Fall might feel like a break after a busy summer, but if you’re not careful, it can catch you off guard, especially financially.
In this episode, I talk about what it really means to be “always ahead” with your money. I don’t mean skipping brunch or deleting a budgeting app. I mean planning intentionally for the next 90 days before your spending happens. Whether you’re prepping for back-to-school, travel, holiday hosting, or just want to enjoy cozy hikes and solo retreats, this episode will help you align your spending with your real life, not just your calendar.
I share the exact questions I walk my clients through and how to use your photo album (yes, really!) to build a budget that supports your joy, not restricts it.
So if you’re feeling the pressure to “cut back” as fall rolls in, this episode will help you shift from reactive to proactive and put your dollars to work on purpose.
Listen now to learn how to plan your money with intention and…
[00:42] What “being ahead” actually looks like
[03:12] The false promise of fall being a low-spend season
[06:47] Why “just cutting back” isn’t a real plan
[09:05] How to budget for joy using your personal photo album
[10:50] My fall reset invitation and how to work with me 1:1
Tune in to learn how planning ahead can help you stop reactive budgeting, align your money with your real life, and feel confident about what’s coming next.
Are you ready to start asking for help with your finances? Apply to work with me, and let’s start working towards your financial goals.
If you’re ready to be proactive with your money this season, make sure you check out Episode 185: Mastering the Magic 10: Your Path to Intentional Saving to help you build a system that supports joy, savings, and sanity year-round.
Transcript for “Always Ahead: How to Budget for the Fall Season Without Falling Behind”
Intro: Hi, and welcome to Money Files. I’m Keina Newell from Wealth Over Now. I work everyday with professional women and solopreneurs to help them get out of financial overwhelm and shame so they can experience more flexibility and ease with their finances. Are you ready to gain confidence and learn to manage your finances intentionally? Tune in and grab financial tips that will help you master the way you think about and manage your finances.
Keina: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Money Files. So I want to talk to you today about what it means to be ahead with your money. And I don’t mean I downloaded a budgeting app ahead or I didn’t spend this weekend ahead, but the kind of ahead where you’re not surprised when life happens because you’ve already planned for it. And what I realized, we’re at the beginning of August and we’re in this in-between space, summer is winding down. If you’ve got kids, you’ve probably doing some of the back to school prep or your kids might already be in school and you might be ecstatic about that. If you don’t have kids, maybe you’re trying to get in one last trip or just slowing down after a few too many summer weekends that maybe cost you a little bit more than you thought.
And for a lot of my clients, this is the point where they might be like, woo, you are like, I need to go chill. My bank account, I’ve been swiping it. I need to cut back for a few weeks and reset. It’s kind of like a little money detox, like a spending cleanse that they start to talk about with themselves. And it sounds like the right thing to do. Summer’s full of activity and flexibility, and I know a lot of you have been doing a lot of mental math and thinking things will just work themselves out with your spending, but if you are not careful, your August reacting will cause you to still not be planned for this fall. So just telling yourself not to spend or that things will settle down is not necessarily true.
So one of the things I talk to my clients about is always being ahead with their money because I want them to be thinking ahead. It doesn’t mean that they have to be perfect with what’s coming up, but I want them to be thoughtful. I want them to be proactive. I want them to really ground and set intention in like what do I already know is coming up? And so being always ahead can simply mean asking what do I need to think about that’s not on my radar? Because let’s be honest, if you have a list of bills, you’re not thinking about what’s not on your radar. It’s just not a question that you are asking yourself. But it is one that I want you to be asking yourself because it means that you’ll start budgeting based on what’s actually happening in your life and not just based on your bank account balance or what you’re keeping in your planner that tells you what bills are due when.
So we start with, what I’m thinking about what’s coming up. I’ll just walk you through some of the things that are coming up with my clients and conversations that we’re having. But some of the clients I have, we have aftercare fees that are coming up. So their child is switching from daycare to school. We have camps for kids because there’s fall break, there’s Christmas break, and although your children are out of school, you still have to work. And so if your kids aren’t old enough, you might have to have either childcare in your home or your kids are going to camp. If you are someone who loves the outdoors, this is me personally, like you want to look at fall foliage, like I’ve already been thinking about it. I’m like, Ooh, I need to go back to Asheville this year. Like things like that, right? Like these ideas that you have, they are starting to build into your brain.
And so you need to think about what are those things that you are getting excited about doing as the seasons are going to start changing. It might be going to outdoor concerts because the weather is going to be even nicer. You might be thinking about traveling, whether that’s for the holidays or maybe it’s some solo trips. Maybe you’re going to be hosting in your home more. If we’re thinking about Friendsgiving, yes, I’m talking about Friendsgiving because August, September, October, you got November that, I think technically falls in that next 90 days. Maybe you’re going to be buying gifts, maybe you are in a space where maybe you’re going to more conferences and so maybe your job doesn’t cover everything.
So just thinking about this, I’ve been talking through some of these things with my clients, so I know that these things are also happening in your life and so my clients are without kids or if you’re listening to me and you’re like, I don’t have any kids, you can still be thinking about, hey, what’s coming up and what’s happening? Maybe you’re thinking about hiking, dinner parties, maybe some new hobbies. Maybe there are some restaurants opening that you want to check out. But I don’t want you to think that this episode doesn’t apply to you. And just because something isn’t on your schedule yet doesn’t mean that you should skip this episode and just not think about what’s coming up.
So one of the things that I see every year is the belief that like fall is calmer and that your spending will just naturally slow down. But what I want you to see is you’re still doing things, they just look different than the summertime. And maybe you’re buying wine to take to a dinner. Maybe you’re buying groceries because you’re hosting the Friendsgiving or you’re bringing a dish. Maybe you are making sure you have tickets to an indoor comedy show or you’re changing up your wardrobe because fall is your favorite season or you are switching up your haircare products. Like these are all real things that you may not be thinking about, but they are things that you do.
And so you probably don’t see it as overspending in the same way that you think about how you’ve gone wild or however you describe your summer expenses. But like, don’t lie to yourself about you not spending money in the fall. Just recognize that your spending looks different. So one of the things I actually would invite you to do, and it’s an exercise that I love to give clients, is imagine that your life is a photo album. And if you’re looking back at this season 90 days from now, what pictures would be in the photo album? Are you at a football game with friends? Are you picking apples with your kids? Are you having a quiet weekend hike and a cozy Dinner Inn?
Like whatever it is that’s in your photo album, we want to make sure that your budget is supporting all of those pictures that you just put in that photo album. We’re not just thinking about what you have to pay for, but we want to create room for what you want to do. Because being always ahead isn’t about you being restricted or not being able to do something. It’s about you being able to prepare for these moments where you want to have this intentional joy. So what most people think, they’ll do is like I said as we enter this fall, is that they’re just going to cut back. But fall is just like every other season and it comes with its own expenses.
So the problem isn’t spending, the problem is that you’re not expecting to spend and then you feel frustrated when you do. You feel frustrated when you’re swiping your credit card. You feel frustrated when your bank account balance doesn’t look like how you think it should look. So today I really want to invite you to just ask yourself what’s coming up in the next 90 days? What are the wants and needs I already know about? Am I underfunded for the life that I know that I actually want to live? Like I love that photo album prompt and just really thinking through like, yes, what will my life look like if I am going back through my phone or if Shutterfly printed me an album because it’s going to spark ideas for you. And if you’re like Keina, I can’t visualize it. I want you to go to your phone and I want you to go to last August. I want you to go all the way.
I would even invite you to go all the way to December. Like, what did you do? What moments do you have? Because it’s going to help you think through the ways in which you spend money and that you’re not thinking about how you will spend as these next months come ahead. So when I am saying always ahead, I’m not saying that you have to actually predict everything. I want you to give yourself permission to be thoughtful about how you want to spend money, to think about how you actually like to spend money so you can have something set aside for the things that you know that you’ll want to do. And just really noticing your patterns. So much about budgeting and being good at budgeting is being honest with your money patterns and what you actually want to do.
Because if you are honest about the things that you actually want to do, you’ll make space for the things that you want to do, which makes it easier to spend on the things that you want to do. So that’s today’s episode. It’s really short and sweet. I just want to shake you a little bit as we transition and sometimes we don’t think about what is happening as different seasons change from summer to fall, fall to winter, winter to spring, but we all have patterns that we’ve adopted. And so being able to take the time to think about those patterns and how we want to respond and adjust is extremely helpful. So if you are ready to stop feeling behind and start building a system that helps you stay ahead, I’d love to help you do that in my one-to-one coaching.
So my one-to-one coaching is five months. I actually, a couple of weeks ago recorded a podcast episode if you wanted to hear and learn more about what it’s like to work with me in my five month coaching partnership, you can go back and listen to that episode. If you are like Keina, I already know I need to work with you. I actually have been waiting all summer to do all my spending and now it’s time. I would invite you to apply to work with me today. So if you just go to wealthovernow.com, you can apply to work with me there, or you can go to my show notes and you’ll see the link to book a consult with me. So thank you so much for tuning in and I will talk to you later.
Outro: Thank you so much for listening to Money Files. If you’re ready to take the next step to reach your financial goals, head to www.wealthovernow.com/appointment and let’s get started.
