E21 - Why Knowing How Money Works Still Doesn’t Change Your Behavior

You know how money works.
 You know what the smart financial move is.
 And yet—when stress hits or life gets busy—you fall back into the same patterns.

In this episode of Before the Returns, Jaden revisits how banks use money and explains why understanding the financial system alone doesn’t change behavior. Drawing from personal stories and real-life pressure moments, he shows how emotional conditioning and early money experiences quietly override logic.

This episode isn’t about learning another strategy.
 It’s about why financial knowledge doesn’t stick—and what actually has to change before behavior, control, and outcomes do.

Key Takeaways

• Financial knowledge doesn’t automatically change behavior
• Stress exposes your true money habits
• Early money experiences shape adult decision-making
• Familiar systems feel safe—even when they don’t serve you
• Structure must support behavior when emotions take over

Listener Reflection Questions

• When stress hits, what do you default to financially?
• Do you avoid, freeze, over-control, or take impulsive action?
• Where did that reaction first get learned?

Learn more at www.jadenzubal.com | Follow @jadenzubal | Join the *Before the Returns Weekly* newsletter

📩 Questions or ideas? Email: jadenzubal.wealth@gmail.com

⚖️ Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only. It is not financial, tax, or legal advice. Always consult with a qualified professional before making financial decisions.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

You know how money works, and it still didn't change your behavior. Knew what the smart move was, knew the bank wasn't really working for you, stress hit, life got busy, and you fell into the same patterns. This is why seeing or understanding a financial system or having a financial strategy isn't actually enough. And there are other things that have to change before behavior actually changes. Hello and welcome to another episode of Before the Returns. I'm your host, Jaden Zuball, and today we are going to revisit some ideas from an earlier episode regarding how banks use our money and how our money is not actually just sitting around in our savings account and growing. There's a lot happening in the background that we don't even fully understand all the time. And I dive in really deep into that in episode seven of this podcast. But today I'm going to go a little more high-level on that and get into conceptually what that looks like for us and how we can address it in our lives to actually get a better outcome with our money. If you listen to the previous episode, or if you're watching this on YouTube and you listen to the previous version, in that video, we talked about stories and how stories shape our lives financially, really in all aspects, right? It's not just a financial thing, but financially, we really get hit hard by the stories that we learn and the traumas that we're attached to growing up. So let's quickly revisit episode seven, just for a moment. So in episode seven, really what we talked about is how banks use our money. And I brought a book with me, or I just took it off my shelf over there to show you guys today. But this book, if you're a diehard about understanding the banking system, and if you really want to dive into how to improve your financial picture, this is a book I could not recommend enough. It's a bit of a monster, right? This one's kind of a beast. So you are almost 600 pages for the whole book, and it's intense. But this tells some pretty incredible stories. So it's called The Creature from Jekyll Island, written by G. Edward Griffin. And it is a fantastic read if you want to understand the banking system better. So big picture, let's talk high-level just for a moment. For those who are not ready to dive into that book or haven't already dived into it. Big picture, when we talk the Federal Reserve Banking System. So the banking system that we use here in the United States, what we're really talking about is this idea that when you deposit a dollar, or let's say you deposit$1,000 to your bank account, the bank can then loan that money out, and the money is going to cycle multiple times. So they might take that what was originally$1,000, and it might be loaned out 10 times because it's just cycling over and over. So the banks are able to take and multiply your money for themselves, right? That's how they make money is they take the money on deposit, they loan it out to other people, charge higher rates, and they do it multiple times. So it's really not even just about the rates for the banks, it's that money movement, right? It's them being able to shift money around frequently, and that gives them much higher returns. So what this boils down to though is you're playing the game, right? You're just part of the banking game. They own the structure, they make the rules, they decide how everything's set up, and we are all involved in playing this game. We've got to have a bank account. It's pretty hard these days to really accomplish anything if your money is not running through your bank account. But that bank account is just part of the big picture. We are all just thrown into the pot. We give the banks our money, they do their thing with it, and then for the most part, we get to use it when we actually need it. So as long as banks are able to keep the system functioning well enough that we can still go to our checking account or swipe our cards and things work, then nobody really asks any questions. And so, really, what I want to talk about on this episode, though, is not so much here's all the problems with the banking system. I want to get into here's what the banking system is doing. They are loaning the money out, they are cycling it over and over, and they've created these strategies and these systems. But there are ways for us to utilize these same types of systems. Okay. And we're really missing out big time when we don't at least try to understand high-level how the banking system works, and then try to implement some of those things into our own lives and take advantage of these types of strategies. Just knowing about it, though, doesn't create the change. Listening to my earlier episode, that by itself doesn't create the change of how you operate with your money. In order to actually create change, we have to recognize that information does not provide emotion. Bringing in a bunch of information, we are all just beat up every day with information. You sit here and we can scroll on our phones and we're just pounded with tons and tons of information coming in all the time. How much of that information do we actually ingest and do something with? How much of it do we run right through us, right? It goes in one ear, out the other, and we never ever think about it again. So there's a lot that we don't catch. And usually what we don't catch, we don't catch it because there's no emotion attached to it for us. We didn't see anything in it initially that said, This is important to me. I need to latch on to it. So what that means for you is that pressure or stress or difficult things happening in our lives. We get in a car accident or we have a family member call with an emergency, or the kids need a dozen different things that day, or there's a problem at work. The typical stresses of everyday life, they often reveal our actual operating system. They reveal the way that we actually treat money and what we do with it. So we can have tons of information coming in and telling us, here's what you should do with your money. Here are the ways to operate. And look, the banks operate like this. They use other people's money and they loan it out and they make an income that way. Okay, that's nice. You know, maybe we can figure that out someday, but I can't figure that out today because I've got this and this that I'm thinking about. So if you're thinking about all these different things all the time, it's gonna be really hard for you to dial in and make a strategy work because the emotion is still attached to the old way. So we have to get the emotion attached to the new way in order for the new way to mean anything. If we need to somehow shift from the old emotions and the old stories, meaning the stories of growing up and the things that happened to you that influenced how you make decisions with money. I've told this story before on the show, but I've come back to more than once now this story of when I was a kid and I was only seven or eight years old at the time, and my mom had asked me for$40. And what I remember about that story is something clicked for me, and I said, okay, I now feel responsible. I feel like I need to help her. But as a child, it's probably not the healthiest thing. And for a long time, I didn't think about that story. I pushed it out. I didn't really make the connection between what that did to me at that point and how it made me operate financially today. That story became an emotional attachment for how I manage money. I grew up in a situation where money wasn't really talked about, there wasn't a lot of money to go around, there wasn't a lot of financial education. So, in my mind, that told me I need to learn this stuff and I need to figure it out so that I can change the direction of my family. So there were good things that came from the story, but the bad things that came from the story were as I got older and I started to actually make a little bit of money, I had a really hard time taking on any risk. I didn't want to invest in anything. I didn't want to put money anywhere that I could potentially lose it. Because the story when I was a kid was if I lose this money, that's it, right? We're done. There's not enough coming in the door. There's not a way to bring in more money and more income. So how am I going to solve this problem if I lose it today? And that is the story that I had to grapple with and learn. Well, in order for me to grow, sometimes I'm going to have to take on a little bit of risk. But, and that this is the big key is when you take on risk, there are ways to offset risk and there are ways to still protect. Because any intelligent, long-term investor is not just thinking about how can I take on as much risk as possible. There comes a point where they make that shift from I'm just going to take on a bunch of risk to I'm going to also protect. But everything is strategic and there's thought that goes into it because we have to, again, we're just shifting the story. We're shifting the emotions, we're learning from the original ways that we managed our money, and we're developing it into a new story that works for where we're at in life today. So, why do people stay in these bad systems? They do it because it feels familiar and it feels safe. Similar to my story, the unknown feels risky, right? So we don't want to go out and dump our money into buying some real estate when we have no idea what we're doing. I agree with that. I don't want to go out and make an investment that I don't understand either. I invested in real estate a lot, but the more that I've done it, the more I understand, the more I'm willing to take on a little more risk with it. When I first started buying real estate, the very first property I ever bought was around$70,000. Today, the last properties that we just bought, we paid a little over a million dollars for those. So it's a huge shift in what might be perceived risk. But in the end, those million dollar properties were not more risky than the$70,000 property because it's the knowledge and the understanding and the shift in my story that's enabled me to do that. So let's look at it another way as well. I've talked in the past about renting versus owning when it comes to real estate. I compare a lot of things to real estate. It's an analogy that's familiar. And so this idea of renting a home versus owning a home, we can also apply this to our emotional and financial lives. Meaning, think of renting as being the more passive, familiar, it's the easier, lower barrier to entry. We can outsource decisions when we're renting. So we're not responsible for everything in that property when we're renting it. And if you go back to previous episodes, you'll find I am in no way opposed to renting properties. I actually find a lot of value in renting the place you live and then owning other properties. Again, not applying this specifically to buying real estate right now, but applying this to our emotional and financial lives. So renting is passive, familiar, allows us to outsource ideas. Owning is now where we have to take responsibility for the ideas. We have to take responsibility for the discomfort that comes with those ideas. And we have to take responsibility for the intention behind the decisions that we make, because the decisions that we make ultimately influence the outcome that we get. And a lot of times we don't want to acknowledge that. And I say that speaking for myself as much as anybody else out there that I've ever worked with. It's pretty hard as an individual where your story is pretty set in stone by the time you're an adult. When you get into your 20s and then 30s and then 40s, like the older you get, the harder it gets to change that story. And so changing from this renting emotionally, financially mentality to a owning mentality means we are now going to own those decisions. We're going to own the intention behind them, and we're going to own the stories that created that. Because if we back into it, I really do believe at this phase of my life that if we back into those stories, we will be able to create the new story, and we'll be able to allow this new information to come in and help develop how we make financial decisions going forward. Behavior doesn't change with insight alone. What I mean by that is that structure has to carry the behavior. So we do we, as we bring the information in and we build out the structure, allows us to create discipline so that when the crazy thing happens at work or when the kids need 15 different things or whatever it is, we've essentially built the story to create habits and control the decisions that we make. A great example is me recording this podcast. There are weeks where I simply don't want to do it. There's 500 things going on. I'm dealing with rentals and kids and business and family and all these different things. And the last thing that I'm wanting to do is record a podcast. But the habits and the structure have been built. The information's there. I've had the information come in that okay, this is a valuable tool for myself and it's a valuable tool for my clients. It's a way for me to have an outlet and get information out to people that I really believe holds real value for them. And because I have all of that information that has come in and I built that into my story now, I can say I've got the discipline and the structure that I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna record the podcast. We're gonna make it happen. How do we take all this information that I'm spewing? How do we take that information? How do we implement it and actually have it have any meaning for you? A couple of questions or a couple of thoughts to consider. One of them is when stress hits, so just for a minute, sit back and think about your day-to-day life. And think about when you're making decisions financially. What happens when stress hits? What do you default to? What is that initial emotion that comes up if you have a financial emergency or you have a big expense that comes out of nowhere? Things that often happen to us, and it could be as small as a few hundred dollars, it could be hundreds of thousands. Everybody's in a different situation. But what is it that you initially feel when those things come up? Then do you avoid the feeling? Do you lean into it? Do you freeze? Do you over-control the situation? What does that look like for you? So that reaction, that initial gut reaction when the emergency happens, that will tell you more than any spreadsheet, than any spiel I can give you on how to manage money or how to do things financially to get a good outcome. That initial emotion that you feel will tell you more about your story and what your story is doing to your financial life than anything else I could do for you. So you don't need to fight banks. You don't even necessarily need more discipline yet. You need to understand your story and understand that as we build out that story and try to use it to our advantage, try to turn your story into a thing that can help you pursue the worthy goals that you have and the good things that you want to do. That's where we can start to build the structure. Because that we're all human and the structures only work when we attach it to the emotions. So with that, thank you for joining another episode of Before the Returns. And if you feel like you got any value from this episode or any of the others that you've listened to, please consider liking, subscribing, and sharing. Really helps the channel to grow, and we appreciate all of your support.