Finding Financial Freedom Through Regenerative Wealth with Laura Oldanie

Can financial freedom be achieved while addressing environmental and social challenges? Laura Oldanie, a green living and money coach, joins the show to discuss minimalism, designing life, and the fear associated with the notion that we must save up enough money for our entire lives. She explains why FIRE, or Financial Independence, Retire Early, often leads to burnout and why perpetual saving isn’t the solution. Discover how to find freedom and balance now, why money doesn’t equate to status or respect, and the importance of recognizing how much money is "enough" for you. 

For full show notes and more information visit https://tinyurl.com/7abj76vh 

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Transcript

Finding Financial Freedom Through Regenerative
Wealth with Laura Oldanie
Less House More Moola with Laura Lynch
https://thetinyhouseadviser.com
Full Episode Transcript
With Your Host
Laura Lynch
Finding Financial Freedom Through Regenerative
Wealth with Laura Oldanie
Less House More Moola with Laura Lynch
https://thetinyhouseadviser.com
It takes a brave and independent mindset to go tiny. If you are trying to
figure out your tiny pivot, this podcast is here to inspire and connect you
with the other unconventional, gritty, inspirational people within this
community.
I’m Laura Lynch, your tiny house friend and host. On this show, we are
always going to come back to money because, as a financial planner, this
is the question I hear the most: How do I make this work for me financially?
Well, that’s my jam. So jump in, let’s go. New episodes drop every
Thursday.
Laura Lynch: Laura Oldanie, thank you so much for joining me on Less
House More Moolah podcast. I’m super excited to talk to you today. Would
you please introduce yourself to the audience and share a little bit about how
you practice minimalism or tiny living in your life?
Laura Oldanie: Sure. Well, thank you very much. Thank you for having me.
I love having these conversations. So, yes, my name’s Laura, and I am a
green living and money coach, and the founder of Rich and Resilient Living.
My work is all based on my own journey to align my money with my values
and my pursuit and interest in sustainable living and permaculture and
merging all that together, and then finding that other people were interested
in that aspect of it, as well. And so, designing digital products, video courses,
ebooks, and the physical book that I co-wrote with people to help people on
this journey, as well.
So, in terms of minimalism and tiny house living, my first experience with tiny
house living was as a Peace Corps volunteer. I served in the Peace Corps
from 1993 to 1996, and I was teaching English in Poland at that time, and I
was given a room to live in, in the boys’ dormitory. So it was probably—it was
no more than 200 square feet, if that. It was probably closer to 100 square
feet. There was a bathroom, there was a tiny kitchen, and then there was a
room that was the living room, with the dining room table combined, and it 
Finding Financial Freedom Through Regenerative
Wealth with Laura Oldanie
Less House More Moola with Laura Lynch
https://thetinyhouseadviser.com
was my bedroom. It was a fold out kind of—it wasn’t a futon, but it was like
a Polish version of a futon that I slept on.
But I loved it. I loved that small space and just fitting everything in that small
space, and I kept that appreciation for it, and I’m grateful that I had that
experience at that point in my life so that it was never important for me to go
out and amass more space. It was such a positive experience in that small
space.
And now, the house I own and live in now is not even quite 800 feet. So it’s
not a tiny house, but it is definitely on the smaller side and it is sparsely
furnished and decorated, in part just because I have not prioritized getting to
painting and furnishing it.
But even then, I am more along the minimalist side. I’m prone to purging
things and just not accumulating things, and I very much have an affinity—
there’s probably a word for it, but I don’t even know what it is—for the
Japanese minimalism style. It’s just inherent in their small spaces. They’re
so well organized and efficient, but still so aesthetically pleasing and
welcoming and inviting, and I really appreciate that
Laura Lynch: Yeah. I love that. For our listeners, I’m back in the tiny house,
so we’re looking at my sparse space. It’s been really entertaining this trip to
bring some more things into the tiny house and figure out exactly how to be
very efficient with all of the spaces and also think about where things might
be able to go now. So, it takes a little bit of attention, right? To live in a smaller
space and to think about how to multi-purpose things and how often you
actually might use that thing and all of that. It definitely takes some work.
So for the listeners, Laura Oldanie and I connected through my permaculture
class. I was sitting in permaculture class and people in the class started
talking about her, and I'm like, “Oh my gosh, who is this gal? I got to talk to
her on the podcast.” And so I sent an email and here we are. And I've been
reading a book that she co-authored - I'm talking about you in the third person
- that she co-authored. So, super excited to explore that. So I've been
reading the book, Laura Growing Free, and let's just spell out F R E E
because I really feel like this perfectly summarizes the ultimate goal that
many of us are trying to achieve. So would you please define FREE for us.
Finding Financial Freedom Through Regenerative
Wealth with Laura Oldanie
Less House More Moola with Laura Lynch
https://thetinyhouseadviser.com
Laura Oldanie: Sure. So on the cover of the book, the free is: financially
resilient and economically empowered. And that is definitely what it is, but
there's even a more expansive version of it that is financially resilient and
economically, ecologically, and ethically empowered because the free is all
about this financial resilience, but in alignment with our values, and our
desires to be better stewards of the planet, to be more intentional in our
interactions and the actions of our money, the impact of it on other people.
And so, the word choice for our title “Growing Free” is very much in
juxtaposition to a concept called FIRE that some people will know from the
personal finance space, and that FIRE stands for financial independence,
retire early. And so my co-authors and I, we knew about FIRE. But we were
also all steeped in permaculture, this regenerative ecological design toolkit.
And so there's all of this talk in permaculture about financial freedom and
escaping the rat race and the destructive corporate economy, but there
wasn't the roadmap. And so, people were talking about FIRE in the
permaculture space, but they didn't want that either. Because it wasn't in
alignment with their permaculture values, because the FIRE path is to - it
varies a little bit, but it is largely based on putting a lot of money, investing in
the stock market to build wealth in Wall Street, in the same corporations and
practices that those of us that are coming to permaculture and these
regenerative practices abhor and see that they're actually destroying the
future that we're trying to prepare for.
So, we didn't want to be investing our money in it. Or some people in FIRE
are pursuing, they're accumulating large rental property portfolios, but those
often exacerbate affordable housing issues. For us, it was what is the
permaculture version of FIRE? What is this version of FIRE that
acknowledges what is happening currently to people and planet?
Laura Lynch: Yeah, I think that's really good. In the book, it talks a lot about
how the FIRE lifestyle tends to burn people out too and ultimately. we're here
on this earth for our entire life duration.
And so to be just really holding yourself to the grindstone for those years to
sort of save up, save up, save up for that moment at which you maybe set
yourself on your retirement journey, it isn't really in alignment with
everybody's values. I would think that there are some people out there, 
Finding Financial Freedom Through Regenerative
Wealth with Laura Oldanie
Less House More Moola with Laura Lynch
https://thetinyhouseadviser.com
maybe that, setting themselves free to entertain themselves for the rest of
their life maybe aligns with them.
But for a lot of people, it's really about creating more balance now and
making sure that their money is aligned with how they want to have an impact
while they're on this earth. And so bringing all of those pieces together means
we have to look outside of FIRE in order to come up with another framework
for ourselves. So I really like that FREE framework, because it really
describes what we're all trying to achieve, which is we want to be
economically empowered, for sure. And we want to be financially resilient.
and so it's a great summary.
Laura Oldanie: Could I add a couple more thoughts there, just to expand on
that? Because often, FIRE is this financial independence, retire early and
FREE isn't about retiring per se. I mean, if you want to retire yourself from a
soul-crushing, miserable job, okay. But FREE is all about figuring out what
lights you up, where your passion is, where you want to plug in to be part of
the solution and finding ways to make that economically viable - not to put
you in a place where you're turning all of your creativity and interest into
profit, and that's the only way you're thinking about it, but to give you that
opportunity to design your life around that. your passions and being part of
the solution.
Laura Lynch: Yes, yes! Because we all want to create that sooner rather
than later and retirement for a lot of people can be kind of the end of their
fulfillment because work can be quite fulfilling. And so just, how do we make
our labor, our effort, our energy, our attention, really more in alignment with
how we want to create impact on this earth sooner, rather than saying, “Oh,
I'll volunteer when I retire.”
Right? I think that that's, one option, but I think there are other more creative
options that we can do sooner. So there's this really super impactful section
right at the beginning of the book that talks about money delusions and you
know, money is so weighted full of baggage and we all have our own money
scripts and ways that we have kind of grown up with money.
And I think some of these delusions are really huge reframes or shifts of
perspective. So would you highlight a couple of these money delusions that
you feel like hold people back from aligning their life with their values?
Finding Financial Freedom Through Regenerative
Wealth with Laura Oldanie
Less House More Moola with Laura Lynch
https://thetinyhouseadviser.com
Laura Oldanie: Sure. I think one of them is this idea that money can buy us
status and respect. And I actually recently posted a video on social media,
and it was all about the things that I see society normalizing and glamorizing,
like shopping halls, and large pickup trucks, and golf courses, and home
renovations that aren't necessary.
And I think we look to that as status, but that's really when we step back from
that, that is not the source of - when we think about the people we respect, I
think that it's not. More and more of us, especially imagining people who are
drawn to your audience, that's not where the respect and status and esteem
comes from.
And so I think one thing is just people are stuck on, “I need to have a lot of
money to have this status and be accepted and not feel insecure in my
community” or when I'm interacting with my family or friends who maybe
have more money. So that would be one. I know that in another conversation,
you had mentioned the delusion - because you're working your way through
the book about how that's, what was the oneLaura Lynch: About money buying security?
Laura Oldanie: Well, that's yes. That's one of them. Yes. That's a big one
for me because especially I think once you get to permaculture, it's really
hard to not see beyond money as a form of security when, and even if you're
not steeped in permaculture, more and more people are seeing this.
With money being just numbers and digits, in the ether these days, it is such
a fragile and speculative form of wealth or capital. And what truly is where
we get our resilience and our security is from our community. It's from our
connections. It's from our skills. it's, it is not money. I'm not saying money
doesn't play a role, certainly I acknowledge that.
I do think a base level of money is helpful, and having that sense of security
and not feeling so tense all the time. But beyond there's also this idea of
getting to your point of enough recognizing what enough means for you. And
then recognizing that you don't necessarily need to keep pushing and
stressing to go for more of it.
Laura Lynch: Yeah. I think that that's a great point because we feel so fragile
when we think about whether or not we can have enough money to buy our 
Finding Financial Freedom Through Regenerative
Wealth with Laura Oldanie
Less House More Moola with Laura Lynch
https://thetinyhouseadviser.com
security. And often we find that folks that do retire, they can never really, they
have a really hard time letting themselves spend the money that they have
been saving up, right. Because they still feel some level of fragile because
all of us know that investments go up and down and that inflation is impacting
the money that we save.
And so we understand that even the security that we do create by being good
savers, it doesn't make us feel all that secure all the time. We've completely
abandoned the historical notion of the fact that it was your community that
took care of you. The 401k is an example: wasn't even invented until 1978.
And so therefore, when we look back, not that long ago, it was really your
community that was there to take care of you or to provide you with security
in your later years. And we've so abandoned that. And I think it's good to
bring that back into our mindset around how we're creating security for
ourselves.
It's not just by being good savers or cramming dollars away while we work
hard. It's also about the cultivation of our resilience in other areas, including
community, including skills, including confidence, and confidence and all the
things that can make us valuable members of our community.
Laura Oldanie: Yes, yes. So we use the word resilience in our title, free.
And it is a big part of all of it.
Laura Lynch: Yeah. So, good. So I often hear sometimes people are bad
with money and that is something that's discussed in the book. Do you want
to dissect that one a little bit?
Laura Oldanie: Sure. Well, so yeah, we look to people who have lots and
lots of money and think, “Oh, they must be good with money. And since I
don't have much money, I must be bad with money.” But we don't stop to
think about how many of those people inherited wealth. How many of those
people are generating that wealth through these unsustainable practices that
are exploiting and harming the planet and other people?
And when you start looking into the statistics, the data, it really shows how
wealthy people so carelessly spend their money. They're spending so much
money on homes with rooms they don't need, or multiple houses that they're
not even using, or cars that they own, but don't really drive around.
Finding Financial Freedom Through Regenerative
Wealth with Laura Oldanie
Less House More Moola with Laura Lynch
https://thetinyhouseadviser.com
Whereas those of us with less money, we're much more on top of our
spending, or at least more often spending it more wisely. That's not to say
that more people couldn't step up and pay more attention to their money and
manage it better. But overall, it's not so much that we're bad with money. It's
just that we haven't had the luck and advantages of so many people with
money.
Laura Lynch: Yeah, and I think it's good for folks to sort of unpack that
notion, “I'm bad with money” because it really holds people back from taking
steps to learn more about. The full range of their wealth and to understand
how to sort of tackle that and align it with what's most important to them and
their vision for the future and how they want to care for themselves and the
planet.
The very first thing that we have to do whenever we tackle a new goal is get
into the weeds with it, and understand it, and feel empowered enough to pick
up that first tool to start working on something. And so if we sort of avoid it
because we assume, “Well, I'm just bad with money because I don't have
any” then that can be so disempowering from building a resilient future for
yourself.
Laura Oldanie: Certainly. Yeah.
Laura Lynch: So that was a couple of the delusions. There's quite a few
more in the book. Each one of them I felt so, just such an important mind
shift. So I think that that is a really great section of the book to help people
kind of rethink some of their ideas around money that they picked up from
wherever they picked them up.
So I really appreciate that section. And then another point in the book that
really is something I learned about in permaculture is about forms of capital
and currency. So would you share this concept and how kind of thinking
about wealth in a broader form creates more resilience?
Laura Oldanie: Sure. So this idea of multiple forms of capital. I also learned
about it first through permaculture, but it's not original to permaculture. It has
been used in rural communities to show them - rural lower income
communities - that even though they may not have a lot of financial capital 
Finding Financial Freedom Through Regenerative
Wealth with Laura Oldanie
Less House More Moola with Laura Lynch
https://thetinyhouseadviser.com
in their communities, that they have all kinds of other forms of capital and
enforce forms of wealth in their community.
So I'll talk through them and then I'll talk a little bit more about them. So the.
There's financial capital, which is the one that we all interact with regularly,
and it is the most predominant in our society. But it is just one form of capital
that we have access to. And that is the money: the Bitcoin, the
cryptocurrencies, the stocks, the bonds, all of these financial forms of capital
and currencies that we interact with. Another form of capital is material
capital. So that is the phone or the laptop that you're listening to this on, your
car, the building that you're in all of these tangible things are.
The book itself; if you're touching the book Growing Free, that's a material
form of capital. Then we have living capital, which is the air we breathe, the
parks in our neighborhoods, the papaya tree in my yard. these are all living
forms of capital. Then there is experiential capital. So experiential capital are
those skills we mentioned.
When, you learn something through experience, you have a skill, you know
how to do something, whether that is a plumber earning his money through,
knowing how to work with plumbing systems, repair a toilet, repair a sink,
repair a car, repair your own bicycle, or even knowing how to cook - when
you volunteer in a community garden, when you volunteer, you bring your
experience, your skills. So that's experiential capital. Then you have
intellectual capital. So that's what you would learn when you read a book,
when you go to school. It's our creativity and our innovation.
So say that. you read in a book about how to repair a bicycle tire, that's the
intellectual capital. And then you go and actually replace your tire or repair
it. Then there you've got that experiential capital. Then there is a spiritual
capital. So it could be your religious faith, but it doesn't have to be.
It could be a yoga practice, meditation. however you center yourself and find
meaning in this crazy world we live in. That’s spiritual capital. Cultural capital
is our shared history, ethnic foods, film, art. All of these forms of culture are
forms of capital as well. And there is also social capital - and social capital is
this community that we've talked about.
Finding Financial Freedom Through Regenerative
Wealth with Laura Oldanie
Less House More Moola with Laura Lynch
https://thetinyhouseadviser.com
This is, for me, where the resilience really comes in. These are the
connections you have to your neighbors, your family, friends, the PTA, if your
kids go to school and you're involved in the PTA, your church group,
whatever groups you are involved in. I think about social capital, like a buynothing group, if you're part of a buy-nothing group, or I'm in a local time
bank, or even just when someone needs a job and they put it out on LinkedIn
or Facebook and someone has a connection and connects you to a job
opening and you've done it because you've done it through your connections.
So that's social capital. So those are the eight forms of capital that get talked
about in permaculture.
But I also think that, I've seen other forms of capital talked about. I think time
is a form of capital. I think time is, for people, when they think about what's
important to them, it's a big part of their decision-making. That's what people
want: the autonomy over their time to use the time the way they want, and
not feel like they're pressured to make their choices of how they spend their
time because they need to earn money to pay off debt, or whatever the
situation may be.
So, time is a form of capital we can think of. I think our health is, our physical
and mental health are definitely forms of capital. they even say health is
wealth and we spend so much time and energy working to earn and save
money for retirement to afford this expensive health care in our later years,
but we're creating often those health problems that we think we need the
money for by stressing and focusing so much on working all the time during
these earlier years of our lives.
So health is a form of capital. And another form of capital I think about is
attention capital. When we see how much money Mark Zuckerberg and Elon
Musk and so many others are earning, advertisers are earning from our
attention.
We can be much more intentional about what we choose to pay attention to
and how, what, when we think about what we're paying attention to. Is it
benefiting us and our communities more than it's benefiting that destructive
corporate economy? Is it enriching us? Is it maybe giving us a new skill?
Not that we can never relax, and just enjoy something, but we can be much
more thoughtful about how we, how we direct our attention, because it's very 
Finding Financial Freedom Through Regenerative
Wealth with Laura Oldanie
Less House More Moola with Laura Lynch
https://thetinyhouseadviser.com
valuable. And what we pay attention to often impacts us psychologically as
well. So those are the forms of capital that people can think about.
And I just think they're so powerful because, when you think about money,
we only really want money as a gateway to access these other forms of
capital and it's like, okay, so how do we bypass money and go straight to
these other forms of capital? And there's so much potential for that creative
thinking to come in here, come into play.
And that, when we use money to access these things, it makes everything
transactional. And it makes it so much more impersonal, and it robs us of the
opportunity to be creative and have that that sense of satisfaction and pride,
but it also just puts so much distance between us, and it doesn't give us the
opportunity to have those more personal interactions with people.
I get it that it is a balance of time - time it's much easier to just pull money
out of your wallet often to go into the store. But it definitely robs us of our
creativity. And, there is another book that was very much influential for my
co-authors and I called Early Retirement Extreme.
And I can't remember Jacob Lund Fisker's quote right now, exactly. The
author, but he said something about, how spending money is the least smart
way of solving a problem. It's the easiest, but it's not the best way. It's just
the way we default to.
Laura Lynch: Yeah, it is the way we default to because it used to be before
currency that we exchanged, goods or time or services or what have you for
the things that we needed.
And so currency became a faster way to get the things that you need and to
not have to have, you could exchange dissimilar things, right? And so it
became a shortcut for us. And then we became very fixated on it as being
the only source of wealth. And so I really appreciate you listing out all of
those forms of capital.
And one of the exercises in the book challenges the reader to go through
your life and calculate your different forms of capital in your life. We have
realized - Eric, my husband and I - that, making the move across the country
is really severing some of the most valuable form of capital that he has.
Finding Financial Freedom Through Regenerative
Wealth with Laura Oldanie
Less House More Moola with Laura Lynch
https://thetinyhouseadviser.com
And that is the relationships that he's built from a professional standpoint
over 30 years in one place. And so we've been really thoughtful about how
are we going to recreate that in a new place? How do we build new social
capital and trust within the community? How do you become known for the
skills that you bring to the community?
And, it's a really important part because, sure you can put your business out
on Facebook or whatever, but at the same time, people do business with
other people. And so you have to develop those trust-based relationships.
So, thinking about all the ways that we have wealth in our lives through
relationships or through our skills, our knowledge or experience, or what
have you can be a really helpful exercise to think about your wealth in a more
comprehensive way.
It not just be boiled down to the thing that's easily measured and calculated
in a bank account.
Laura Oldanie: Yeah.
Laura Lynch: So, I have been really interested in regenerative agriculture in
recent years. And so, I was super excited to see you and your co-authors
dive into regenerative wealth. So I would love for you to talk some about what
is regenerative wealth and how can you know that be applied in people's
lives in order to improve your situation and your community.
Laura Oldanie: Okay, so one of the key concepts of regenerative wealth
building is thinking in terms of assets and investments, which is actually a
conventional wealth building concept, but it carries over to regenerative
wealth building too. It's just a different range of investments and assets that
we're thinking about.
And so regenerative for anyone who is less familiar with regenerative, I like
to juxtapose regenerative with sustainable because, most people know
sustainable or sustainability. But if we look at the root of sustainable, it's
sustained. It's sustaining and maintaining where we're at. And we can see
that sustaining and maintaining where we're at right now is insufficient.
It is not going to lead to a positive outcome. Whereas the idea of regenerative
is not just sustaining and maintaining, but it's restoring, repairing and
rejuvenating regenerating the soil in regenerative agriculture. That's a big 
Finding Financial Freedom Through Regenerative
Wealth with Laura Oldanie
Less House More Moola with Laura Lynch
https://thetinyhouseadviser.com
part of it. And it's not just on large scale farms. We need to be regenerating
soil in our yards, in so many places, but it's also we need to regenerate
people too.
People are depleted. We've been exploited. There's a lot of regenerative
work to be done, not just in regenerative agriculture, but in all aspects of our
lives. And so carrying that over to this way of thinking about regenerative
wealth building, instead of investing in Wall Street or a real estate portfolio
that's going to exacerbate local housing issues like we talked about, it
becomes - if we're talking about more conventional ways of thinking about
financial investments, there are now platforms where you can make loans to
regenerative farmers and earn interest on those loans.
So that would be a regenerative investment in that more conventional way,
we think of investing. Even just starting with the basics. How many of us have
moved our money out of the major banks? all of the big mega banks are
funding the fossil fuels industry. So if you're out there wanting to divest and
not support fossil fuels and working so hard at it in your personal life, if you're
still banking with any of the major banks, your money is supporting fossil
fuels and you're supporting banks that support fossil fuels. So, have you
thought about putting your money in a local credit union where the money
stays and supports your local community?
Have you looked for climate-friendly banks? There are banks that have better
practices or more socially responsible banks, even just banking. Those are
more regenerative ways to think about our money socially, responsible ways.
There a Native American bank, you could open a CD or a savings account
with a Native American bank and all of your money in that bank, they're
putting depositors money to work, making car loans and mortgage loans and
business loans to Native Americans.
If you want to put your work to something like that, you can do that. There
are all kinds of community development financial institutions that operate as
banks and marginalized communities. So, there are ways out there. We can
put our money to work in the ways we want to want to see it.
There are, I have a pay-what-you-can course on regenerative investing intro
towards regenerative investing. And I've listed out all kinds of investing
opportunities I've discovered that are available to non-accredited, non-
Finding Financial Freedom Through Regenerative
Wealth with Laura Oldanie
Less House More Moola with Laura Lynch
https://thetinyhouseadviser.com
wealthy investors. There certainly a lot more that can be done in regenerative
investing for very wealthy people, but there's plenty that we can do, even if
we're not wealthy.
So, there's that way of thinking, kind of more like, how do I make financial
investments? But then there's also the, one of the things I've done for my
retirement planning is plant soap nut trees in my yard. And because that's
something that if I want to later on, I can sell and earn money from, it will
save me money.
I can gift and barter them and share them with my community and build
community. For me, retirement planning, I'm thinking about how do I,
potentially build an accessory dwelling unit on my property and how am I
cultivating relationships with people younger than me, so that I can have
someone live on my property and have an exchange with them.
So I can age in place gracefully. I don't want to go into an assisted living
facility. If that may be for some people, but that's not my vision for aging.
And, so there's that kind of thinking, How do we invest in tools or things that
will hold their value and help us earn more money.
I always give the example of, my boyfriend. Albert does several different
things, but one thing is he's a beekeeper and he spent, I think like $120 on a
wax press so that he could press more honey out of the honeycomb. And
within one season, he had earned that $120 back. Now, everything he earns
off of that is profit.
These are investments. If we start thinking about skills, you're investing.
Again, not to turn every interest or thing into income or profit, but how do I
obtain a yield from this? What investments can I make? How can I spend
money in a way? That even though I no longer have the cash, that value
somehow stays on my holistic balance sheet. It's just transferred to another
column that's not a financial column.
Laura Lynch: Yeah, that's so good. I think that most people are trying to
figure out how to create a place for themselves in the future where they can
age in place or age wherever they want to age.
And it's something that I've been thinking about a lot too, like how do I
surround myself with different age groups in my community so that I have 
Finding Financial Freedom Through Regenerative
Wealth with Laura Oldanie
Less House More Moola with Laura Lynch
https://thetinyhouseadviser.com
people that I can depend on in the future, and how do I invest in my
community to make it make the resources there for me and for others, right?
By supporting small businesses. We make sure that those businesses are
there for ourselves and for others. And there's just so many different ways to
think about aligning our money in ways that creates growth and healthy
communities and healthy lives and healthy soil and healthy people beyond
just stocking it away in a brokerage account somewhere.
And so I really love some of the examples of practical things that can be done
that you all list out in the book to create regenerative wealth and income and
all the things to think differently than just the traditional way of building
wealth. Are there any other key takeaways from the book that you wanted to
share with us?
I definitely have peppered you with some questions on the key things that I
really gravitated towards, but I'm sure that there are other topics that are
super interesting for folks.
Laura Oldanie: Well, I guess I just want to underscore: Yes, we need
systemic change, but there's so much we can do personally as well.
We don't have to wait for government leaders and, these laws and
regulations and things to be put in place. We, the people can start taking
action. And one example, we don't talk about it in the book with this language.
But we do talk about it: in economics, there's something called a circular
economy, or at least in a sustainable version of economics.
And it's the idea of a closed loop, no waste or very reduced waste system.
But we can start doing that with our own personal economies. We can make
our own circular personal economies in terms of tapping the multiple forms
of capital. How do we catch and store that energy in our own personal
economy?
So that it's not just us earning money from soul-crushing jobs, taking out
loans and being in debt. We're tapping these other forms of capital and then
they're not just passing out of our personal economy, but when we pay our
bills and send it off to Wall Street and other places, we capture and hold the
social capital or the living capital. And we invest in these assets and they 
Finding Financial Freedom Through Regenerative
Wealth with Laura Oldanie
Less House More Moola with Laura Lynch
https://thetinyhouseadviser.com
stay in our circular personal economy and on our balance sheets in different
ways like I mentioned.
So just to start encouraging people to think more about how do how do I start
doing this more on my own and that you don't have to wait for this system to
change. We individually can be doing this. And this is something that I'm
going to be teaching people in a class I'm offering in May.
I'm calling it personal economy makeover, and how do we transform our
personal economies into these circular or regenerative or permaculture
personal economies? And so, it'll be online via Zoom for four weeks, four
Wednesdays in May, and people can learn about that on my website,
richandresilientliving.com.
Laura Lynch: Awesome. Yeah, that'll be really good because we've talked
about things in some pretty broad strokes today. And when you get into the
nitty-gritty details of how do I actually do that, I think that'll be really a lot more
valuable than kind of talking about overall philosophy, but instead thinking
about really hands-on, how do I do this in my life.
On another recent episode of the podcast, I talked with Meg Carney, who is
the author of Outdoor Minimalists, and she has a great podcast. It's very
practical in the sense that it teaches you how to be really resilient in the ways
that you are using your outdoor gear. And she talks about repairing and
repurposing and all those kinds of things, which I think is a great way to think
about things, having multiple uses in your life. In the last two days, I
repurposed one of my Columbia quarter zips for my dog, who I was afraid
would get a little too cold. And so instead of rushing out and buying my dog
a dog sweater, I just repurposed one that I felt like I would probably never
really get that much use out of.
And so, even just little things can make you feel good about, keeping things
inside and not running out the door to purchase the thing that you think you
need instead of looking around you, where can I repurpose or reuse or figure
out a creative solution for this. It takes a little creativity, though.
Laura Oldanie: Yes, but that's great because that there's a quote from a
poet. I once, I think he's a poet or a writer. “If we had more creativity, we'd 
Finding Financial Freedom Through Regenerative
Wealth with Laura Oldanie
Less House More Moola with Laura Lynch
https://thetinyhouseadviser.com
have less capitalism.” We need creativity. It's going to, what's, what's going
to get us through these challenges that lie ahead.
Laura Lynch: Yes. Yeah. Creativity. And we need space in our lives to have
time for the creativity, which means we have to come up with ways to have
autonomy over our time and to be able to foster that open space in our lives.
So if listeners are curious about reading more of the Growing Free book,
which I still haven't quite gotten to the end of, how might they get a copy of
it?
Laura Oldanie: Okay. So it's available for purchase on my website, which is
richandresilientliving.com and then forward slash shop. So, that's spelt out A
N D, richandresilientliving.com/shop, S H O P.
Laura Lynch: Perfect. And we'll have a link to your website. In the show
notes so that listeners can grab that.
Well, Laura Oldanie, thank you so much for talking to me about this really
important topic of creating more resilience and thinking about different forms
of capital in our lives and sort of expanding our frame of wealth away from it,
just being about how much money we can hoard away, but instead thinking
a little bit more creatively and also multi-dimensionally about what is wealth,
and doing it in such a way that it's aligned with how we want to leave the
earth behind us. I think this is a great topic. Any final thoughts as we wrap
up?
Laura Oldanie: I think that's it.
Laura Lynch: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me. It was
great to talk to you.
Laura Oldanie: Yes, thank you.
Hey, I’m honored that you listened to this episode of Less House More
Moolah. I hope something in it will help you continue to move toward a life
aligned with your values. 
Finding Financial Freedom Through Regenerative
Wealth with Laura Oldanie
Less House More Moola with Laura Lynch
https://thetinyhouseadviser.com
Every algorithm out there is trying to tell us what to prioritize, but we get to
choose. If you haven’t ever identified your key values, I have a free
resource on my website to help you.
You just have to go to thetinyhouseadviser.com. It’s the tiny house A-D-V-IS-E-R dot com.
At the bottom of the page, you can grab the tiny life values worksheet.
When we design a life around “what is our core truth?”, we shortcut to deep
fulfillment.
See you next Thursday.
Please see the show notes for an important disclosure regarding The Tiny
House Adviser, LLC and this episode.