Hi there, and welcome to the very first episode of The Thinking Bigger Than Money Podcast. I’m your host, Jim Marrocco, and I’m a financial planner. This podcast has been a real labor of love for me—a project where I get to show up not just as a holistic financial planner, but as a thinking partner.

My goal here is to have honest conversations about money. We all have feelings of scarcity and fear. We all face the possibility of abundance and the natural uncertainties of life, and ultimately, the question of how to align the money in our lives with the life we truly want to live. My hope is that this podcast becomes a space to talk openly about money in a different way.

Read More: What Are the Money Stories We’re Telling Ourselves

Not just about technical details like how to make more of it, how to save it, or how to get out of debt, but about money as part of the human story. A place for reflection, conversation, and reimagining the role money plays in our lives.

So to kick things off, I thought I would share a personal story about how I got here, and how my own journey shaped the way I think about money today.

When I started Thinking Big Financial about eight years ago, the idea grew out of my background in investment management and my desire to use that experience in a more human, meaningful way. I wanted deeper connections with real people.

What I learned was that money often gets in the way. It keeps people stuck in jobs they dislike, prevents them from going back to school or making career changes, from taking a sabbatical, or from starting a family. To me, that was sad, but also preventable.

That realization led me to start my own business. I wanted to help people engage with money differently, and ultimately, align their financial lives with the lives they wanted to live. That’s what got me here, and it’s what keeps me deeply invested in this work.

One of my favorite books about money is The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist. She talks about scarcity, sufficiency, and abundance, but the idea that really stuck with me was the concept of flow or bringing intention and energy into how money moves in your life. I interpret that as aligning money with your values, with clarity about where you want to go. When you do that, money becomes an antidote to scarcity and fear.

That shift is what I hope this podcast will be about: helping us think differently about money, manage uncertainty better, notice and rewrite the money scripts that keep us stuck, and let go of the scarcity mindset so we can embrace what’s possible.

Early on in my practice, I had a client who gave me a wake-up call. During an annual meeting, we reviewed his finances. His money had grown meaningfully compared to the prior year. He looked at me and said, “Jim, I’m confused. I don’t want more money. I don’t want to die with extra money I could have spent or given away while I was living.”

That moment stunned me. It wasn’t the typical reaction you’d expect. But it was powerful. Here was someone saying they wanted to run out of money, and not in a reckless way, but in a way that meant they had truly used it for living. That completely changed how I thought about my work. I realized even I had been approaching money from a scarcity mindset, which focused on accumulation and avoided running out, instead of embracing the idea of enough.

Why are we so often obsessed with “more” rather than asking, “What would it look like to use what I already have to live fully?”

I share this story because I hope it challenges your thinking the same way it challenged mine.

Yes, spreadsheets, numbers, and technical tools are important in financial planning, but they’re just a small part of the picture. What really matters is getting to the heart of how we think about money, challenging the beliefs that trap us, and aligning our financial lives with our values to create freedom.

Each episode, I’ll share what I’ve been learning from clients through their stories and struggles that will help us all think differently about money.

Thank you so much for joining me for this first conversation. I look forward to many, many more.

Interested in working together? Learn more about our holistic financial planning services.