Ever feel like you’re stuck in a loop where unexpected expenses always ruin your budget?
In this episode, I break down what I call the “This Always Happens” Money Fix, a two-step process that helps my clients stop spiraling and start building real budgeting confidence. If you’ve ever looked at your account and thought, “Ugh, how did this happen again?” this is for you.
I’ll show you how to shift from shame to strategy using my signature process: Respond and Recalibrate. These simple but powerful questions will help you navigate unexpected charges, stop the guilt cycle, and actually make your budget more responsive to your real life.
If you’ve ever paid a surprise dental bill, forgotten about a recurring charge, or panicked over a financial “oops,” this episode will help you move from frustration to freedom without ditching your budget.
Listen in to hear:
[01:04] Why unexpected charges don’t mean you’re failing with money
[02:20] The “This Always Happens” Money Fix: Respond and Recalibrate
[06:10] Real client examples and how we tackled hidden expenses
[10:23] What a dental emergency taught my client about budgeting on purpose
[14:55] How to build a money system that grows with you
Tune in to learn how to make your money system sustainable so you’re not just budgeting for the month but building financial resilience for life.
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 this episode hit home, be sure to check out Episode 180: 10 Money Date Questions That Will Change How You Manage Your Finances, it pairs perfectly with this one to help you move from reactionary to intentional with your money.
Transcript for “A Better Way to Handle Unexpected Expenses”
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. Today I’m going to talk to you about one of the most common and honestly one of the most frustrating money moments I hear from clients. That moment where you look at your bank account or your credit card statement and you say, ahh this is always happening, right? So it could be a nonverbal, it could be a verbal, it could be a nonverbal and a verbal response that you have, but you see a charge that you forgot about or you have to pay for something unexpected. Or you realize again, that you didn’t plan for something. And what generally tends to happen when this comes up is that shame voice kicks in. It sounds like I should have known better. I’m never going to be good with money, this is just who I am.
But here’s what I want you to hear today. And if you take nothing else from this episode, let it be this. That moment is not proof that you’re failing with your money. I’m going to say it again. That moment is not proof that you’re failing with your money. It’s just proof that your budget needs to be more responsive. It’s proof that you’re learning. And when you know how to respond on purpose, those moments can stop having so much emotional weight. They stop creating a spiral for you. They stop the narrative about how you’ll never be good with money.
So in today’s episode, I want to walk you through a simple two-step process that I teach clients and I call it the, this always happens money fix. It’s how we take care of ourselves when real life happens because you’re an adult at this point. You know it’s not a matter of if something will happen, it’s a matter of when something will happen. And so I want you to be equipped with tools to be able to respond. Because for me as a coach, I want to make budgeting something that feels sustainable. And the reason that it’s oftentimes not sustainable is because we don’t have the mindset to help us sustain it. We don’t have the tools to help us sustain it, but most importantly, we also don’t have the system to help us sustain it.
And so today I’m giving you a tool that is going to help you sustain it. And so in this, this always happens money fix. The first step is to respond. And I always ask my clients like, what just happened? And how can we use your budget to support you? So when that expense comes up, we have to ask ourself, like, what just happened? How can I use my budget to support myself? We’re not beating ourselves up about what happened. We’re not just hitting the reset button, we’re just naming exactly what happened and we’re deciding what we want to do right now. We can ask ourselves like, can we shift money from a different category? Do we need to pause something temporarily? Can we absorb the cost over the next few weeks? But we can respond without judging ourselves and we can identify in this moment, how do we want to move forward, right? Because if you continue to move forward, that means that we’re sticking with the plan that we created for ourselves.
And that means that if we’re sticking to the plan that we’re learning about ourselves, and then the next time that something like this happens, we’re going to be able to also respond to it. So step number two is that we want to recalibrate. So the question that I like for recalibrating is what pattern is showing up and how do I want to adjust my plan moving forward? If you’ve listened to some of my other podcasts, I think looking at your bank account just tells you about your financial patterns. I believe this to be true about unexpected expenses as well. No expense is really unexpected. If you have a body, you could end up at the hospital. Even a medical bill isn’t necessarily unexpected, like we can be planning for medical expenses. I get that like a hundred dollars medical expense versus a thousand dollars medical expense is different. But just by way of having a body, we should be thinking and planning for medical expenses.
So that’s what I mean when I say like no expense is really unexpected because there are just things that we can start to think through. So if we’re recalibrating and we’re asking, how do I want to adjust my plan moving forward? It gives us an opportunity to zoom out and we can look at what happened and we can use it as information and not just a reason to start shaming ourselves. And so this is a moment where we can ask, have I underfunded this category in my budget? Is this the first time this has happened or the third time this year? Is my current money plan actually reflective of my real life?
And these are just questions we can ask ourselves without judgment. This isn’t about telling yourself that you’re not good at something. This is just an opportunity for you to be honest and to get rid of fake math and to actually start putting in some real numbers so that your budget can start to respond to you and be responsive for you and also responsible for you. And so respond and recalibrate is the thing that we need to keep us in the game with budgeting. And so you’re hearing me talk about this, I actually want to give you two real life examples of what this has looked like for clients in two very different seasons of their coaching journey with me.
So one of my clients who’s still like within her first month of coaching with me, she would probably say, Keina, we are responding and recalibrating every single week. And it feels like every single week we’re uncovering new expenses that she forgot about or that she didn’t realize were still active. In the last few weeks, there’s been a reoccurring charge from an organization where she was an officer in the organization, she’s had different membership charges that are actually tied to her kids. There have been some annual renewals for things that she just didn’t know that they were annual renewals because it’s not something that had been on her radar. And how we’re talking about money now she’s now aware of like, oh yeah, I should be thinking about annual things versus monthly things.
And so naturally, one of her first thoughts is like, see like I don’t know where my money is going and this is like exactly what I mean. Like here’s yet another thing. But instead of letting her engage in what can become a shame cycle, I just am walking her through this process and we are calmly naming what’s happening. So we’ve talked about the fact like you’re not actually failing at budgeting. We’re okay, this is totally normal that this is happening right now. This is the first time that you’re actually looking at your money with this new level of intention. And that’s all we’re doing. We are just changing the story to the charges that are coming up and the charges that we see. And then as we see the charges coming through her account in these last few weeks, we’re asking two additional questions. Is this something we need to cancel or is this something we need to actually add to your plan? So it goes into one of two buckets. Cancel, go into the plan, cancel, go into the plan. That’s it.
We’re not panicking. We’re not making it mean anything about her. If anything, I’m like, oh my goodness, girl, we are saving so much money. I’m like, imagine how many years these things were coming out of your account and you didn’t know. But literally that is one of the ways that she is earning her money back and making her money back by working with me because we have canceled so many things that she’s like, Keina, I can’t even tell you how many years this has probably been coming out of my account. And sometimes people turn, they turn their back or their eyes, however you say that to like an expense that’s like $9. Like, oh my goodness, like why are you looking at a $9 expense? But it’s not just about the $9 expense. That $9 expense first off is $108 a year.
But it’s like how many years has that been going on? Or how many $9 expenses do you have? So this is like a really fun opportunity for us. I call it fun at least for us to be thinking about what can we respond to? What do we need to recalibrate? Because I also know that going through this process, we are saving her money. She has canceled so many things. She has recalibrated what she wants to put into her budget, how she wants to plan things. And it’s not cancellation out of deprivation, it is cancellation because she was unaware prior to. And that happens for so many of us because it’s so easy to sign up for things now with like Apple Pay, Google Pay, like everybody has your card and everybody has, it’s your PayPal, whatever. And so we’ve just been able to consolidate things and we are literally making her money.
So by going through this process, we haven’t had to throw out her budget. We’ve just made her budget become more responsive. And the beauty of this is that every time she finds something new while she’s working with me, when she stops working with me, that instead of spiraling, she’s just building her confidence. She’s learning how to stay in the moment and just adjust her budget. Like this is going to be the skill that keeps her budgeting. So that’s client number one, like I said, new to me, new in the process. And she’s able to use the respond and recalibrate. Client number two, had a dental surprise. And so she’s been coaching with me for a little bit longer. We’ve been working together and she has a stronger budget. She knows more of her numbers. And a couple weeks ago she actually was going to a dental appointment.
We had talked about the dental appointment. She was going to get some implants put in, and she messages me after the dental appointment. She’s like, oh my goodness, Keina, like I had to get some dental work done before I can actually get my implants. And I wasn’t expecting to get this dental work done before I’m getting my implants. And so she told me like I had a $300 dental bill and I didn’t know what to do, so I like put it on my credit card and I wasn’t expecting to put it on my credit card. So she did the best that she can in the moment for what she wanted to do with her money. And I reminded her of this process when she emailed me because her brain was telling her, oh my goodness, something has gone wrong. Something has gone wrong. It was trying to protect her, right?
But I said, let’s just respond to what’s actually happened and then we can recalibrate. So together we looked at her budget and we saw that she actually has a line for doctor’s visits in her budget. And so she’s funding her doctor’s visits for like a hundred dollars a month. I said, you could just use your doctor’s visits category and you could use this to put towards your credit card and pay off the $300 that you’ve charged. And you don’t actually have to like throw out the whole budget and you don’t have to pause on all your savings goals. You just get to respond to what actually happened and you don’t have to make it mean anything about you.
So that was the process that we used in order to definitely calm her brain down about this dental charge because she has a lot of, dare I say, money, trauma about unexpected bills, whether it is dental, whether it is home, whether it is auto, and those are just things that are triggering for her because she always feels like her and her husband are never prepared for them. And so we started to build out this budget that has some home repair money, that has some dental money, that has some auto repair money so that when these things come up, she can be responsive even if it means that she’s not fully funded. Because sometimes there’s a gap in between what you have versus what the actual bill is. But even if there’s a gap, how do we respond to that? And then how do we want to recalibrate?
So in her recalibration, we started talking about are you seeing more dental expenses coming up than you’ve actually expected? I think that’s in the case of the dental work. If you know what type of teeth you have, it can be a great conversation with your dentist to think about like, Hey, do you think I’m going to have to have a lot more dental work, which means that in your budget you might want to go and set more money aside, so that way you can offset the cost of your dental insurance coverage, versus what you’re going to have to pay out of pocket. And then you can ask questions like, is this a one time thing or do I actually need to increase this line item moving forward? And so we were able to have that conversation after she went to the dental office and giving her a tool that she gets to use in real time to also be able to strengthen her budget for the next 30 days, the next 90 days, but also the next year from now, because she’s able to respond and recalibrate versus just going into this shame cycle, that tells her all the reasons that she’ll never be good at managing money.
And so I want you to hear this from this episode, that it’s not a matter of if something unexpected will come up with your money, it’s just a matter of when. And when it does you don’t have to make it mean something about you. You don’t have to make it a crisis. You just need a plan and you need a process to help you actually move forward without shame. And it doesn’t have to be a hundred percent without shame, you might have a little bit of shame and the shame can come with you, but I don’t want the shame to drive and make every decision for you. What I want you to do instead is I want you to respond to what happened, and I want you to recalibrate your plan with what you now know, so you don’t have to spiral so you can stay in the game. And so you can build a budget that is actually going to learn and grow with you.
I think budgeting is therapeutic, and this is why I think budgeting is therapeutic because I can go in and I can put the things together that need to take care of me, that can support me in my life. So if this episode resonated with you and you’re realizing that you want a budget that like actually reflects your real life and not the fake math that you’ve been doing in your head, I would invite you to apply to work with me. And when you apply to work with me, we will build a system, a very simple system where you will always have money for your bills. You’ll always be able to save and you’ll always be able to spend, that’s what my Three Money Bucket system allows you to do.
But you’ll also learn how to take care of yourself by learning how to respond and recalibrate when things are coming up for you. You’ll be like my client, that’s like, oh my goodness, every single week Keina, I’m finding something new. But we’ll be able to integrate those things into your budget while also helping you save money and pay down debt at the same time. So if you go to the link in my show notes, you can apply to work with me, or if you just simply go to wealthovernow.com, you can also find more information about working with me there. And if this episode brought up some deeper feelings like guilt or embarrassment or shame, I also want to encourage you to download, it’s a free mini podcast series about the four reasons that you’re stuck with money. It’s all about the four different types of shame. So actually, if you go to the show notes, you can download that there. But thank you so much for joining this week and I look forward to chatting with you next week.
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.
