How to Stop Worrying About Money (If You're Not a Billionaire)
The Jesse Mecham Show
YNAB
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 October 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When worry creeps in to your money, the knee jerk response is to think: "I just need to make more money, that will solve my problems." But as Jesse shares in a humorous conversation with his daughter, it's interesting how quickly you can spend more and more money in your mind. Unless you're a billionaire, money has a way of becoming stressful when you're only solution is to need more and more of it.
Jesse's approach when worry creeps in? Double down on YNAB. Go back to giving every dollar a job -- which is the core principle of the YNAB method -- and taking active control of your money. Doing this not only helps you create a plan for your money, it puts you in the driver seat of your money, and helps you regain confidence in your plan, one transaction at a time.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, my name is Jesse Meekam with another episode of the Jesse Meekam show, and I'm here each week to obsess out loud about worrying. |
| 0:23.2 | Well, the day I want to obsess about worrying. I think we all obsess about money to a degree, but it's not obsession. It's worry. |
| 0:30.7 | I think it's universal that we humans worry about money. And it doesn't have to be that way, but it is that way. It's just, |
| 0:39.7 | it just is. It's like, you're not allowed to pet that cute jellyfish. That's life, right? |
| 0:45.1 | No matter how cute, that thing may look to be. We, we just, we're looking for solutions to |
| 0:52.6 | worry so much of the time and one that I have found both |
| 0:57.1 | personally and just in my observations over the last 20 plus years is a lot of us tend to think you know |
| 1:03.5 | what I do notice that I worry about money and I know exactly how I'm going to fix it I'm going to |
| 1:08.9 | make more of it a whole lot more, shovels more. |
| 1:12.6 | And then, magically, that worry of money will go away. And you might, your dreams may have taken |
| 1:20.3 | you so far. Actually, just yesterday, my daughter, Fay, asked me, you know, how much does that house cost point into a house? |
| 1:29.3 | And I was like, oh, definitely a million dollars. |
| 1:30.8 | And it blew her mind. |
| 1:32.3 | And I said, well, a million dollars isn't just what it used to be. |
| 1:34.9 | So she goes, dad, what about a billion dollars? |
| 1:38.9 | So we had a discussion about a billion dollars. |
| 1:41.8 | And I did the whole, well, your safe withdrawal rate of a billion dollars would be $40 million, |
| 1:47.0 | which would pencil out to be that you could spend $165,000 every day. |
| 1:54.0 | And then the next day you could spend $165,000 and you would not run out of money. |
| 2:00.0 | And so she's like, oh my gosh, i would buy so much gum spearmint gum and i had her get a piece of paper and a pencil and i was like uh write down everything you would buy because you could buy that gum and the next day what are you going to buy because you have 16165,000 the next day. So she's like, |
| 2:17.8 | I'd buy a house. And then I was like, well, which state? You know, so then she was like, well, Maui, Florida, Utah. And I was like, okay, now we're cooking. And then she's like, and I would have maids. I was like, okay, now, no, wow, you got there quick, you know, a little too quick honestly we, we went from gum to maids very quickly. |
| 2:36.7 | But it was fun. It was fun to see her try and figure out just how much money that was and how |
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