Are You Avoiding Your Money? 4 Reasons High Earners Avoid Their Finances

What if avoiding your money does not actually look like avoiding your bank account?

You can make six figures, own a home, contribute to your 401k, take vacations, and still have parts of your financial life that you do not want to look at. Maybe you keep saying you will deal with the credit card balance next month. Maybe you move money between accounts to cover the same gap every single month. Maybe you know how much is in savings but have not actually decided how you are going to grow it. Or maybe spending has become a way to get temporary relief when you are stressed, overwhelmed, or just tired from the week.

In this episode I am breaking down financial avoidance and why it can be especially sneaky for high earners, because avoidance is not always about ignoring your finances. Sometimes it is about avoiding the discomfort of making a decision. You will hear why making good money can actually allow financial avoidance to continue longer than it should, the four reasons you may be avoiding your finances right now, and how repeatedly handing decisions to your future self can slowly erode the trust you have in yourself.

And most importantly, I am giving you three things to practice over the next one to two weeks so you can start changing the pattern without turning your finances into another source of restriction or shame.

In this episode you’ll learn…

• What financial avoidance actually looks like for someone making six figures or more
• Why avoidance is not always about ignoring your bank account
• How spending, moving money between accounts, and making minimum payments can sometimes become forms of avoidance
• Why spending money is not automatically a problem and the question to ask yourself instead
• The four reasons you may be avoiding your finances: discomfort, protecting your identity, not knowing what to do with the information, and having an income that allows you to recover
• Why a high income can create a cushion between your financial decisions and their consequences
• How to tell the difference between making good money and actually having a money management system that works
• Why repeatedly saying I will deal with it later can damage your trust in yourself
• How to use spending tracking to understand what is actually happening with your money
• How fake math can keep you from making financial decisions
• The one financial decision you should make this week instead of handing it to your future self

Tune in to this episode of Money Files to understand what financial avoidance really looks like when you make good money, what it is costing you, and what to do this week to finally stop handing uncomfortable financial decisions to your future self.

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 loved this episode on the avoidance money pattern and finally understanding what financial avoidance is really costing you,, check out 226 | How Lisa Paid Off $15,000 in Debt and Built $7,000 in Savings in One Year

Transcript for “Are You Avoiding Your Money? 4 Reasons High Earners Avoid Their Finances“

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. Last week, I introduced you to something I call the four A’s of money alignment, avoidance, aspirational, accidental, and aligned. And over the next few episodes, we’re going to slow down and really sit with each one of these patterns, because I don’t want you to just listen to an episode and say, oh my God, that’s me, and then go about your life. I want you to understand what the pattern actually looks like. I want you to understand why it might be happening.

And I want you to understand what you can actually begin to do differently. So today we’re going to start with avoidance. And if I had to sum up in just one sentence, I would say avoidance is when I’ll deal with it later, slowly becomes your money strategy. And if you’re hearing that, and maybe you’re bracing for me to come for you today, please stay with me, because avoidance doesn’t mean that you don’t care. I actually think a lot of people who avoid their money, they care deeply. And sometimes they care so much that looking at it actually feels really overwhelming. So they don’t look at it. They don’t open the email. They don’t check the balance.

They don’t add up the debt. They don’t look at how much they’ve spent this month. They just keep moving. And here’s the thing about avoidance. It doesn’t always look like financial disaster, you can make six figures, multiple six figures. You can own the home. You can drive a nice car, have the 401k, go on vacation. And people probably look at you and they think like, oh, she’s doing really well. But you know that deep down inside that there are areas of your financial life that you refuse to look at.

And so I think that’s what’s really sneaky about avoidance. Sometimes it sounds like, I don’t know, I’ll probably be fine, or I’ll figure it out. I’ll deal with it later. And later keeps coming. But I think the most important thing I want you to understand about avoidance is that avoidance isn’t always about avoiding your money. Sometimes it’s about avoiding the discomfort of making a decision. Because you can look directly at your money and still avoid the actual decision. You can check your bank account everyday and still avoid asking, why do I keep running out of money? 

You can make credit card payments every month and still avoid admitting that you continue to use the credit card because your current spending plan doesn’t actually work. You can know exactly how much is in your savings account and still avoid deciding what you’re actually going to do differently to make sure that your savings actually grows this year. So when I say avoidance, I’m not just talking about like closing your eyes and pretending that the numbers aren’t there, although that’s one flavor of it. I’m talking about avoiding the discomfort of making a decision. And I’ll deal with it later can look like doing nothing.

But sometimes it can look like spending. It could mean that you’re swiping, you’re transferring money in between your accounts, or you’re justifying, you’re using distraction as a tool. So you’re telling yourself a story that makes you feel better in the moment, but either way, the decision is still looking and waiting on you. Either way, the decision is still waiting for you. So sometimes avoidance, yes, does look like not doing something. So you don’t open the credit card email or you don’t check the balance or you don’t look at your account before you spend. You check afterwards or you swipe without actually having a plan or you add a new subscription or maybe you upgrade something without thinking twice. You can move money around between accounts to cover a gap instead of asking why the gap keeps showing up. You ignore the balance until it becomes really urgent.

But sometimes avoidance doesn’t look like doing nothing. Sometimes it looks like doing something, just not the thing that actually helps. And this is the part that I think people can miss, is that spending itself can be a form of avoidance. Maybe you have a stressful day. Maybe you’re overwhelmed. Maybe work is on your last nerve or maybe you’re lonely and buying something makes you feel better. Not because you need the thing, but because the act of buying it gives you like a little bit of relief. And for a moment, you get to feel something other than whatever you’ve been feeling before. That’s avoidance too.

You’re not avoiding your money by ignoring it. You’re avoiding the discomfort by drowning it out. And I want to be clear, buying something doesn’t automatically mean that you are in avoidance. Like going out to dinner isn’t automatically avoidance. Shopping isn’t automatically avoidance. The question is not, did I spend money? The question is, was I trying not to feel, think about, or decide when I spent it? The question is, what was I trying not to feel, think about, or decide when I spent it? Because sometimes we don’t need another budgeting rule. Sometimes we need to recognize that we’re using spending to postpone a conversation with ourselves. Because when you avoid a decision, it doesn’t actually disappear. You just hand it to future you.

And bless future you’s heart because I know she’s exhausted. Because present you keeps giving her things to clean up. You don’t want to look at the credit card balance. Future you will. You don’t want to figure out how much you need to pay for taxes. Future you will. You don’t want to make a plan for Christmas. December you will. You don’t want to figure out what to do about your car. And then when your car breaks down, now you got to figure it out. I want you to remember this. Every decision you avoid doesn’t disappear. It just gets more expensive for someone else to make later. And that someone else is usually you. 

So why do we do this? Because I don’t think it’s helpful for me to get on this podcast and say, just look at your money. I think you already know that you should look at your money. That’s not new information. The question is, why aren’t I looking at my money? And I would say that there are four main reasons that you don’t want to look at your money. Number one is discomfort. Sometimes you avoid your money because you don’t want to feel what you think you’re going to feel when you look at it. So maybe you think you’ll feel guilty or maybe you’ll feel like I’ve never been good with math or maybe you’re afraid you’re going to see a number that confirms something you already suspect.

Maybe you’re making $175,000 a year and you already know that you don’t have nearly as much money saved as you think you should. And looking at it makes that real. But here’s what I want you to know. Avoiding the information doesn’t protect you from it. It only delays your relationship with it. The number is already there. The credit card balance already exists. The spending already happened. Looking doesn’t create the problem. It just makes you aware of what’s already true. And awareness, even uncomfortable awareness is where you can start to gain power. 

Number two, protecting the version of yourself that you think you’re supposed to be. This one is specific to a lot of you listening. Sometimes you avoid looking because looking might mean confronting a gap between the person you believe you should be financially and what’s actually happening. You make good money. You have a good job. You’re educated. You probably feel pretty successful in other areas of your life. And I’m sure that people look at you and they look at your life and they assume that you’re doing well. And somewhere along the way, you decided that someone like you should have this figured out. 

So looking at your accounts might mean admitting, I don’t actually have as much saved as I thought I would. Or I’ve been making six figures for years and I still have credit card debt. Or my lifestyle looks good but I don’t actually feel financially secure. And I think that can be hard because now it’s not just about the number. The number feels like evidence that you’re not who you thought you were supposed to be. But avoiding the number doesn’t protect your identity. It just keeps you from having the information that you need to change your reality. And you do not have to become a different person to deal with your money. You just have to be willing to see where you actually are. 

Number three is not knowing what you would do with the information. So this one is really big. Because sometimes you don’t look because you think, okay, but if I find out that I’ve overspent, then what? Am I like not supposed to eat out again? Do I have to cancel the vacation? Am I supposed to stop buying things? And if you think the only answer is looking at your money and then immediately going to restriction, of course you don’t want to look at it, right? Because you’re not willing to have that conversation. Nobody wants to be told they can’t do something. Especially when you work 40 hours a week, 60 hours a week. 

You went to undergrad, you got a master’s, you got a doctorate. And who wants to voluntarily sit down and make themselves feel deprived? But that’s not the goal. The goal isn’t to look at your money so you can punish yourself. The goal is to look at your money so you can decide how you want to move forward. And those are two completely different conversations. When you’re punishing yourself, you’re asking, what did I do wrong? When you’re deciding how you want to move forward, you’re asking yourself what’s happening here and what do I want to do next? And I want you to hear me when I say this. You can look at your spending without making yourself the problem. 

You can say, okay, I spent $600 eating out this month. That’s a fact. You don’t actually have to immediately add, I’m so irresponsible. I have no discipline. Here I go again. I’m always going to do this. Those are judgments that you add to yourself. Instead, you could simply ask, okay, I spent $600 eating out. Does that work for what I’m actually trying to build? Do you see how that feels? If you say that to yourself, it feels completely different in your body. 

And then the next one is, it works for a while. So when you make good money, you generally, I would say, are able to pay your bills. The card could even get paid down and then you keep using it. You know the next paycheck is going to come and your income has created a cushion between your decisions and the consequences of your decisions. So you overspend, but maybe the next check covers it or you put something on the credit card, but you make enough that you can make a payment. It’s not the same as when you’re making $30,000 a year or $40,000 a year. The same things aren’t on the line. If you make what we will call in this episode a mistake, you eventually feel like you can recover because of how much money that you make.

Your bonus is going to save you. You’re getting ready to get a new job that’s paying you $80,000 more. And so being a high income earner is the thing that has been protecting you. And I want to be clear, making good money is a gift. I love it. We love it. And I’m never going to tell you that you should feel bad because you make a lot of money. But good income is not the same as good money management. And sometimes your income is working so hard to clean up after your decisions that you don’t realize how much work your income is actually doing. You think, I’m fine. But what you might actually mean is my paycheck is big enough that I can recover every time I avoid making a decision. And those are two different things.

So here’s a question I want you to think about. If your income stopped increasing tomorrow, would your current habits still work? Not could I survive. Would the system work? If you don’t get another raise, if your bonus disappeared, if you decided to take a lower paying job, if you wanted to take time off, if your life changed, would you know what to do? Or has money been the solution every single time? Because I hear this all the time, Keina when I make $200,000, I’ll be able to save. Or I’m like, okay, but what happened when you made $150,000? And usually the story is the same, just with a different number. 

At some point you do have to ask, do I actually need more money? Or have I been using more money to avoid creating a system? What I want you to understand is that your avoidance, it costs you. Avoidance costs you time. Money problems rarely get expensive all at once. They get expensive slowly. You don’t look at your bank account. You have another month of interest. You have, I’ll deal with it with the next paycheck. And so you are passing decision after decision off to future you. And then before you know it, you’re dealing with something that maybe you never could have imagined because you didn’t actually address the problem today, which today is as good a day as any day. 

What happens is that maybe in three years from now, five years from now, even 12 months from now, because you weren’t willing to make the decision that you needed to make today, you’re not sure if you can take the job. You’re not sure if you can take time off. You’re not sure if you can afford the house or take the trip. And so the way that you manage your money becomes reactionary. And there’s a cost to that. I don’t want you to have a financial life where everything has to be a reaction. I want you to have a financial life where you have options because options allow you to have clarity. But I think the biggest thing that avoidance costs you is actually trust in yourself. 

Every time you say, I’ll look this weekend and you don’t. Or every time you say, I’m going to stop using the credit card and you don’t. Every time you say, I’m going to figure it out next month and next month comes and then it goes. You start collecting evidence that you don’t follow through with yourself. And eventually that becomes your story of not being disciplined or I’m just bad with money or I can’t stick with it. But that’s not actually true. I think what may have gotten in the way is that you just got in this habit of handing uncomfortable decisions to a future version of yourself. And so that has disrupted you from actually building trust with yourself. 

But the good news is that you can change a pattern. All this is, is a pattern and patterns can change. So I don’t want you to listen to this episode and decide that you are suddenly going to become someone who spends four hours in a spreadsheet every Sunday. I don’t want to do that and I don’t think you need to do that either. But what I do want you to do is I want you to take the next couple of weeks and I want you to work with yourself. Like I said, I don’t need you to become someone new. When I’m working with clients, it is never about, okay, welcome to our five-month coaching partnership. I’m getting ready to change you.

No, I’m like, girl, show up as you are. I see you getting your nails done. I see you getting your hair done. I want you to learn who you are. I don’t want you to become some fake perfect version of you. And so what I’m going to ask you to do is I want you to just track your spending. I want you to track what is actually happening. I would say do this for one to two weeks just to pay attention with how your money is actually moving. You can learn so much from how your money actually moves. I didn’t ask you to judge it. I’m not asking you to immediately cut anything. I just want you to notice what is showing up over and over again. Where does your money keep going? What decisions are you making without really thinking about it? This is a moment for you to turn the lights on so that you can see what’s happening, so that you can disrupt handing things off to your future self. 

The second thing that I want you to do is I want you to name where fake math is showing up. And fake math is like what I call when you tell yourself some version that isn’t quite true. It could be, I don’t really spend that much on eating out. But you don’t actually know how much you spend on eating out. You don’t know if it’s a lot or a little because you’re not really paying attention. Or you tell yourself, I’m going to catch up. Or you tell yourself like, I’ll start saving with my next raise. But where are you giving yourself permission to not do the thing right now? Especially as someone who is in avoidance.

So call yourself out on where fake math is showing up for you. What are the things that you are telling yourself maybe that aren’t happening? Or what’s the narrative that you can, because you’re going to be tracking your finances for one to two weeks. What’s the narrative that when you listen to yourself, you’re like, ooh, ooh, I didn’t notice I did that. It’s a really interesting exercise to actually listen to the things that you say about your money. So just notice where you’re using that. 

And then the third thing is make one decision you’ve been postponing. Just one, not five, not a complete financial overhaul, but just one decision. Maybe you’ve been putting off looking at your credit card balance. Look at it. Or maybe you’ve been meaning to cancel a subscription. Cancel it. Or maybe you’ve been meaning to figure out how much you have left to owe on your car. Look at it, see what it is. Or maybe you’ve been moving money around every month to cover the same gap. Ask yourself, why is the gap there? And maybe you already know that you need support with your money and you’ve been saying, I’ll figure it out on my own first.

Okay. So maybe the decision you’ve been postponing is actually booking a call to work with me. Whatever it is, I want you to practice something different. Stop automatically handing every uncomfortable decision to future you. Because that’s what we’re practicing here. We’re not practicing being perfect. We’re not practicing restriction. We’re not becoming someone who’s completely new, but we’re practicing becoming someone who’s willing to make a decision, who is willing to decide. And here’s also what I want you to hear. Looking is the first step. It is not the whole plan. Because once you see it, once you actually know what you’ve been avoiding, the next question is, what do you want to do with that information? 

And that is usually exactly where avoidance tries to sneak back in. You look once, you feel a little better, life gets busy, and suddenly you’re back to not looking. And that’s exactly the gap that my five-month partnership is built to close. We don’t just look once. We look every week. And we don’t just notice what’s going on. We actually build a system around who you are. If you are the girl and the woman who loves to travel, you love to get your hair done. We’re building a system around that while also helping you accomplish those other goals, increasing your savings, paying off your debt, saving for a home. 

And so the goal isn’t to white-knuckle everything. We are going to look at what’s actually happening, what decisions do we need to make? What do we need to adjust? And how do we make sure that this plan fits your real life? And I want to say something directly to some of you listening right now. Maybe you’ve been thinking I probably should work with Keina. Maybe you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while and you’ve been watching my content and you’ve been telling yourself that you’re going to figure this money thing out. And maybe you keep saying I’ll book a call later. 

Now, I’m not saying that every person who hasn’t booked a consult is avoiding their money, but sometimes the answer is simply, yes, you have. So no judgment, but I do want to encourage you if this podcast episode is resonating with you and you’ve been one that’s opened up the application a couple of times, book the call. It is going to be a one hour consult where I’m just going to get to learn more about you. You can share what’s going on with your finances. And I’m going to tell you here’s exactly how I would help you over five months. And here’s what we would do together. So I think the thing that people love about my partnership the most is we literally are going to be in it together. You do not have to do it alone.

You don’t have to feel overwhelmed. I’m going to meet you exactly where you are. And we’re going to build a simple three money bucket system for you to be able to manage your money from one month to the next. So do the homework from this episode. Don’t be avoidant. I want you to track your money for one to two weeks. Just see what’s going on. Take the time to identify where is there fake math showing up in your life. And then lastly, make one decision that you have been postponing. So thank you so much for tuning in. And I will chat 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.