We are officially in June! We are already halfway through 2023. It is time to do a financial check-in. In today’s episode, I discuss the importance of conducting a midyear financial review and strategies to keep you on track to hit your money goals.
January is an exciting time to set resolutions, and we enter the new year with enthusiasm, especially around changing money habits. However, it is easy to lose focus and stray away from financial plans. A lot can happen in six months. It’s normal for goals to change or different aspects of our finances to gain a higher priority. That is why a midyear review is so important!
Schedule time in your calendar to sit down with the money goals you set for yourself and reflect. Really evaluate your progress. Take a moment to celebrate wins! Then consider what is important to you right now. Do these new goals align with your original financial plan? Remember, budgeting is a tool, and your process will evolve. By checking in with yourself now, you will gain more financial confidence and set yourself up for more success in the second half of 2023.
During this episode I encourage you to consider the following…
[00:04:55] The first thing I want you to do in your mid year review about the goals that you set for this year is think about what financial goals you said out loud or put on paper.
[00:06:45] I want you to think about what is truly important (in your finances) right now
[00:11:17] As part of the media review I want you to actually think about quick actions. What are the quick actions you can take to make progress
Tune in to this episode of Money Files to learn how to jump start your midyear financial review and reflect on the progress you’ve made in 2023.
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 CONVERSATION ON HOW TO BEGIN A MIDYEAR FINANCE REVIEW, CHECK OUT MY EPISODE ON A QUARTERLY NUMBER REVIEW FOR YOUR PERSONAL FINANCES!
Transcript for “HOW TO BEGIN A MIDYEAR FINANCE REVIEW”
Hi and welcome to Money Files. I’m Keina Newell from Wealth Over Now, I work every day 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.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Money Files. I just want to thank you for listening wherever you are tuning in from. If you’re listening to me in the morning, the afternoon, I know some of you listen to me at the gym. I just thank you for putting me in your ears to help you reshape how you think about your finances. And I also want to let you know that I have one-to-one coaching spots open right now in my five-month coaching partnership. So if you just found me, I have people that find me on Google or Yelp or Instagram or you’ve been referred to me because someone else has worked with me and you’ve been thinking about like I want to work with Keina, I want to let you know that right now I have one-to-one coaching spots open in my five month coaching partnership. And so what that looks like is we get to spend five months working together and we have 45-minute coaching calls three times a month but we really get to dive into your individual numbers and I will help you create a budget.
I will help you actually know where your money is going and most of all, you are going to be able to experience clarity with where your money is going. You’re going to have that peace of mind about where your money is going and money isn’t going to be the thing keeping you up at night. I mean so many of my clients have just told me how many times they were up at night thinking about their finances or they’re even checking to make sure that their paycheck has hit their account. And so we were really able to get them out of that paycheck to paycheck cycle and just being able to have the confidence that they always have the money available for what they want to spend on. So if you are ready to change how you view money, to change your relationship with your finances, I would invite you to apply to work with me.
I have some consoles open before the end of June and so if you apply to work with me in June, we can get you on my calendar for July or even August, whatever your schedule looks like. And we’ll be able to coach really for about the rest of the year. And so if you are one of those people that like, I’m going to get my finances together this year or in 2024, now is the time to do it because you are going to experience summer differently. You’re going to experience your holidays differently. The next time you get a bonus or you get a big paycheck or invoice in your business, you are going to actually be able to manage that money with ease. So you can go to the link in the show notes or you can just go to www.wealthovernow.com/appointment and you can grab a time on my calendar and I look forward to meeting you and spending an hour with you and really talking about what it is that you want to shift financially.
So speaking of money, as I do every week on the podcast, I want to actually talk to you guys about reviewing your finances in terms of a mid-year review. So we’re six months into the year, I’m recording this in June of 2023, so we’re about six months in. And I feel like when we’re in January, everyone is really excited about New Year’s resolutions and they have intentions that they’ve set and money is oftentimes in that conversation. But also money is something that can also easily be lost. And when I say lost, I mean the focus on what you’re doing can go by the wayside. You’ve set those goals and intentions but you kind of run out of gas and you haven’t paid attention to what you actually said that you intended to do or on the flip side of that, maybe you actually are doing what you said you wanted to do, but I just want to encourage you to take an opportunity to block out 30 minutes on your calendar and be like, okay, let me actually review my numbers for the year.
And this is a great opportunity to do some celebrations for what has shifted for you, to also set intentions for what you want to accomplish in the next part of the year. And then also take some quick actions for things that you’re like, oh yeah, I said that I was going to cancel that subscription to my Hulu, but I haven’t actually canceled it. So I’m always as a coach thinking about how do we have some forward momentum and actually do the things that we said that we desire to do when it comes to our finances. So the first thing I want you to do is during your midyear review, I want you to really think about the goals that you set for this year. And so maybe you’re listening to me and you’re like, Keina, I didn’t actually set any goals. I’m going to give you some different ways to think about this. I want you to think about what financials goals did I say out loud or did I put on paper?
So if you’re like me, you probably have a notebook somewhere where you’re like, oh, I’m going to write down what I want to accomplish for the year. And so maybe if you are that type of thinker and that type of individual, just recapture what those goals are that you set for this year, you can think about this in your personal finances. You can even think about your business finances coming into here. I know that I set a goal of creating 50 K months this year. And so that’s a goal that I set out loud and I actually wrote down. And so just thinking about what goals, like I said that you set out loud, what did you put on paper? Maybe you had a goal to pay off your credit card debt. Maybe you had a goal to save $10,000. Write that down. Then I also want you to capture what goals or financial results have been living in your head.
So maybe you’re someone who you’re like Keina, I didn’t actually write down goals on paper, but that’s okay. You are not being criticized for not putting anything down on paper, but I want you to take the time right now to write down what’s been living in your head. I think it’s good to be able to actually do this at incremental points in the year because you can look back and see what intentions you set and what intentional shifts you wanted to make with your money and then you can actually chart a course forward. And that’s one of the things I do in my five month coaching partnership is to help people think about what they said they wanted to accomplish and then we make decisions from there. So that question is like what’s been living in your head? And then the third thing I want you to think about your goals for this year is I want you to think about what feels most important right now. And a lot of things can change.
I have clients that get pregnant, I have clients that move, I have clients that lose jobs, I have clients that quit their jobs and so there can be a difference in between the goals that you set at the beginning of the year and maybe what feels most important right now. And once again, this is just to do a brain dump of some of the things that you said you wanted to accomplish this year. And the goal of this is to really kind of get a big picture of where you desire to be financially because you’re talking about the goals that you have. For me, I want to hit $50,000 months. And so with that being true, I’m going to be able to think about that in my midyear review and how if I’m on track, what’s getting in the way of that? I can actually analyze that for myself. So when you’re thinking about your goals and you’re thinking about this big picture, you can just leave those on the paper.
And in leaving those on the paper, what I want you to do after you think about your goals is to be able to ask yourself like, am I on track? What progress have I made towards the goals that I’ve set? What am I celebrating about my goals? I want you to identify what you are doing right, what you’re most proud of and I don’t want you to use this as an opportunity to judge yourself about the things that you haven’t hit. I want you to use this as an opportunity to think about like here’s the mindset shifts that I’ve noticed or I’ve started having money dates, I’ve closed more sales calls in Q1 and Q2 of this year. So I know that was one of my things that I was celebrating when I was actually looking at my numbers is that my sales call conversion has gone up. And the reason that that’s important when I think about my financial goals is I know how to create $50,000 months, especially when I feel like I have control of my sales call conversion.
So that’s one of the things that I would celebrate if I was thinking about what I’m most proud of when I think about my financial progress this year, even though your brain might not want to see those two as being connected. They like for me are very, very connected. So the first part of this midyear review is really just about you taking the opportunity to get clear on your goals that you set for this year and then really being able to think about what you’re celebrating, whether or not you are on track and being able to identify the progress that you’ve made. In my five month coaching partnership, I have clients at the beginning of our relationship together, we set goals for the next six months, the next year, the next five years, and when they’re 80 years old. And I actually was just talking to my client, Ellie, which if you haven’t listened to her podcast, you should because we talk about getting out of the paycheck to paycheck cycle. But Ellie was actually reflecting on the fact that she said when we started working together, that in a year she wanted to make$130,000.
And she actually accomplished that goal about a month and a half ago, although she had that as a goal from a year from now, she’s like now able to reflect on the fact that she’s made progress towards that goal. And one of the things that she also reflected on and the last call that we just had is that she didn’t even have maxing out her 401K on her radar, but that was actually something that she was able to do by way of us working together. So just giving you an example of like, for my clients, what this looks like is they actually have the tangible exercise that we’ve done and so they’re able to actually go back and be like, oh, here’s what I’ve accomplished since I set these goals. And so now they’re able to think about what do they want to accomplish in the next six months?
What do they want to accomplish in the next year? So after you actually look at your goals and actually think about like what you’re most proud of, the next part that you can do is to actually think about what do I want to accomplish in the next six months? So that’s why we’re doing a mid-year review because you’re going to be able to actually shift and think about how you want to actually tweak your goals. Like what do you want to push the gas on? Or like maybe where do you want to take your foot off the gas pedal? And so being able to think about what do you actually want to create in the next six months? So the next six months really thinking about where do you want to be in December of 2023? So that’s the first part of the midyear review.
The second part of this midyear review is I want you to actually think about quick actions. Keina, what are quick actions? And I’m just really thinking about what are the quick actions you can take to make progress and tangible things that you can do. And one of the things that I love to do annually is to make sure that I’m auditing my budget. I do this on my business side, I do it on the personal side, but going through and auditing my budget, looking at my expenses and going through and being like, okay, what expenses do I want to keep? What expenses do I want to revisit? What expenses do I want to cancel? Sometimes we have expenses in our budget, whether it’s business or it’s personal, and those expenses have just always been there. We’ve never reconsidered them. I had a client the other day tell me that she didn’t want to go through the process of canceling one of her subscription because it just felt like a waste of time.
And I was like, alright, let’s just say this subscription’s $5, that’s $60 a year over the course of five years that’s $300 that you’ve donated to that organization. Do you want to donate that money to the organization? If you do, I just want one, want you to say it out loud. And two, thinking about that $500 can also be pushing another goal that you have to be able to have money for family when they want to borrow money for you or you want to be able to invest in different things that they want to be able to do. So really think about that trade off. And so that’s I think the importance of going through and thinking about what do you want to keep revisit and cancel. If you’re like me, I’m thinking about I have a Canvas subscription right now that I paid for. I know I’m going to go and cancel it in my business because I’m just not using the benefits of that subscription right now. And so it’s like $10 a month, it’s “not a lot of money,” but I can be using that money somewhere else in my business.
The next quick action you can be thinking about is like, what have you learned about your spending this year? And so actually my client, Ellie and I, again, we were talking this week about and excuse me if you can hear any banging because they are actually demoing my kitchen floor right now and I am hidden away in my room. But if you are thinking about, we were thinking about Ellie’s clothing budget for instance, and she was saying one of the things that I’m noticing is I like to buy like clothes seasonally. And so we were talking about how she’s learned this in the last like five months about herself is that she wants to be able to have money available to buy summer clothes or to buy winter clothes as the seasons drastically change.
And so I said, well, one of the things you might want to consider is that you actually save more money towards those things each month and you put it in a separate bank account. So then that way you have a savings account that’s for those seasonal hauls and you feel like you have the money available to buy. And then the next thing you can do also at the midyear review is like look at your medical expenses. This might seem really odd, but I think this is where people also get caught up. It’s like looking at your copays. Do you have anything happening with dental? What’s happening with your health insurance? And this is just being able to prepare you so that when it comes time to reelect your healthcare options, you’re going to be more informed about how much money you want to put in your HSA, how much money you want to put in your FSA or which health plan or medical plan you actually want to enroll in because you’re going to have thought about your expenses in advance at this midyear point.
And also I think midyear is another good time to have it on your calendar to call and make sure that you’re getting the best cell phone plan to make sure you’ve negotiated your auto insurance, your internet, your home insurance, even like my alarm goes up periodically, my alarm subscription. And so I call about it to make sure that they don’t make my alarm prices go up. But like those little minor things are just like something you can put on your calendar to do midyear or even annually and quick actions that you can take because it’s just a part of you being informed and aware of your expenses. And then lastly, another quick action you can take is to check in on where you are with some of your short-term savings goals. And so when I think about that, I think about if we’re in June right now, like are you already preparing for the holidays? Like when I think about from November to like that first week in January, have you already started to prepare financially for those things?
How much money do you have saved? How much money do you want to have saved by December? And adjust your budget accordingly. Do you need to revisit your vacation fund or how you’re thinking about trips? And so this is how you can be thinking about your numbers at this point in the year. And I would also say birthdays would be included in that. So you can look at where you are and being able to adjust and not waiting for that moment when that birthday’s in front of you or the trips in front of you. I spoke with someone the other day who was telling me like, one of their friends is turning 50 and so what does that mean? And so we’re talking about like you could do a 50th birthday fund, right? Because you know that your friends are going to be turning 50 in the next four to five years and that can be something that you want to plan for longer term.
So I have enjoyed talking to you today and I just wanted to give you that encouragement to look at your numbers and do a midyear review. And once again, if you are looking for a shift in your relationship with money and you want to be able to spend money drama free and with ease, I would encourage you to apply to work with me at www.wealthovernow.com/appointment and have a great week. Bye.
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.
