Shang Saavedra was an immigrant family’s dream: She earned stellar grades and made her way to Harvard. Upon graduation she was making six figures, living frugally and investing at least $20,000 every year. She went to business school, got married, started a family – and was crushed by the pressure of it all.
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“My parents were constantly comparing me against a pretty impossible standard for education,” recalled Saavedra, who was born in rural China and moved to Boston when she was 10. “Those voices never stopped in my head: ‘Am I ever going to be considered successful? Am I ever going to do right by the amount of money they put into my education?’”
By her late twenties, these anxieties were straining her relationships, particularly her marriage. “I would complain about how stressed I was, whether I was pleasing my bosses, whether I could be up for promotion,” she said. “I was taking so much of my life for granted.”
4 Takeaways from Shang Saavedra
Cultivating a healthy, positive mindset is a critical step to mastering personal finance.
Most people struggle with money. Join a community group to feel less alone.
If you’re saving for fertility treatments, look into a Health Savings Account for a tax break.
Sometimes renting is a better financial decision than buying a home.
Through therapy, Saavedra, 40, learned to break the thought patterns preventing her from feeling her success. She eventually left her corporate career and now works as a money coach helping clients change the beliefs about money that hold them back. Her 2025 book, Wealth Is a Mindset, is a memoir and a guide to her philosophy.
The Guardian caught up with Saavedra to talk about how to set financial goals, the importance of community, and the single purchase that satisfied her taste for luxury.
You’ve shared that going to therapy helped you heal your anxieties around money. Do you have any advice for switching from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance?
Around the time I was dealing with all of these feelings of inadequacy somebody said to me, “Instead of saying I have to go to work, say I get to go to work. You can be grateful for the fact that you have a job. Instead of saying I have to clean my apartment, say I get to clean my apartment, because you have a place to live.” It’s an immediate transformation of your mindset – and it makes you a more pleasant person to be around!
Wealth comes from having a positive mindset around money. If you have a healthy mind that also leads you to having a better grasp on the executive functioning skills that are required to handle money well.
What are your first steps in helping clients feel less anxious about money?
I get a sense of where everything’s at: how much money you’re making and a best guess – because most people are not tracking – as to how much money is going out the door each month. Once I have that snapshot, I’m able to work backwards and say, realistically, as long as we meet your basic needs, then we have this amount of money left over to start addressing your debt or start putting a little bit toward retirement.
The very first thing to do for most people is to commit to an amount of money that you put away towards a goal, whether the goal is to get debt-free or to save for your emergency fund. We commit to that goal, and we try to commit to it for three months.
Three months is a really good amount of time to start building habits. Once that commitment happens, then it broadens to a lot of other possibilities.
You talk about how depression and anxiety can get in the way of building – and enjoying – wealth. How so?
One of the hardest parts about struggling with mental health is not being able to think clearly. It can make it harder to set and commit to goals, and harder to operate in unknown circumstances–which is all the time in personal finance.
I myself have experienced symptoms of depression and anxiety, and I think it’s really important to get help, whether it be by medicine or by talk therapy or group therapy.
I manage it with medicine, to calm down my mind and give me a little bit of energy throughout the day. And then a huge part of it is also getting support. I schedule meetings with my therapist, I try to get out to see friends.
Therapy’s expensive. How do you help your clients budget for mental health treatment?
I take a look at their budgets, and I also emphasize to people: we only have one brain, and we only have one body. If this is where we’re going to spend money, this is it.
Most health plans provide in-network coverage of mental health services. The challenge is finding an in-network provider. Many psychologists [offer] sliding scale services. Churches and non-profits may also offer group classes or meetings that address parts of mental health, like grief counseling and trauma-based counseling.
If you join a community you’ll realize that, actually, most people are struggling and you’re not alone. I go to a mom group, because a lot of what I’m feeling right now are mother-related issues. Anything that gets you talking about life with others and building trust and building friendship.
What’s your motivation as it relates to money?
When I was young, I just wanted to be rich. In my late 20s, when I learned about early retirement, the motivation shifted toward finding my freedom – so I can be with my children.
I continue to be frugal for two reasons: One is to set a good example for my children. Children need to see their parents manage their money well, and I try to be very thoughtful and show them I do housework because I want them to learn these adulting skills.
The other reason is that I don’t see my wealth as being mine. Because I’m religious, I see it as money that I’m helping manage and that I can use for good. [My husband and I] do regular 10% tithing split up between several non-profits. I also have a pro bono arm to my coaching work.
More from Money whisperers:
Can you describe the “Trigger, Action, Reward” approach to personal finance?
When I started working one-on-one with individuals and households, I began noticing that certain stress factors – depression, anxiety, relationship troubles, grief – make people have a harder time with money.
For example, I had a client who was doing a lot of online shopping, and she did not have the money to do so. I recognized a trigger: she said, “Whenever I’m bored at work, I shop.” That was the action. The reward was that she solved her boredom for a moment.
I thought, “What if I can interrupt that thought pattern and say whenever you’re bored, we’re going to come up with something new to do that doesn’t require spending but still rewards you?”
So what did your client start doing instead of shopping online?
Well, she really wanted to get out of her job so I told her should just apply to other jobs when she got bored.
You’ve posted about using IVF to conceive each of your children. The median cost of a successful IVF cycle in the US is about $61,000. How did you pay for it?
I was extremely lucky that I worked for employers that offered fertility benefits. Some of the larger corporations do have fertility benefits. Then, we saved for it. I have a client right now who wants to save for [IVF]. We’re putting less towards other goals, like retirement, because there’s only one window for fertility.
If you happen to have a Health Savings Account (HSA), then you can save for your treatments in that account. You [can] become eligible for an HSA if you have a high-deductible health plan. You should pick the health plan that is the best for you, but if you decide that a high-deductible health plan is your best option, then you should absolutely open the HSA. The money goes in tax-free, it grows tax-free, and if you use it on healthcare, it’s tax-free.
I avoid talking about investing [in the stock market] when it comes to saving for fertility because if you’re going to need that money within the next one or two years, it may be too risky to have it be invested.
In your own life, have you made any big money moves you regret?
Buying a house! Both times I bought houses, they did not turn a profit. People think that as long as you own a house, you’re going to make money from it. That’s not always the case.
What about your best purchase?
For my 40th birthday, I spent about $3,000 on a Louis Vuitton handbag. It’s a symbol that I’ve gotten to a point where buying something like this doesn’t hurt me financially. After having purchased the bag, it actually settled that desire. I don’t feel the need to buy handbags anymore for the rest of my life, especially not new ones. I guess I just wanted that one experience.
Is there any piece of conventional wisdom when it comes to money that drives you crazy?
Everybody’s always arguing over, “Don’t spend your money on coffee.” Like, is that good or bad advice? Well, you only save $5 a day or something. That’s nothing compared to saving $1,000 on rent. If I were to help somebody change their budget, I’m not going to cut out the coffee – I’m going to look for bigger things.
But one thing I like about cutting out coffee is what it’s actually saying: little behaviors add up. Are you buying out of convenience? Are you always opting for delivery instead of cooking at home? Are you picking expensive places to travel when you have extra money? Is your lifestyle sustainable or not? If not, then we need to start changing little habits so that it adds up to overall change. It’s about more than the coffee.
What do you see as the relationship between money and happiness?
Most people believe that the more money you have, the happier you will be. In general, there is an increase in security and a decrease in stress when you have enough money to pay the bills. That does improve your life. But there comes a point where more money does not necessarily bring increases in contentment. Once you reach the threshold of safety, if you’re trying to rely on money to bring you fulfilment, it probably won’t work out.
The best money advice my parents have given me was the phrase, “If money can solve the problem, it’s not that big of a problem.” What they meant by that is if you can solve it with money, eventually you’ll take care of it. They wanted me to focus on things that money cannot necessarily buy, like investing in my marriage, making sure that I have a good relationship with my spouse, and being there for my kids.