Saving for a rainy day doesn’t always spark motivation. That’s why in this episode, Keina introduces the concept of the Side Eye Fund—a money stash that empowers you to say “no thanks” to toxic jobs, burnout, and financial fear.
If traditional emergency funds haven’t inspired you to save, this episode will reframe what savings can mean for your life. It’s not about disaster prep—it’s about options.
Keina shares how her clients use the Side Eye Fund to build financial peace on their own terms. Whether you want to walk away from a draining job, take an unpaid break, or support a loved one without stress, this episode will help you start saving for the life you actually want.
You’ll also hear a real-life example from a client working toward her $24,000 fund goal—and why slow, intentional saving beats hustle and sacrifice.
Listen to learn how to build a savings system that puts you in control of your choices…
[00:36] Why Keina wants clients to have options, not just budgets
[02:04] What a Side Eye Fund is and why you need one
[06:14] Rethinking the traditional “emergency fund”
[08:45] What the Side Eye Fund allows you to do in real life
[10:30] A client story: growing a $24,000 Side Eye Fund
[13:35] How to start your own Side Eye Fund today
[15:22] You don’t need a crisis to start saving
Tune into this episode of Money Files to discover how a Side Eye Fund can give you the freedom to walk away, say yes to yourself, and save without fear.
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 the Side Eye Fund resonated with you, make sure to check out Episode 90: A Stress-Free Way To Save $10,000.
Transcript for “Emergency Funds Are Out—Side Eye Funds Are In”
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 today I want to talk to you about something that you’ve probably heard time and time again, but I want you to hear it differently. For me as a coach, one of my main philosophies and things that I want is I want my clients to have options and I want you to have options that allow you to live the life that you desire. I’ve worked with over a hundred clients since I’ve started my business and there are so many different circumstances that my clients are facing in life. They could be cultural circumstances, their life circumstances. And when I approach my clients, I approach them each as individuals. I approach them based off of the things that they say that are important to them, their life experiences. And I want to meet whoever I’m working with right where they are and I will do and say things that might break their brain in ways because they’ve never been given permission to do certain things.
They’ve never given themselves permission to do certain things. And so this is one reason that I’m talking about what I’m talking about today, but I just wanted to share that with you because I think that’s very important to share with you in terms of how I approach coaching or you may have been listening to my podcast and you’re like, how’s Keina different? I have a budgeting app or I’ve signed up for this course online and I think it’s the humanness that I bring to my coaching that makes my coaching feel different because I have clients that have, like I said, there are cultural circumstances, cultural expectations that we consider when we put into their financial plan. There are life circumstances whether it’s, I’m in the middle of a divorce, Keina, I’ve been laid off from my job. Keina, I want to have a baby on my own.
There are so many different things that are happening for my clients and they’re happening in real time. I’ve had clients, going through chemo. I’ve had and seen it all. And so my work honors what’s going on for clients and it’s why I want people to have options because no matter how you come to me, the circumstance you come to me with, life is going to present you different circumstances. And so I want you to have options and so with that, one of the things I want to talk about today is the emergency fund. That was a long way of me telling you that I want to talk about emergency funds and more than an emergency fund, what I want you to have is what I call a side eye fund. And I’m very notorious for probably rolling my eyes and it’s just something I do innately. So I think about this is what this fund is for. So you can roll your eyes at somebody or at something because you have a side eye fund, like you think about somebody giving you a side eye. What does a side eye mean? It’s like girl, go sit down. Ain’t anybody listening to you.
And that’s what I want you to have in the bank. So you can say, girl, go sit down, it’s your girl go sit down money and everybody needs your girl go sit down money. It’s your option fund. And sometimes people don’t connect to this idea of having an emergency fund, like they don’t want to save for a disaster, but I do want you to connect to why am I saving money and you’re saving money because I want you to be able to give a side eye, like my side fund allowed me to quit my job. My side eye fund has allowed me a little while ago I had to go home because my grandmother passed. My side eye fund allows me to do things that I want to do. And it doesn’t have to align with what somebody else is doing. It doesn’t have to align with traditional financial norms. So I want you to think about like what would a side eye fund allow me to do in my life?
So everybody’s heard the advice that you need to save three to six months of expenses in case of an emergency. And I agree that’s very, very important. I want you to have a cushion, but sometimes that can feel, once again, you just don’t know what you’re saving for. Like Keina, I don’t really want to do that. There’s something more important. I need to go to a concert, I need to travel. And so sometimes we won’t prioritize saving because it just doesn’t feel important because we don’t know what emergency we’re saving for. And so if you don’t know what you’re saving for, then you’re not also going to prioritize saving. Or if you have saved money, you might feel guilty for touching it or you might be thinking like, I’m going to save once I pay off my credit card or once I get a raise or once life settles down. And so you’ll delay the freedom that having an emergency fund can actually give you. And that’s why today I just want to reframe it for you because you are someone who needs to have options in life. It’s how you move in life anyways because you want this level of freedom. And so I want you to actually have this true freedom. And so it’s going to be your side eye fund.
And so your side eye fund is literally like that little emoji that pops up where that yellow face and the eyes are looking to the left. I actually don’t think the yellow face with eyes are looking to the left. I think there’s only a eye roll. But you can think about the eye roll or those two big googly eyes. Like I want you to think about that when you think about this side eye fund. Like that’s what this is for and it’s the, I don’t have to put up with this fund, right? Like you don’t have to stay in your toxic job. You can take a month off for your mental health. Maybe you just are like, listen, I need to go to Bali because I need some space and I need to escape. Like I’ve planned for this. Like I can help my mom without stressing out about my bills. But your side fund is going to give you options. And options are the foundation of financial peace. And I don’t want you to be in a space where you have to ask for permission, not even with money. And the side eye fund is how you’re going to get there and you get to build this side eye fund brick by brick.
I know right now you might be listening, you’re like, oh my goodness Keina, you should just said that you could go to Bali. How much is that going to cost? I don’t want you to think about how much it’s going to cost. I want you to be thinking about how you’re going to shift your thinking about why you want to save money. Think about all the things, you’ve probably already experienced things in life. I know you have because you are a full grown adult. And what are the things that you would like to side eye but you haven’t been able to? Like, I want you to just think about what would be the purpose of this money as you’re creating it. So that side eye fund is a powerful word because it gives you the ability to say, I’m saving money so that I have choices. I’m going to say that again. You are saving money because you want choices. You’re not saving to prevent a disaster.
You are saving to give yourself breathing room. You’re saving because you want to live with fewer financial shoulds and you want more financial options. So this fund isn’t about saving for something that you have no idea what it would be or what it would look like, but it is literally, like think about it as your living trust fund for yourself. Like this fund is going to allow me to dip into it when I just need to side eye something in my life. And I honestly would encourage you, I think I say this on the podcast all the time, like write about what a side eye fund would mean for you. What are the things that you could see yourself doing and allow yourself to be expansive like in a year from now, how could a side eye potentially help you? In five years from now how could a side eye potentially help you? I actually was talking to a client on a call today and we were talking about her side-eye fund goals and I was giving her some milestones to work towards and we were talking about her having $24,000 in this fund.
And when I think about like her growing a fund, that’s a five figure side-eye fund, I love that for her. But as we were talking about her growing this fund, I was like, right now you’re growing it. I think she’s saving like a little over $300 a month and sometimes you can get discouraged when you’re saving money. You are like, oh my goodness, it’s like taking so long. But we literally created like her milestone one and everyone’s milestone is to save a thousand dollars. And then I said, okay, then we’re going to save $4,000. And so in less than a year, she’s going to have $4,000 saved. Then we thought about, okay, what does it look like to have $12,000 saved? I said, this is like you could just put this on autopilot. And she has this side eye fund that she’s building, but she’s also saving for other things. Like she enjoys travel, she has a house, she has kids or a kid, not kids. So she also is putting money towards other things. So as she’s growing her side eye fund, the goal is that her side eye fund can just be there to protect her whenever she needs it.
It can be there to give her choices whenever she needs it. But she’s also not going to be short on living life because she has these other buckets of savings that she gets to enjoy while she’s building this side fund. So she hasn’t gone ham on how she’s saving, but she also does know some opportunities for how she can really lean into saving $24,000 that just gets to be there to protect her. So back to you. The question, how do you build your side eye fund? You can start small, but I want you to start on purpose. And when I’m walking clients through this, we literally open a bank account. I prefer a high yield savings. So you could go into NerdWallet and just type in like high yield savings accounts. And a high yield savings account is simply an account that is not going to give you 0.03% interest.
Right now they’re about 3% returns, some have 4% returns. A lot of my clients have a Capital One performance savings account. And we are going to name this account, you could name it your side eye fund, you can name it your exit plan. You can name it your options money. Whatever gives you a little grin based off of what you said a side eye fund could support you with. So you can name it uniquely because I want it to have purpose in your life. Then I want you to choose a number, like what are you going to put in the side-eye fund per paycheck? It could be $25 a paycheck, it could be $200 a paycheck, but I want you to start with a number that you can commit to. I’m not going to miss a hundred dollars a month, I’m not going to miss a hundred dollars a paycheck. I spend that on DoorDash and so I’m putting it into the fund. And this is big, like you aren’t just saving to save.
I want you to reflect on why am I putting this money in this account? What is its purpose? You could write down a few things like this fund is for, maybe it’s to take two weeks unpaid vacation if your health requires it. If you had to quit your job without a backup plan, this is what this fund would be for. Maybe it would help you in the event that you’re like, Hey, I had some random medical thing happen to me and I didn’t have enough, in this other area of my spending. Or maybe you want to walk away from something that’s no longer aligned, like think about the past situations in your life that you would’ve enjoyed just having some cash in the bank. And that’s what that side-eye fund could be for. Maybe you have a dream of working for yourself, like I’m, and so this is going to allow you to build a bridge to be able to cover some expenses. Those are the things that you could think about for the purpose of this fund.
And so your goal is to protect this money. You don’t have to think about hoarding it, but this is money. It’s not money that you won’t ever touch, but it’s money that if you touch it, you have clarity for why you’re touching it. You’re not touching it to say, oh, I need to touch it because I went a little bit over on my credit card, right? You’re touching it when a moment comes where you want to side-eye something in your life and say, no thank you. Like this fund has your back. This fund allows you to have options. And so you can put some rules around what you would use this fund for. So I want you to truly, truly think for yourself, what would your side-eye fund give you the power to do? Would it let you pause? Would it let you walk away? Would it allow you to say yes to yourself instead of being in fear? But you don’t have to wait for a crisis to prioritize savings. You can actually start today, literally today, you can start with a number, give yourself a purpose, and then you are going to start creating and forming a new identity for yourself as a saver. Because it’s not about you saving for someday, it’s you saving for the moment that you choose for yourself.
The moment that you decide you want an option, that side-eye fund is going to be there to support you. And we don’t know when these moments come, right? Like I don’t have a magic 8 ball, I don’t have a crystal ball to see into your future, but I do know that, as my grandmother says, you keep living. And so if you keep living, you are going to have a moment where you need to be able to give yourself something. And so you need to be able to give yourself an option. And that’s where this side eye fund is going to come into play. So if this episode resonated with you, I want to tell you, like I’m also going to do some more series, a couple more episodes on saving. We’re going to dig deeper on why savings feels hard, even when you want to save, even when you make good money. And I’m going to actually introduce you to four saver identities that I see in coaching.
I’m going to talk to you about how they show up, how they sabotage your progress, and how to shift into a version of you that saves on purpose. So tune into next week’s episode. We’re going to be talking about how you don’t have a savings problem, you actually have an identity problem, and we’ll be talking about building your financial safety really from the inside out. So once again, thank you so much for tuning in. If this episode resonated with you, I would appreciate if you would share it. If you’re like, Keina, oh, okay, I’m ready, I want you to go to my website, Wealthovernow.com and you can apply to work with me. But until next week, 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.
