HerMoney Classic: The Surprising Link Between Alcohol and Financial Freedom
32:16 Share

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Shop now at the Home Depot and get up to 35% off select appliances. Plus, save up to an extra $400 on select appliances like Frigidaire. From the stainless steel French door refrigerator with crisp sealed drawers to keep produce fresh longer, to the five burner electric range that lets you cook more at once and get meals on the table faster.

Right now, get up to 35% off select appliances like Frigidaire. The Home Depot. How doers get more done. Pricing by January 9th through January 29th. U.S. only. See store online for details and minimum purchase required.

Hey everybody, I'm Jean Chatzky. Thanks so much for joining me today on Her Money. So, dry January. For the second year in a row, I am practicing dry January, trying to make my way through dry January. Last year was pretty easy, actually. This year, it's been a little bit tough.

tougher, which I think is just a sign that in light of or in the aftermath of my mom's death, I was definitely drinking a little too much. I was certainly drinking a little more. But the thing about dry January is it's not just a January thing anymore. It's become more than that. It's sort of a movement. Many people are

practicing sober curiosity, not just in January, not just in sober October, but throughout the year. And this dry January is especially relevant because it coincides with the ask from the Surgeon General for warning labels on bottles of alcohol. He is suggesting we should all think twice

about our nightly glass of wine. The report that he issued highlights links between alcohol consumption and seven types of cancer and suggests that

Again, that alcoholic drinks come with cancer warning labels. Despite these warnings, our alcohol consumption, specifically among women, has been increasing, not decreasing. Among younger people, yes, it's going down. But if you look at the numbers where women are concerned, they are trending higher.

And so maybe this is just a moment where we pause and we actually do give our relationship with alcohol a little more thought. And I think we can

do it in a very measured way. For those of you like me who really don't want to give up our nightly glass of wine, I want you to go and read the piece about our relationship with alcohol and the risks that Susan Dominus wrote about

for the New York Times in the middle of 2024. She really took a hard look at the numerical risks and the fact that, yes, while the risks have increased, the starting risk was very small.

So it's an increase of a small number, which doesn't get you to a large number, which may make you decide that, yeah, you're going to have that nightly glass of wine anyway. I think about, and this may not be a very good analogy, but I think about my sweet and low habit. I am still a pink packet woman. I have been...

I like the pink stuff. I've been a fan of it since high school. I put it in my coffee like it's going out of style. Do I know it's bad for me? I absolutely know it's bad for me, but I like it better than Splenda. I like it better than Equal. I like it much better than Stevia. I don't necessarily like it better than Sugar, but I'm not going full Sugar. So I've

clearly made the decision that sweet and low is going to be okay with me. And I think I may make the decision that one glass of wine a night is going to be okay with me, understanding the risks. But a lot of people are not.

A lot of people are going in the other direction, which is why I wanted to bring back this incredible episode with Laura McCowan, whose own struggles with alcohol led her to choose a different path that completely transformed her life. She's the author of the best-selling memoir, We Are the Luckiest, The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life, and put

Push off from here, nine essential truths to get you through sobriety and everything else. She is also the founder of The Luckiest Club, a global sobriety support community. It was born during the pandemic. Today, they have over 55 support meetings each week.

monthly dance parties, game nights, and a running group that helps members forge sober community and connection. Laura, nice to have you here. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. Tell me about you. Tell me about your journey. I understand that there is a drinking journal involved where you started keeping a record of when you drank and what you drank. And that

That totally jumped out at me because it's what I tell our listeners when they're trying to get a handle on where their money is going or they're debating a job offer. Get it on paper. Yeah, things become different when we record them. What is unconscious becomes suddenly conscious and that can be a good or a bad thing or good or a bad feeling. I think it's always a good thing. So about me.

had a long career in marketing, actually, and advertising for 15 years. And I live just north of Boston. I'm from Colorado. I'm a mother. And I surrounded myself with, in this career, I don't think it's any accident that I chose

It's a very booze-filled culture. And I surrounded myself, whether it's work, socially, my family, with people who drink like I did. And it wasn't, I didn't really stand out in that regard. I think, as you noted in your intro, it's far more common to drink than not to drink. It's estimated that about 80% of Americans drink. And that was before even alcohol.

The mom wine culture started before big alcohol started really targeting women as a market. I started drinking when I was 17, but in earnest really dug in in college and through my early professional life. And although I did run into problems with drinking, it wasn't always problematic for me.

I looked and performed well. I was what they would classically call a high-functioning person who happened to also drink a lot. And I was really successful in my career. Like I said, I'm a mom. I was married. I had lots of people that wanted me around, both my friends, family, my colleagues.

So my problems with alcohol, once in a while I would have a publicly difficult time or night, but mostly it was a private thing. I felt really scared about the way that I drank. I knew I needed it and liked it more than it seemed other people did. And once I started, I just didn't ever really want to stop drinking.

But I managed it, and it really changed when I became a mother. It really changed again when I got divorced from my husband in 2012. And at that point, I was 33.

five years old. I was at a really high ranking position in the agency that I worked for. And the wheels really came off at that point. And I started to be really afraid. I knew I didn't have control anymore or I didn't know what was going to happen when I drank. And again, it was mostly private. Unless you got really close to me, you wouldn't have been able to tell. But to make the long story short,

I reached a point in 2013 where I had, and I write about this in my book, where I left my four-year-old daughter alone for an entire night in a hotel room at my brother's wedding because I was blacked out. And...

That was a horrific incident. It wasn't by any stretch the first horrific thing, but it was a public thing. My family was there for it. And so that started me on the trajectory of exploring sobriety. And I didn't want to get sober. I thought that was the worst thing that could ever happen. When you said you loved your wine, I loved my wine a lot. And I needed it at that point. I was physically addicted. I tried at sobriety for a year and a half. I finally did get sober in 2014.

Since then, I have switched careers. I started writing about sobriety and podcasting about it. And really, it became something I was really interested in talking about. And I switched careers in 2016 to do what I do now. I'm an author. I teach several courses about personal development and sobriety. I run a company called The Luckiest Club. And it's a whole different life.

I love talking about alcohol culture because it's, to me, it was like, I just didn't realize the water I was swimming in. I didn't. And a lot of people don't. It's just something that is a foregone conclusion to a lot of people that alcohol is just there. It's very ubiquitous. It's socially totally acceptable to drink almost anywhere. And we, there's no other drug like that. Your community is largely women. Yeah, it's largely women. And do you think it's because...

women are more sober curious as you describe them or sober concerned? Or do you think it's because, and I feel this way about Hermione, we want a place to just talk about something that people don't talk about?

Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. I don't think it's that there's more women that are sober curious or sober concerned as I emailed to you. I think it's women tend to talk about things more than men do. Women are drinking more than ever, ever before. And it's having a real impact in our lives. And

And women tend to, just like more women read books, more women tend to be interested in, I hate calling it personal development, but for lack of a better word, we tend to be interested in it more and more open to it. For men, despite the fact that the prevailing recovery modality worldwide as Alcoholics Anonymous and that that was created by men, and I don't want to say it's for men, but it's masculine in its language and such, anonymity is still very big.

For men, I think it's hard to talk about things that are deemed shameful. And this is one of those things that society still looks at as very, you either struggle with alcohol or you don't. And if you struggle, it's because you're an alcoholic. And that's a moral failure. It's a failure of will. First of all, there's so many things that are just wrong with that statement, right? I mean, I have people in my life who I have watched struggle.

And I think just like we have learned that depression is not an issue, it's a disease. We should not be pointing fingers at all.

Why is it that women are struggling more than men or not even struggling? Why is it that women are drinking more than we were drinking? Well, I want to address the part that you talked about because I think it's really important for people listening because everyone, I don't know what the statistics are exactly, but chances are everyone you meet is touched by someone who struggles with alcoholism.

alcohol or drugs, right? And we'll just keep it to alcohol. I mean, it's... There's 15 million people struggle with alcohol use disorder in America. It's not a small number of people. And it's not a binary thing either. It's not either you have the gene or the disease. The disease model is definitely debated. But it's not that you either have it or you don't. It's a huge spectrum. It's an addictive substance, period. And so...

of course, people get addicted and we're marketed to. I mean, you talk about money and business and it is a billion dollar industry. It's working on us because that's what happens. You know, we don't see it. So I just want to address that. It's not a binary thing. Most of the women that I talked to didn't have a problem for a long time. And oftentimes what happens is they became mothers, they have careers, and they were trying to do it all. And

Something had to hold that up in the back end. And alcohol is just there. It's marketed to us. It's put in beautiful packages. It's rosé all day. Our friends do it.

Some of my biggest drinking times were when I was a young mother, when I had a young child, because it's hard. It is hard. I mean, I remember those. There were times in my life where I really didn't reach for a glass of wine every night. And then I became a mom. And I remember that.

With my friend Diane, who lives across the street, Mondays. Mondays, we would feed the kids together. We would throw them in the bathtub together. I have pictures from those times, but there was always wine involved.

Yeah. And that's super common. It's totally socially acceptable now. It's not that women didn't do this before, but in my mom's age, they sat around and smoked cigarettes together. And drank beer. And drank. But the cigarettes and they all, there was also pills.

When my grandma, who just passed away a few years ago, she was 95. And I joke, but it's not really true. She was a certified sort of drug addict. You know, she had been taking Valium for years because that's how, you know, it was called literally mom's little helper. So women have been encouraged either privately or now publicly to self-medicate and that you deserve it.

You deserve it. This is hard. And you'll get people, countless women, mothers publicly. Kelly Clarkson is a great example because I remember hearing her say this and my jaw just dropped. It was like, how do you survive having four kids? And she said, wine. And it's like it's a joke, but it's not a joke. That's not uncommon. People weren't aghast at her saying that. It was like, yes, me too. Yeah.

So why we're drinking more, why women are drinking more is it's a layered topic. But I think a lot of it has to do with the social acceptance of using a drug that does work. You described it. It does take the edge off. It is socially social lubricant. It feels good for a while, but there's also a big mythology around it.

Because the reality is you feel better for about 30 minutes and then all kinds of things crash and it messes up your sleep. And so the answer to wine is usually more wine the next day or whatever. So people fall in unwittingly, fall into a habit.

And I think that has a lot to do with it. I think, you know, it's a flip side of feminism. You know, we wanted to be able to do all the things and there may be a dark side of feminism. We wanted to be able to do all the things and we wanted to have all the things that men had. And part of that was being able to drink openly, publicly with abandon. And there's that.

Those are the two big things. And then you can't deny the ubiquity of it in our culture. It's just marketed to the tune of multiple billions of dollars every year to women. So let's talk about the dollars, because this is a personal finance podcast. And you wrote extensively in your memoir about how your financial situation changed as your relationship to alcohol evolved. Can you talk about that? Yeah. And this is something I don't get to talk about much. So I'm

I love talking about it. I was a financial mess. By that, I mean six-figure debt, living paycheck to paycheck no matter how much I made, having a huge scarcity mindset about money always. I was very afraid of it. I couldn't even talk about it. It was almost more shameful than my drinking in a way. I just felt like it was a lost cause. Like I'd probably always live that way.

And I just ignored it. I didn't know how to look at it. And some of that is a product of the cycle of drinking and the chaos that it creates in your life. Just from a practical standpoint, I wouldn't pay bills. I didn't have my head wrapped around it. We talked about writing things down. It was a big, big day when I think it took me two years into sobriety to write down how much debt I actually had.

I couldn't even write it down. I didn't know the number. I just knew it was big, right? So I got sober in 2014 and started to slowly piece together the practical things. I would pay my bills on time. I knew I wasn't spending money on alcohol and I would spend hundreds of dollars on alcohol, both going out to restaurants and buying it myself. And then I

There was a big mindset shift that has happened over the course of many years just to not be afraid of things that I'm afraid of and to know that really the only way to resolve something is to look at it. Yeah, I think that's so true of money. And it's at the heart of what we do in our coaching program, in our Finance Fix program. We make you look at your data. You may not want to look at your data.

But until you look at your numbers, until you get in there with your numbers, you can't fix it because you don't know what it is. That's right. It's basic awareness. It's like step one. And it's terrifying. And then almost immediately there's relief when we do it. You mentioned me writing down how much I drank. I just didn't have a real concept of how much I actually drank.

I thought it was a few glasses of wine a night or something like that. And it was over the course of a week, a lot, lot, lot more because my glasses were three glasses, you know. And so it's just I didn't do that to shame myself. It was just like, what is really going on here?

It was just like with money. It took me two years of sobriety to be desperate enough to want to change it. I just didn't want to live like that anymore. And I didn't think it was possible for me to not fear money and have shame around it. And I don't today. I really don't. I invested in coaching.

A lot of it is just practical building blocks. But I look at my money every day. I know what comes in. I know what comes out. And that's a miracle to me. But that's what it takes. I mean, I look at my money every day, too. Coming out of my divorce really got a stronger handle on it. And I had had a handle on it before. But I knew at that point of transition in my life I needed to be more aware of

And I like looking every day. Looking every day makes me feel comforted and in control. Yeah, I feel empowered about money and I never thought I would say that. Never.

I'm wondering if the other women who are members of the Luckiest Club have experienced a similar financial metamorphosis. Years and years ago, I did a program called The Debt Diet with Oprah. And we found, interestingly, that people who went on the debt diet, and there were so many, actually lost weight.

because once they got control in one area of their life, it was a lot easier to get control in another. And I'm wondering if this is similar. Oh, it's all connected. I don't see it as very different. A lot of the work that I have done to be a lot of people think they have money problems, but they don't. They have worthiness problems. They have mindset problems. They have scarcity problems. They have

trauma that they haven't processed. They need to go to therapy and learn some emotional sobriety. And when those things happen, suddenly a lot of external circumstances improve because it all comes from the same place. I think there is merit to working on your money

skills and your know-how and you're learning the tactics of how money works and looking at it every day and things like that. So much of it is emotional. And when we're operating in a state of fear, what we know from evolutionary psychology and other things is when we're operating from a state of fear, we can't thrive. We're just trying to survive all the time.

There are many reasons people get in debt, but a lot of it is just being in survival mode for way too long. Right. And I don't mean to minimize the very real reasons why people have financial problems. A lot of times there's extraordinary circumstances and there's a lot we can do at the individual level. You asked about do other people go through similar metamorphosis? I mean, money is...

One, I would say, of the top three things that people struggle with when they get sober, it's their relationships, money, and I don't even know what the third would be, how we'd classify as sort of emotional sobriety.

Do you find yourself getting the winter blues after the holiday rush? Look, let's face it, once the holiday lights come down and all the plans with family and friends pretty much grind to a halt, winter can feel blah. The skies are gray, the nights are long, the chill seems endless. When

When that mid-winter slump hits, I try to give myself a little boost, a little treat, if you will. And for that, I love Quince. Quince brings you everyday luxury at prices that will not break your budget. They have gorgeous staples starting at just $1.

$50 including my favorite Mongolian cashmere sweaters. I just got the most amazing chocolate brown. The question is, how do they make luxury so affordable? Quince skips the middleman, working directly with top factories to bring you premium prices at 50 to 80% less than other brands. Plus...

Every item is crafted with care. Quince only partners with factories that prioritize safe, ethical, and sustainable manufacturing. I, for one, have been eyeing their cotton cashmere dolman sweaters. I love the elevated look, and even though they're short-sleeved, I know the cashmere will keep me warm without feeling stuffy or overheated the next time I head into the city for a meeting.

Treat yourself this winter without the luxury price tag. Go to quince.com slash her money for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order. That's quince.com slash her money to get free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com slash her money.

I'm talking with Laura McCowan, founder and CEO of The Luckiest Club, a sobriety support community and author of the bestselling memoir, We Are the Luckiest, The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life. So when people get sober, they struggle with money. Why? There are a few reasons. One is people with sobriety.

addiction problems tend to, by the like 97% of them have experienced trauma.

And what that often does is it sort of they operate in scarcity mindset. They operate in a survival mode a lot of the time, and that extends through so many areas of their life, one of them being money. So this isn't true for everybody, but it's true a lot of the time, especially for women. They've given up their power, and sometimes that power means financial power and financial autonomy.

where they have outsourced that to other people in their lives, whether it's a partner or they've just given up and thought, I can't do anything about my money situation. There's also poor boundaries. People who struggle with addiction struggle with boundaries. We don't have a strong sense of ourselves.

and where I begin and you end. And so what that means is there's a lot of giving away, giving away our power, giving away, yes, our money, giving away the ways that we can live our lives with a lot of sovereignty. And that's what I see a lot of times as the money issue is this lack of sovereignty or autonomy. Like, I don't believe I can be good at this.

So I'm just not going to try. I have a lot of shame around how I spend and it's very secret. And that's the thing that we see with people who struggle with alcohol. Lots and lots of secrets, lots and lots of behaviors they don't talk about. And that's always about shame. And until we talk about it, it stays shameful. It increases the shame. Secrecy increases it. So

I'm sure you have a lot more insight as to why money is a secretive, shameful thing in society, especially for women. But...

That's just what I see. And then there's the fact that if you have a substance abuse problem, or even if you drink a little more than you want to, you're unconscious more. You're making unconscious decisions. There's a lot of links to purchasing things when you're not quite with it, signing up for things when you're not quite with it, just not being able to stay on top of your finances because you're

You're not there. You're not able to have the presence of mind to do that. Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely true. And we've talked about that, that if you're going to have a glass of wine, then your defenses are down and you should just stay away from the computer. You should stay away from Instagram. You shouldn't be anywhere where you are going to make purchases because, believe me, most of them are going back. Let's wrap this with two things.

pieces of tactical information. I'd love to get your thoughts on if you are a woman who drinks and you think you should be drinking less, maybe you are sober curious, what do you do? What are the steps? And by the same token, if you are a woman who drinks and it occupies a nice place in your life at this point, how do you keep it in that lane?

Great question. I laugh because the answer to the second question, I'll go first.

That's the big myth is that we have quote unquote control or it's totally a choice because whenever you dance with an addictive substance, there is a chance that you will become addicted to it. That's what addictive substances do. So whether it's a psychological addiction where you just you really look forward, you don't feel quite right if you don't have that at the end of the day or it's a physical addiction, the hope that it won't manifest into addiction.

something worse is a hope. So I just want to say that. It's not that some people are immune and some aren't. That said, I know so many people who have a perfectly fine relationship with alcohol. I don't know that it does anyone favors, but I don't think it's necessarily bad for everyone, right? The key is to have some consciousness around it. That's the answer is say, why am I drinking? Like the moment before you drink, ask yourself what's going on.

Why am I doing this? And if the answer is, I just really enjoy it, great. You ask yourself the question. But if there's a part of you that's going, I hate the way I feel right now. I don't know that I can tolerate the next hour or two hours without a glass of wine. That's something to explore. And it's just no judgment curiosity, right? Okay, so there's that. And then the first question about if you suspect that...

Alcohol plays a bigger role in your life than you want it to. There's often a nagging voice that we have that says, this isn't serving me. Curiosity again. There are luckily now so many resources and so many places to go to look at that question without judgment and without saying, I got to label myself as I'm going to do this. You don't. I don't call myself an alcoholic.

It's not a black or white binary thing. It's perfectly acceptable to say, I don't know if this works for me and I'm going to explore it. So one book I would check out is my dear friend Annie Grace wrote a book called This Naked Mind. And it really looks at the mindset around alcohol and sort of explores the myths that we have around what alcohol does for us, that it's a relaxing, that we have more fun.

all those things that it facilitates connection. And it's very much written for a sober, curious type of person. That's a great place to start. I would explore that. And then people have different relationships with social media. But one of the great things that's happened in the past five years is there's a lot of

sober curious if you just search that hashtag say on instagram you're gonna find a lot just listen there's podcasts tons of them check them out see if any of what people are saying resonates with you and then follow the next breadcrumb if it does laura mccowan thank you so much for a really terrific conversation if we want to find more about you about the luckiest club where do we go

Just go to my website. Everything is there. It's my name, lauramccowan.com. And the luckiest club has its own website to theluckiestclub.com. But it's all linked from my site. That's the best place to go.

Thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. Of course. Thanks so much for joining me today on Her Money. If you loved this episode, please give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. We always value your feedback. And if you want to keep the financial conversations going, join me for a deeper dive.

Her Money has two incredible programs, Finance Fix, which is an eight-week program designed to give you the ultimate money makeover, and Investing Fix, which is our investing club for women that meets biweekly on Zoom. With both programs, we are leveling the playing fields for women's financial confidence and power. I would love to see you there.

We'd like to thank our sponsor, Edelman Financial Engines. Her Money is produced by Haley Pascalides. Our music is provided by Video Helper and our show comes to you through Megaphone. Thanks for joining us and we'll talk soon.