said, “You’re a consumer advocate now. You don’t have wealthy clients to keep up with.” Of course, I went to all of the luxury vehicle places and actually just about bought a Lexus. And it was a lot of money. What interrupted that was not just my husband’s questioning me as to whether I really wanted that, but me still running the old pattern of my “poor kid syndrome” because I was raised poor. I talk about that in the book—trying to look wealthier than I was at the time. And then I ran into a friend who does Doctors Without Borders. He spent his own money to take two nurses to go do cataract surgery. He asked me what I was doing that day and I told him I was probably buying a new car. He asked me how much it was, then said, “No judgement, but, if you just got half that car and gave the other half to Doctors Without Borders, I could fix so many people’s eyes so they could see,” and I was just blown away. That interrupted my pattern. Long story short, I finally went to the Hyundai dealership with my husband. There was this fully loaded Hyundai Sonata. It was sexy. If you would have put a Mercedes symbol on it, I wouldn’t have known any different. It was amazing. It was literally less than half the price of the Lexus and I bought it. We still have it because I don’t even drive anyway. I was on the road all the time and used Uber. But here’s the interesting thing; we went for dinner with some friends. This is like seven years ago that I bought this car. Anyway, we go for dinner with some friends. I was always driving fancy cars and a couple of my friends whispered to my husband, “Is Kelley’s business doing okay?” And he asked why. And they asked why I was driving that car. So he told them it was because I liked the car. She doesn’t need a luxury vehicle anymore. But do you see how I was judged by my peer group? That’s a primal thing; we are ingrained to not upset our tribe. You don’t upset your tribe. So when you start making different financial decisions, you might get the backlash of your tribe. They might say, “Why aren’t you coming out with us anymore? Why are you being so anti-social?” It’s hard, Tom. So, make that goal. Get all those little steps and then be steadfast in saying, “This is what I really want.” But that opportunity costs. You have to forgo other things. Thank you, Tom, for letting me tell that story. We’re all dealing with these difficult decisions about how to stick to the goals if we even make time to set them.

Tom: That’s great. And just like how I said I had coworkers going out for happy hour and vacations and stuff. If I were to look back now, I’m probably much more likely to retire early than they are. They’re going to have to keep working and keep doing their happy hours. It becomes this cycle where they’re kind of trapping themselves in. I like the “future self” idea because now, looking back at that 20 years of corporate life, I feel much more prepared for retirement already than I would have been if I were making some of the choices other people made. Thanks for being on the show. Can you tell people where they can find the book and you online?

Kelley: Thanks, Tom. Thanks for having me on. You can find me at kelleykeehn.com. Don’t worry how you spell it. Just Google it. Every way you spell, it’s going to come up. The book was in stores everywhere before COVID. It was at Costco. It was everywhere. It was at the airports. I don’t know where it is now. You can obviously find it at Amazon an at Kindle and As A Book. It’s called, Talk Money To Me, Simon and Schuster. My handles are pretty much Kelley Keehn. Again, I don’t provide any advice, but if you need any help or guidance, I’m happy to do that. I just wanted to make that clear because there’s a lot of people that need a lot of help. I don’t provide advice but there’s a lot of great folks out there that do.

Tom: Great. Thanks for being on the show.

Kelley: Thanks, Tom.

Thanks, Kelly, for giving us some ways to control the urge to spend on luxury items and what’s at stake when we do. You can find the show notes for this episode at maplemoney.com/110. Are you new to the Maple Money Show? If so, I want to thank you for listening. In case you weren’t aware, you can watch videos from many of our top episodes on our YouTube channel. If you’re interested, head over to maplemoney.com/youtube. Make sure to like the video and hit the subscribe button. Thanks as always to you for listening and I look forward to seeing you back here next week.

Imagine a buffet. You have a plate, you have a stomach. You can only put so much on that plate. You can’t eat everything at the buffet...we have to bring those same principles to our money, that you can have what your neighbours have, but within reason… - Kelley Keehn Click to Tweet

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