We all have thoughts about money that feel true, but what if they’re quietly keeping you stuck?
In this episode of Money Files, I introduce the concept of automatic money thoughts, those quick, familiar thoughts that pop up when you think about money and sound perfectly responsible, but actually block your financial progress. Thoughts like “I live a modest life,” “I only spend on necessities,” or “I don’t spend on travel” feel safe and logical, but they often hide the truth about how your money is really moving.
When you believe those quiet scripts without question, you stop looking at your numbers. You stop planning for things you actually do spend money on. And before you know it, you’re back in fake math, wondering why your savings haven’t grown or your credit card balance won’t go down.
In this episode, I’ll walk you through how to uncover and disrupt your automatic money thoughts so you can build awareness, tell yourself the truth, and create a financial plan that reflects your real life.
Listen in to learn:
[01:40] What automatic money thoughts are and where they come from
[03:55] Why responsible-sounding money thoughts keep you stuck
[06:20] The 3 most common automatic money thoughts people have
[09:45] How your thoughts about “modesty” and “necessity” hide real spending
[11:10] My personal story of realizing I was in fake math with travel expenses
[14:50] Three questions to ask when you catch an automatic money thought
[16:45] How to replace judgment with clarity and build a plan that works
[18:30] Why awareness, not avoidance is the key to financial freedom
Tune into this episode of Money Files to learn how to recognize the money stories running in the background and start building a plan that supports the life you actually live.
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 hearing about automatic money thoughts, check out Episode 9: How to Choose Your Thoughts About Money. These episodes work together to help you uncover what’s really happening with your thoughts around money and build a plan that feels honest and empowering.
Transcript for “Automatic Money Thoughts”: The Sneaky Scripts Keeping You in Fake Math
Intro: Hi, and welcome to Money Files. I am 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 introduce to you a concept I have been thinking a lot about. I talked about it on social media. I did a reel on it. But I wanted to bring it here because I know that it is going to help you just to notice what’s going on in your head. If you heard me talk about money, whether you’ve been here a day, you’ve been here for years. You will hear me tell you that money is not just about like whether or not you are good or bad at maths. But there is an emotional layer under your money and with an emotional layer, we also have to investigate the way that we think about our finances. And so if we can be aware of the way that we are thinking about our finances, that means that we can change something in our life in order to create different results with what is going on with our finances, so the concept I am going to introduce to you today is called automatic money thoughts.
Now if you have ever heard of automatic negative thoughts from mindset of phycology work, you know that those are quick intrusive thoughts that pop up uninvited. And they happen instantly without you even realizing it. Well I started to notice something similar with money. And here is the twice, these automatic money thought don’t always sound negative. In fact they usually sound pretty responsible and they sound like the kind of thoughts that prove you are good with money. So things like I live a modest life, I don’t spend money on travel, I only spend on necessities. But here is the truth, these thoughts are happening subconsciously. You’re not aware you are saying them. And because you are questioning them, they quietly block you from creating a real plan with your money. And that’s what I want to unpack with you today.
So these automatic money thoughts, like where do they come from, Keina I have never heard of them. So in my experience, they come from different seasons of life. Maybe childhood, where you absorbed your families money values, like we don’t need vacations to be happy, we don’t waste money on fancy clothes and so you internalize some of those thoughts and that way of thinking for yourself. They could have come from a financial transition, like going from one decade to the next. So from like my 20s to my 30s and my 30s to my 40s. And you might have graduated, got your first job. You had 6 figures and you decided, I’m going to give myself new rules about what you would or wouldn’t spend on. And so, let me be really clear with this graduation piece. It could be a graduation of sorts to a higher income level or out of a season of life.
And so when you gave yourself these new rules about your spending, you told yourself what you would or wouldn’t spend on. And again it could have happened subconsciously and weren’t really aware how your thinking shifted about money or your thoughts shifted about money. Or the thoughts could just be apart of identity protection. You want to feel like you’re being responsible. So your brain whispers, see you don’t really spend on that. Your brain is sometimes your number one alia. So your brain is supporting you by telling you, we don’t spend money on that. So these thoughts are your attempt to be good with money. And sometimes they even come from real intensions like scaling back or wanting to save more but overtime, they get baked in as rules that you don’t even realize you’re following.
And they’re happening at such a low volume, it’s like a whisper in the back of your mind. You don’t notice them until you finally bump into the reality of your number. So the reason why I want you to pay attention to the automatic money thoughts is because when you say things like, I live a modest life or I spend only on necessities, it means that you are going to stop investigating what’s actually happening with your money. And when you eventually check your bank account or your credit card, that’s when shame and frustration show up. You see a balance that doesn’t match your story that you have been telling yourself. The palms of your hands they start to get sweaty, maybe your chest tightens, maybe your ears start to burn or maybe even your stomach drops.
And so it feels easier to avoid these moments but that avoidance is exactly what keeps you in fake maths and fake maths is why you don’t save as much as you want. Why debt feels like this hamster wheel you can’t get off of and why it feels like your money is always like 2 steps behind where you want to be. So I want to dive in and tell you a little bit more about three common automatic money thoughts that I hear. The first one is, I live a modest life. And this one comes up actually all the time. I think that people say this when they are comparing themselves to other people, like when I think of, you’re trying to live like the Jones, I think that’s how the saying goes. Don’t quote me. And so you’re like no, no, no, I don’t do that, I live a modest life. And when I ask people what that means, people might start to tell me, I don’t really shop, I don’t get my nails done. We don’t travel much.
There is always a list of what you don’t do, but almost never is there a list of what you actually do. And modesty might mean you’re not on the Fiji Islands every summer but maybe you are paying for insta cart, maybe you have house keeper. Maybe you eat out after work because you’re exhausted. And those choices they are like wrong choices but because you tell yourself you live a modest life, you don’t recognize the impact of those decisions on your bank account. The impact of those decisions on being able to save. The impact of those decisions on being able to pay down your debt. So because you ignore them, they don’t make it into your plan. And then you find yourself in a place where your plan is never working because you live a modest life.
A second thought that I hear a lot is, I don’t spend on, you fill in the blank. And this one is really, really sneaky. So I have a client who swore to me, up and down, that he did not spend on birthdays. And if I say like hey, how much do you want to put, I don’t do birthdays, like all my friends know I don’t do birthdays. And when we were looking at the numbers just a couple of weeks ago. What we noticed is that he spent $1200 between mothers days and his wife’s birthday. In his head he’s not calling those gifts, just like, but that’s my wife. Why wouldn’t I treat my wife to something special? Why wouldn’t I celebrate my wife. And listen, as a coach, I know he spends money on gifts, I see it. We have to work on that and we worked on it when we’re in coaching. But the thing is, if you don’t name it, you can plan for it. And if you don’t plan for it, you can’t actually have the money available for the spending that you actually do want to do.
And that is the epiphany of fake math, like fake maths will tell you, no, no, you don’t do that so you don’t need to plan for it, you don’t do it often, so you don’t need to plan for it. And then the third thought is, I only spend on necessities. And this one I think sounds the most responsible but it’s also the most misleading because when we dig into what necessities actually mean, they often include, daily coffee runs, subscriptions that are automatically renew. Take out after long work days. Those may feel necessary in the moment but they are still expenses. And when you erase them from your mental math, your plan will never ever, ever feel like it’s going to work for you. So just think of you like a personal example, in my own life, for a long time, one of my automatic money thoughts was around travel.
And I was telling myself and when I tell you these voices are low, I mean they are incredibly low. I was telling myself, I don’t really travel that much but it wasn’t like I was walking around, being like I don’t travel, I don’t travel. That was not the narrative that I was walking around with, like I wasn’t saying it on a bull horn. It was just very low. And when I like stop to actually think about it and actually looked and I told myself the truth, I was travelling. And travel, like I was going to DC to Oklahoma for holidays and those flights were going on my credit card because I was never planning for them. And in my head I think travel was big international trips, it wasn’t weekend get aways. It wasn’t weddings, it wasn’t flights to see my friends. I wasn’t adding those things up, like I should have been adding those up. I was not intentionally planning for them, even thinking like, can I plan for them.
And what I realized is in my own reflection about this work for myself is, sometimes we tell ourselves these things. I think because we’re also afraid of what will happen if we see the real number. Like if I admit I spend $3000 or $6000 on travel, then I’ll actually have to face the fact that that’s how much I’m spending and I will have to make a decision and it can feel safer to just ignore and try to figure it out later but that later puts you in a space that you don’t want to be in, it puts you in a credit card debt. It puts you in a space where you are feeling shame because, here you are again using your tax return to pay off your credit card debt. Like I was one of those people, whoo I can’t wait for April so I can get my tax return to pay off my credit card debt.
So when we are ignoring when we actually do, it keeps us from being able to actually build those things into our lifestyle that we actually want. And it may feel easier to ignore in the beginning but I promise you it is 10 times harder to reconcile that on the back end, like I would rather sit down and be honest with myself, even if it feels uncomfortable because I can do something about the number that makes me feel uncomfortable versus having to feel uncomfortable about the credit card debt because I wasn’t willing to be honest with myself.
So I told you about automatic money thoughts. And I want you to know how to disrupt your automatic money thoughts. And the first thing I want you to do is notice them. So you have been listening to this episode and maybe you’re like ohh Keina I’ve heard myself say that. Write those things down. What have you heard yourself say? So the 3 that I mentioned was like, I live a modest life, I don’t spend on X. I don’t spend on travel, holidays, selfcare, like think about the things you tell yourself you don’t spend on. And I also mentioned I only spend on necessities. So some of those might sound familiar. You might have some other ones that are coming up for you. I want you to ask yourself, once you notice these automatic money thoughts that you have, I want you to ask yourself, is this true. LIke take each one of them individually and ask yourself, is this true?
Is it true that I don’t spend on travel? What about road trips, hotels, gas, weddings? So maybe in your head travel means I have to catch a flight. But travel could be the 3 day extended weekend. Travel could be maybe there is some version of hosting that you do that you’re like no I don’t travel for the holiday. Holidays are something else I talk about a lot with my clients. They’re like no I don’t travel for the holidays but I’m like okay but do you host. And so maybe we don’t need to save for travel around the holidays but we need to save for hosting. So we’re asking ourself, is it true? And asking what other things come in here. So is it true that you don’t spend on birthdays? So what about dinner celebrations? What about drinks, what about baby showers, what about wedding, what about thanking someone? Or at work do you guys, I mean when I had a job, oh my goodness, excuse, me, when I had a job, we used to put money in to get people gifts for different things.
So maybe it’s not birthday but it’s something else. Is it true that you only spend on necessities? Like what is the definition of a necessity in your life? The third question you can ask yourself is what’s more true? So I’ve kind of gone into this already but instead of I don’t travel, maybe it’s not the international trips but you do spend $3000 a year when you think back to this last year where you had one wedding and you had 2 weekend get aways or maybe every other month you take a long weekend away. So add up those numbers and figure out what that is for yourself. Instead of I only spend on necessities, maybe it’s I have a hand full of things that kind of fall outside of my regular list of bills that I want to plan for. Maybe it’s a manicure and a pedicure. I do have the housekeeper. She doesn’t come every single month, but I do it quarterly. You can plan for those things but ask yourself like what’s more true?
So when you hear some common things that fit in a budget, maybe you’ve heard me in past episodes or you have my spending plan template. And you look at a category and you tell yourself you don’t do it, like maybe you tell yourself you don’t donate money. Is that true? What’s more true? Oh, what’s more true is that I adopt a family at my church for the holiday and I buy them gifts or sometimes I do give my brother money. That’s another one that I ask people a lot, is like do you give money to your family and they’re like no? Oh, wait Keina, I did give my brother like and then they start listing off things. So I’m like okay let’s put a family fund into your budget. Don’t tell yourself what you don’t do. Ask yourself like what do I do
And question, is this true, what’s more true? The other thing you can do is, as you’re going through this, go back through your bank statements and see what’s missing. Like, oh, I forgot I do this, I forgot I do that. And it may not be every month. It could be quarterly but just going through and being curious about what life do I actually live. What did I actually do? And then the last one is, I want you to use the awareness. You questioning your automatic money though is not about you judging yourself. It’s just about you being more clear with how money moves in your life and how you’re spending money because once you actually have the real math, then you can actually build a plan that support you having more choice. It’s going to support you moving towards those mile stones that you said you want to be able to do, whether it’s like Keina, I’m looking to have a baby this year. Keina I am looking to get married. Keina I want to buy a house.
Keina I want a 5 figure savings account. Keina I want to automate all my bills. Whatever that is for you, when you take the time to be honest, then you’re going to be able to have a plan that’s a reflection of your reflection on how you actually spend money. So this week, write down one thing you say about money. Ask yourself is this true. Pull your statements and highlight where that’s true and where it isn’t. Then ask like what’s more true and then finally capture, finally to capture that number in your budget as a real number. And that’s how you’re going to break your cycle of fake math. And fake math will always, always be there if we don’t investigate it. Even for me I have to still investigate where am I doing fake math and telling myself, oh I spend on that. But there is something that’s more true.
So to recap, automatic money thoughts are those quite scripts that sound responsible but they keep you in fake math. They come from your attempt to be good with money. From childhood messages or from rules that we created during different seasons of life. But when you ask yourself, is this true, the next time you encounter an automatic money thought, then you’ll be able to find out what’s more true and you’ll actually get the clarity you need to build a plan that supports the life that you are trying to build. And as always if you want help doing this work, you’re like oh my goodness Keina, I never thought about this. I would love to have your support, like I want to have more choice with my money, then apply to work with me, like we’re going to pull out your automatic money thoughts and we are going to start looking at your real numbers. We’re going to be at the money table on first coaching call and we’re going to get everything out there.
And then I’m going to help you build a budget that is reflective of the things that you are telling me you want to do. The things that you want to have more choice for. And if this is what you want to do and you want that accountability then apply to work with me, either go to Wealthovernow.com or go to my show notes and you will see the link there. So thank you so much for tuning in and have a great day.
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.
