Featured Guest:
Financial Well-being with Kassandra Dasent
I met Kassandra through a group of online entrepreneurs on Facebook after FinCon19. Kassandra and I share a love of financial well-being and mutual affinity for helping people understand how to optimize their wellness.
Kassandra supports financial wellbeing through many avenues and has been tapped by Forbes, US News & World Report, Business Insider, Fast Company, Travel Noire, Yahoo! Finance and News, and Glamour to share her passion for financial education.
When I learned more about Kassandra and her passion, I knew I had to share her work with the Wellness Grind community. Kassandra is all about servant leadership as she makes personal finance approachable and inspirational for those around her.
She’s paid off $55K CAD in debt, focused on her financial freedom, found financial stability and committed to living a debt-free life. Through Minding Your Money, Kassandra provides individual mini-coaching sessions to continue her service those in need of financial wellness.
Kassandra is a true renaissance woman, from singing to YouTube, speaking, consulting, and coaching… there is nothing that this woman can’t do.
As a financial financial wellness engineer, educator and speaker, and the Founder & CEO of Minding Your Money. Kassandra address the emotional impact and effect that money has on our lives. She is also a wife, long-distance stepmother and caregiver, singer-songwriter, and double-emigrant business owner.
Looking to Pay Off Debt? Watch These Easy to Understand Strategies!
What’s the best debt payoff strategy according to Kassandra? “It depends!” is her answer. No two people have the same wellness recipe and no two people have the same “financial reality”.
Check out this debt payoff strategy video Kassandra recently released on her YouTube channel with different approaches you could implement to reduce your debt.
One thing I absolutely love and respect about Kassandra’s approach to financial well-being is that she recognizes the need for individualizing financial wellness.
Like any aspect of your wellness, your financial wellness is completely up to your situation. And you can control how you feel about your situation.
Financial Wellness Deep Thinking with Kassandra Dasent
I was able to track Kassandra down (she’s a very busy lady!) and she agreed to share a bit about herself, her wellness recipe, and what drives her to help others. I asked Kassandra some pretty real questions, here’s the wisdom she had to share:
When is it O.K. to Use Your Savings?
Question: In one of your recent blog posts you discuss saving for emergencies. In your vast financial wellness experience, can you say a few words about how people can overcome any guilt they might feel when dipping into their savings? Is it OK to deplete your savings rather than going into debt?
The premise of saving money is to create a measure of security and widen the gap between oneself and the proverbial financial cliff.
For some, spending their savings, even when it is for good reason, makes them feel anxious, guilty, and/or disappointed. Rather than using a tool that is designed to alleviate financial strain and mental duress, they prefer to access credit as the latter helps them to avoid potentially uncomfortable or negative emotions they have unwittingly associated with their savings.
I always recommend that people question why they are feeling conflicted about using their savings to deal with a bona fide emergency. It is important to be willing to confront beliefs, language, and behaviors in your relationship with money that are not serving you well and then begin to work toward creating a more emotionally positive association with money (i.e. feeling good about being able to face life events with greater financial ease).
How Did You Learn About Financial Wellness?
Question: What drives you to help people with their personal finances? How did you come to understand that wellness + personal finances go hand in hand?
I had a very unhealthy relationship with my money and it took me over a decade to address it and shift my mental narrative in order to pay off debt and begin to create wealth. I know for a fact that so many others are in the same situation as I once was. That is what motivates me to do what I can to help people to experience a values based and purposeful relationship with their money.
During my debt payoff experience that began in 2009, I had a financial breakthrough. I made the emotional connection of wanting my choices and decisions with money to reflect my core values and I began to live by the concept of holistic wealth. My wealth is built upon four pillars being: physical, spiritual, mental, and financial. I realized that if one or more of my pillars are not properly reinforced, it affects the remaining ones. Once I am doing well mentally, physically, and spiritually, my personal finances are also positively affected.
How Do You Maintain Your Wellness?
Question: You’re such a hard-working woman, how do you maintain your own personal wellness? Can you give us 3-4 tips that help you maintain yourself ?
In order to maintain and increase my well being, here are the key forms of self-care that I practice regularly:
- Establish boundaries and protect my time (whether this means not working excess hours often, needing a few minutes or even a day to decompress when arriving home from a work trip, or not overscheduling my evenings and days off).
- Remind myself that saying NO to something means I am saying Yes to something more important and meaningful to me (this helps me to reframe the feeling of guilt that NO can sometimes elicit).
- Be mindful of who I spend my time with (my mental well-being needs to be enriched and not robbed by people who are not well-meaning or understanding).
- Acknowledge when I am feeling anxious, stressed, or down, and work through the associated feelings and then redirect them into positive action (can be as small as taking a 5 min walk or enjoying a small scoop of ice cream).
- Rely on a support team (positive people, health professionals).
What’s Unique About Gen-X’s Financial Wellness?
Question: As a Gen X leader in the financial wellness space, do you have any thoughts on what makes money for GenXers different from past or subsequent generations? Have you found any common needs/desires/hopes for financial wellness that are common amongst Gen Xers?
GenXers are the first generation that have for the most part had to confront the reality of taking care of their own retirement. The age of the company sponsored pension is essentially no more, save for those who work for the government and crown corporations.
They are also the first generation to encounter crippling student debt and are severely overextended with consumer credit. Then add in the day-to-day challenges of raising a family, caring for their elders, financially supporting extended family, coping with the fact that there is no longer such a thing as a “secure” job, dealing with pivotal life changes such as divorce, remarriage and blended families, while coming to terms with the impact of the swift evolution of technology, and socio-economic shifts.
In short, many GenXers feel that some or all of the above factors are adversely affecting their ability to secure their financial well being. My mission is to help them understand that they have the power and ability to change their financial trajectory in part by employing emotional intelligence and teach them how to begin to create a life of their own design that reflects what matters most to them.
Kasandra’s Message with Meaning
I have to admit, I definitely fan-girl stalked Kassandra the way I did with Karen (aka __SweetCheeks). When I dug into Kassandra’s YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter… I found we share a passion for mental health.
When I was able to talk to her for a short consult on this post, I learned she’d actually read some of my work as well. Totally humbled and appreciative of our mutual passion for mental health and wellness!
I have increasingly found that many personal finance digital creators are passionate about mental health and financial well-being because of their own experiences and want to help people get out of financial situations that might bring them emotional baggage.
From depression, anxiety, guilt, embarrassment, to many other emotions, it seems we can’t escape the baggage that comes with money. Kassandra talks more about this in her blog post You Need to Change Your Money Mindset.
It may sound a bit out there what I just said but it actually does require you to let go of certain notions, ingrained beliefs, and behaviours that you have learned over the years in order to create the conditions to support a mindset that leads to financial stability, wellness and wealth.
Kassandra Dasent
I love this quote, let’s tease it apart a bit.
Notions often come from baggage you are bringing with you into adulthood, could be how your parents spent or saved money. Or even how society has framed money and finances, which you have internalized.
Your ingrained beliefs can hold you back because they are often driving forces for your habits- be it a good or bad influence.
Lastly your behaviors- the actions you actually take around money which might include spending, saving, and investing. The actions or behaviors are the result of you acting on the notions and beliefs that you have carried with you into adulthood.
What I admire about Kassandra’s message is that she’s not limiting us to holding onto these if they are negative or are holding us back from making the changes necessary to reach happiness, wealth, and wellness.
Rather, she is enlightening us to consider how changing our mindset will result in financial stability, wellness, and wealth that we desire.
Change your mind, change the game. It’s that simple.
Thank You!
A special thank you to Kassandra Dasent for taking the time to be part of Financial Wellness Week. You can find Kassandra providing helpful financial wellness tips at Minding Your Money, through mini coaching sessions, and creating content about financial well-being.
Featured Guest Bio:
Kassandra Dasent is a recognized financial wellness engineer, speaker, Founder & CEO of Minding Your Money, LLC.
EQ Your Way to Wealth™ is what Kassandra specializes in. Focusing on how emotional awareness can have a direct and lasting impact on one’s relationship with money, she provides her clients, corporate employees, and audiences with practical solutions to help them achieve financial stability, wellness, and wealth.
You can find Kassandra on social media at:
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