Are you tired of feeling like you “should” be better with money but never seem to get ahead? It’s time to stop the shame cycle and start implementing a system that actually works for you!
In today’s episode, I’m tackling the myth of “being good with money” and why that phrase can actually hold you back. I’m sharing how having a money system – not just hopes or wishful thinking – can help you feel secure with your finances. I’ll break down the importance of having a plan for your spending, saving, and handling life’s curveballs. Plus, I’ll share how this mindset shift helped me reach my financial goals and overcome feelings of shame and insecurity about money.
Ready to stop feeling anxious when you check your bank account and start creating a system that works? Learn how to stop saying, “I need to be better with money,” and begin making progress with a simple, actionable plan. It’s time to create the financial system that works for YOU!
Let’s demystify the idea of being “good” with money…
- [0:22] The dangers of the “good with money” mindset
- [02:25] Keina’s personal examples
- [06:45] Client examples
- [07:45] How shame shows up in your finances
Tune into this episode of Money Files to learn why you need to stop using the phrase “good with money” and start focusing on building systems that align your spending with your real life.
EXCLUSIVE BONUS CONTENT
Want more Money Files? Check out my private podcast series that covers four types of shame that keep you stuck when it comes to managing your finances. I give you systems to overcome the shame and make your money work for you. Download these exclusive podcast episodes here.
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 the discussion overcoming shame and creating money systems that work for you check out my episode, How To Take The Shame Out Of Debt!
Transcript for “Breaking Free From the ‘I Should Be Better with Money’ Trap”
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 File. I’m going to do a short series for you and I want to talk about simple money systems that are going to make you feel rich. But before we get into that, I want to make sure that we talk about the myth of actually being good with money. I think that one of the most dangerous sentences that you can say, or that I can hear as a coach when it comes to money is when someone tells me, I just need to be better with money. That sentence is the very sentence that’s stopping you from real progress. It sounds responsible. It sounds really mature, but the truth is it’s actually loaded with a lot of shame. It’s loaded with avoidance and it has exactly zero strategy. If it does have strategy, the strategy is usually like, I’m just going to make more money or do something else that’s unconventional.
Today I want to break down why that sentence is actually keeping you broke. Why it’s keeping you stuck and just constantly anxious about your finances, even if you’re already making six figures and even if you’re doing okay. So this episode is for you, if you’ve ever thought like, I should be further along, I should know better, this shouldn’t be hard, you are in the right place. So when clients come to me, they’re usually measuring being good with money. And if you could see me right now, I have some very big air quotes. But being good with money by one of these things, this is how they’re measuring it, either by how much money is in their account, how often they have to check their bank account balance, or whether or not they need to use a credit card for emergencies.
But none of these things mean that you’re good with money. You can have money in the bank and still feel stressed. You can stop checking your account and still feel broke. You can avoid credit cards and still be in fear of something going wrong. But being good with money is not about these vibes that you desire. It’s not about hoping it works out, it’s about actually having a system for your money. And most people don’t have a system for their money. They actually have a list of bills and a few prayers. So just to tell you a little bit about how this has shown up for me in my life, is that when I move to DC, almost like 15 years ago now, I think that’s right. 15? Yep. Actually, no, I think it’s 16 years, which is crazy. Almost 16 years ago I moved to DC.
I was making about $50,000 a year, paying like $1,400 in rent, paying down student loans. I had some credit card debt, like you know this story. I had moved to a very expensive city. I went from paying $600 in rent to paying $1,400 in rent, even though my salary went from like $30,000 a year to $50,000 a year. And what was true for me at the time is that I could only save $25 a paycheck. So I was saving about $50 a month. And even then at that time, I thought like, I should be saving more. Maybe I shouldn’t have moved. Maybe I messed up. I thought I’d done some calculations, but one of the things that changed for me was that my mom said something that I will never forget. She said, you’re saving something Keina. I’m like, yeah, but mommy, it’s only.
She’s like, you’re saving something. Like that’s what you need to focus on. So that’s when I decided that I wasn’t going to shame myself for not saving more. I’m going to build a system that actually just works right now so that when I make more, I’ll already be in the habit of saving. That’s where my philosophy of, just start somewhere really came from is because that’s what I had to tell myself, like, don’t sit here and shame yourself because before moving to DC I was saving like $300 a month. So it was a little burst to my ego because I felt like I should be able to do the same thing but my circumstances had changed. I wasn’t paying student loans when I was in St. Louis and when I came to DC I was paying student loans. So I had to factor in those real things in my life that were happening.
It didn’t just happen overnight that I’m like factoring in this conversation with myself. But those are the ways in which I got really real with myself. It’s also how I went from saving $50 a month to being able to save a thousand dollars a month, and being able to save, even before then, I was saving $300 a month and $500 a month. So being able to have this progression, the amount didn’t change first. Like how I was showing up for myself changed first. And listen, even now as a financial coach, I have to be mindful of how old thoughts still show up. Like when I think about, as I was thinking about recording this podcast episode, I was like, where has this shown up for me right now where I tell myself, you know, I should be better with my money. And it shows up with like, I should be saving more for retirement. I shouldn’t have taken out that debt in my business, or I should have more money. I still have these thoughts.
They just have different seasoning on them. They have a different flavor. And this is what no one will tell you is that even when you know what to do, your brain still offers up shame. It still wants to make you wrong. And that’s why structure matters. When I left my nine to five, I went and got another job just so that I could be saving for retirement and to make that easier because retirement was something that I was really worried about. So eventually I started setting aside a percentage from every single client that paid me, every amount of money that I made. It wasn’t perfect, but it was consistent. And that’s what makes me good with money. Same with debt. I borrowed money from my mom for a coach. And when I say mom guys, I have two parents, I feel like I need to name that because sometimes people think I only have a mother. I have a mom and a dad. They’re happily married, they’re going to be married for 50 years this year. But I borrow money from my mom for a coach.
I put my website on a credit card, but I had a plan to make all of those payments back. I tracked it, I cleaned it up. The difference in between me and you, it’s not that I don’t ever mess up with money. The difference is that, I either always have a plan or I will create a plan and that’s what makes me good with money. So just to tell you how this shows up too for clients is like my client, Kath, I think is also a perfect example of how this works. When she came to me, one of her main goals in like the very beginning was like, Hey, I want to get out of this paycheck to paycheck cycle. So we built a system, she got really consistent. Now she’s not in that cycle anymore. All of her bills are on auto pay. If somebody told her that a bill wasn’t paid, she would not think that was a reflection of her money management.
She would say, well, that’s because you didn’t take the money out of my account because I know the money was there. So we had the system. But even with that, like her brain goes into, okay, but Kath, you should be further along. Like you should have more money saved. You are behind, like her brain goes to this place where it just starts moving the finish line. In the beginning, the finish line was like, let’s get out of the paycheck to paycheck cycle. But that’s exactly what shame does. Shame comes in and it tells you about the reasons that you should be further along. It tells you the reasons about why you just need to be better with money. Shame is not logical. It doesn’t care how well you’re doing. It just wants to keep you feeling like you’re not enough and like you’re stuck. And that’s why we can’t rely on these feelings and we really need to have a structure.
We really need to have a system. We really need to know our own data so that way we can talk back when that shame wants to be like really big and rear its head. I feel like shame, if I had to describe it to you, it’s like that shadow, you know, when you’re a little kid or you watch like a cartoon movie and there’s this big shadow in the room that you see from your bed and you’re like, oh my goodness, there’s a monster. But when you turn and you flip on the light, it’s really not a monster. It’s like this little thing in the corner of your bedroom that because the light was casted on it, it made it seem like it was a big monster. And the flipping on of the light in this scenario and in this situation is you having a system, the system allows you to actually see what’s happening.
So you can be like, oh, okay, it’s not a big scary monster. And even if the light turns back off and all of a sudden it looks like really, really scary, the system is going to allow you to have the skill to get to the light to turn it back on. Like, that’s how I would describe shame to you. And that’s my own processing of being able to talk to shame in my own life and be able to say like, what is this that is actually showing up for me right now? And being able to name what’s showing up for me right now and being able to sit with it in the same space. I can’t remember if I’ve shared this on a podcast episode or not, but I’m kind of going off on a little tangent. But I have this stuffed animal in my office because processing emotions is something that I’ve had to learn to do since being in my business.
One of my coaches told me that I basically like stuff emotions in a closet, and I’m like emotionally constipated. Because admittedly, I think I am someone who like, I’ll figure it out and I can push through a lot of things. And in business pushing through sometimes doesn’t work when it comes to emotions. So anyways, I have this stuffed animal in my office and he looks like the big blue monster from Monsters Inc. But whenever I am feeling an emotion this bear, well, he’s a monster. He’s not a bear. He is my reminder that even though that emotion might feel really scary, that emotions can also be like really soft and cuddly and they’re there to help you. You can actually have like a conversation with this emotion and that it’s okay to hold the space for there to be a space for there to be both and especially when it comes to something as big as shame.
Shame is like the things that you don’t want to tell anyone else, because you’re worried about what that person would think of you or even what you think of yourself. So when I’m talking specifically about money, I’m giving you this analogy for turning on the light, I think that having a system allows you to turn the light on for shame and to be able to see like, oh, in the corner there’s just this like little furry stuffed animal. He looks like a monster, but he is really okay. So even though that monster might show up when the light goes out, you have a skillset to get back to that light and turn it back on as many times as you need to. So eventually what happens, like when I’m talking about my client, Kath, is that her problems have changed in our coaching container over time because she’s moved the finish line, her brain has moved the finish line, but she has developed a skillset to, and she is developing a skillset to be able to talk back when these things are happening. So that’s my little tangent for you today.
I hope that it resonates with you. I’ve been describing this process to clients that I’ve been working with lately because it’s really helped me to think about like, how can I be okay with feeling emotions and being able to name something, especially when it comes to money where there are emotions coming up and they make you question yourself and your identity and all of these pieces. So what I want you to hear today is that being good with money is not about getting it right. It’s not about having zero debt or a fully funded emergency fund even. It’s not about avoiding your credit card or guessing the right number. It’s about knowing what to do with your money every payday. It’s about having a plan for your bills, your spending and your savings. It’s about having a system that matches your real life, not a fantasy version of you that eats less takeout and cancels Netflix.
It’s about being a good adult, paying your bills, saving consistently, spending with intention and handling life when it happens. And this is what I teach. This is what works, and this is what helps people actually feel safe with their finances. So if this hit home, I want you to get ready because in the next episode I’m breaking down exactly why a list of bills is not a budget. You’ve probably been doing this for years and it’s not working. I’m going to show you exactly why it doesn’t work. And if you’re already thinking like, oh my goodness, Keina, I am so done with doing this on my own, you can apply to work with me one-to-one, just go to my website, wealthovernow.com. In the very top it says, book a call or you can go to the show notes and you can also book a call with me. But I want to teach you a step-by-step process that is going to stop you in your foot tracks from just saying like, I need to be better with money and I want to actually introduce you to a simple system, a 3 money bucket system that I teach my clients so that you can actually feel like I’m a good adult. I can pay my bills, I can save consistently, I’m spending with intention and I can handle life when it happens. So, alright, thank you so much for tuning in and until next time, have a great 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.
