You’re saving money, but somehow you’re still always transferring money out of savings to cover expenses. That’s what I call the Dipper Identity. And if this is you, it’s not about willpower. It’s about your budget.
In this episode, I walk you through the sneaky cycle of dipping into savings and why it happens even when you’re doing “all the right things.” I break down the signs that fake math is running your money and the four steps you can take to finally break free. From budgeting beyond your bills to naming your savings accounts, I’ll show you how to stop feeling like life is constantly knocking you back.
If your savings account is a roller coaster instead of a steady climb, it’s time to reflect, reset, and rebuild a system that supports you.
Listen to learn how to move past the Dipper Identity and finally protect your savings…
[00:43] What it means to be a dipper
[03:01] Why this isn’t about discipline, it’s about your budget
[04:15] Signs fake math is running your financial life
[06:08] Step 1: Identify your last three dips
[08:44] Step 2: Budget beyond your bills
[10:23] Step 3: Separate your savings accounts
[12:49] Step 4: Use rolling savings for recurring expenses
[14:30] What real financial safety looks like
Tune in now and learn how to stop dipping into your savings and start building a budget that actually works.
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 this episode helped you recognize your Dipper Identity, make sure to check out Episode 182: From Leftover to Intentional: Transforming Your Savings Mindset and Episode 181: The Side Eye Fund—Your Path to Financial Freedom. Together, these episodes form a powerful series to help you reflect, reset, and rebuild a system that supports you.
Transcript for “The Dipper Identity: How to Break the Cycle of Dipping into Your Savings”
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 we’re still in the middle of our saver Identity series and today we’re talking about a very sneaky but common pattern that I see. And for this saver, I call you the dipper, not the big dipper, not the little dipper, but just the dipper. So the Dipper is someone who does save money. So you are doing the “right thing” and I’m putting this in air quotes and I am actually very proud of you. But there’s a problem. You end up going into the money that you saved to cover unexpected expenses and you keep doing it over and over again. So it’s kind of like in one of those board games where you take 10 steps forward, but then you got to go eight steps back. That’s what happens to you.
So you might move over $500 into your savings, but then you need to transfer $300 two weeks later. If that’s you, this episode is for you. Or maybe you’re even the person that you need to dip into your savings because you actually need to pay off your credit card balance. That’s another really common one that I see with a dipper. So we’re going to actually talk about what’s happening in this pattern that you have. I’m going to tell you why it’s actually not a failure and what you can do to protect your savings moving forward. So if you are my dipper, I know that you are doing your best, you’re saving money. You probably even like have your savings. You are like Keina, I’ve done the thing. I have set up automatic savings. They are transferred to a separate account. It’s in a high yield, like you check all the boxes, but you are also constantly putting out financial fires in your life. So even though you save, you are account balance never really grows.
It goes up and down. Like if I looked at a graph of your savings account, it would look like a roller coaster. It wouldn’t look like a diagonal line. We wouldn’t probably see this continuous trend up. We would see dips up and down and up and down. That’s how I know you’re a dipper. And so you just really feel like life just keeps happening. You can’t ever really get ahead. Every time you make progress, something throws you off. And what I see with my dippers is that they have a budgeting blind spot. This is not about discipline. I’m not worried about your discipline, I’m worried about your budget. And so you might not even have a budget if I’m really being honest with you. You just probably feel like you should be able to save the amount that you’re saving. But I know one thing to be true and it’s that you’re doing fake math.
You pay your bills, you’re really good at paying your bills. A lot of my clients are really good. You all have gold stars, I’m proud of you. But when you’re dipping into your savings regularly, it’s telling me that you don’t actually have a budget that reflects your actual life. It’s telling me that you have a budget or if you do have a budget, you have a budget that’s full of fake math because you should be able to have a savings account that grows if you are doing real math. Like that’s one of the ways we know that we’re doing real math is if our savings account is able to grow. I want to be very clear, it doesn’t mean that you won’t ever dip into your savings account, but it won’t continually feel like this thing that you’re dipping into beause you’re like, oh, here’s something else. And of course like we have savings because life happens, but life shouldn’t be happening to you every two weeks or every month.
Life shouldn’t be happening with that sort of cadence. And if life is happening with that sort of cadence, once again, fake math is happening with that sort of cadence. So what I see with my dippers is that you are planning for your bills, but you’re not planning for the things that you feel like are just coming up. Maybe it’s your annual car registration. So that might be something, especially if you put things on your credit card, it makes your credit card spike, maybe a last minute trip home. You are not planning for a weekend trip with friends. You are not planning and thinking about if you have kids, like how much you spend on birthday parties. You’re not planning for what it takes to go on a vacation. Like you haven’t actually thought about your vacation prep, you just thought about the flight to get to the location and maybe the hotels. You’re also not planning for when you give to your family. And some of like the more cultural things that I see that happen with money, you’re also not planning for your Amazon orders that like start with, oh, I just, needed some paper towels, but then all of a sudden it is, a $200 drop that’s on your credit card or coming into your bank account.
So what’s really happening is you are just not being honest with how you spend money. And that’s how I know that fake math is in your life. So if your real life doesn’t match your budget, then you’re going to continue to dip into your savings account. So that’s going to then make you feel like, oh my goodness, I’m not successful, I can’t save. Versus like, just imagine where you actually get real with what’s happening and then you can protect your savings and you can actually have money to spend on the things that you want to spend on. So I was actually talking to one of my clients and she feels like she can save a thousand dollars a month. So she came to me saving a thousand dollars a month, but also she came to me dipping into that savings to pay off her credit card at different times. Like sometimes she’d need to take $5,000 out, sometimes she would need to take like $3,000 out. She actually had over $20,000 saved when she came to work with me. So on paper, she’s doing a phenomenal job. She has money saved, she pays off her credit card each month, but even still she is a dipper.
And so I told her, I said, we need to be honest about what you’re actually spending money on because what’s happening is you have this goal, her goal is to have at least $30,000 saved in her emergency fund, but she’s not able to get to that $30,000 because with regularity, she is taking out money out of her account to pay off her credit card. And it’s not because she’s going on like lavish vacations or lavish trips, it’s that she’s not being honest about the amount of money she spends on her kids. Whether it is thinking about school trips, it’s thinking about swim lessons, it’s thinking about what happens in the summer when we need to pay for summer camp. And so we have all of these like hidden numbers that are causing her to go into her savings account, but they weren’t actually living anywhere when she thinks about her list of bills, because her list of bills is her mortgage, her list of bills is paying for gas, her groceries, but she wasn’t even considering like what do you do when you need to replace your breaks on your car.
And these things that she’s dipping into her savings account for, they’re not surprises and they’re not surprises for you either, if you’re listening and you’re like, oh my goodness, Keina, I can relate. These are actually real expenses that you need to make sure that you’re budgeting for. And so if you’re not making sure that you’re budgeting for them, then every month you’re going to end up dipping into your bank account, into your savings account and you’re not going to feel like you’re making progress with your savings. So with my client, once we actually named her like dipper her identity, we were able to refresh her budget to reflect her life so she can actually start seeing her savings grow. So we can be really honest about what are the things that you want to be able to do for your kids? When’s the last time you got your car repaired?
And instead of what I call, this aspirational savings, it sounds really cool to save a thousand dollars a month, but when you’re also having to dip into it, it’s actually not that exciting because you feel deflated every single time that you have to dip into it. So if this is you and you’re thinking like, okay, Keina, I get it, I’m a dipper, here’s what I want you to do to start protecting your savings. So the first thing I want you to do is I need you to think about, not even think I need you to write it down, what were your last three dips? Like, what were the last three reasons you went into your savings account? And I want you to ask yourself, what did you pull money out for? Was it really an emergency or just an unbudgeted expense? An emergency would be something like, I lost my job. Needing to pay for your kids summer school camp is not an emergency. That’s just something that you didn’t budget for. So those are two different things.
And step number two is I want you to start budgeting beyond your bills. So I need you to think about what are my real life expenses? What are the things that I enjoy doing? Nobody enjoys paying bills. That’s just something you do. But what are the things that you are doing that you enjoy, but also those hidden expenses that may make you roll your eyes because you’re an adult. But think about like your hair. You probably like getting that done, right? Or you like traveling, you like buying people gifts. If you have little kids, they have friends and every little friend party that they go to that’s $20. I need you to think about that. But I also want you to think about if you have a car, you are going to have to do maintenance on it. How much is that costing you a year? Like those are the things that have to go into the plan.
If you do some spontaneous spending. I love it when people are like, Keina, I don’t go to Costco that often. I only go every three months. I’m like, great. How much do you spend every three months, $500? I’m like, great, that needs to be in your budget because that $500 divided by three months, it’s a little less than $200 every single month. And so that’s going to impact your bank account when you go and spend $500 and it’s going to make you dip into your savings because you’re not really considering that quarterly you go to Costco and you spend $500 a month. So these aren’t bad expenses for you to have, they’re just unaccounted for. So I want you to think about how can I start accounting for these things.
And then number three, if you have your, this little bonus tip, if you have all of your savings going into like one account, I would encourage you to separate it out, especially if you’re doing the work with me right now and you’re like, okay, what are the things that I save for and I want to save for vacation and I want to save for birthdays, like name different accounts. If you want to put aside $50 a month for birthdays, $100 a month for Christmas, name that account and send the money over there because you are more likely to protect what that money is for. And then you can also just have a visual to see like, oh, okay, that $300, I don’t want to touch that because I have a plane ticket that I need to buy and it’s coming up. Or, oh, that money is for my side eye fund. And like that’s because Keina told me that I need to be able to roll my eyes at somebody one day. So I don’t want to touch that money, but I can touch this money, it’s okay for me to touch. But separating your account in that way can also take the pressure off of you having to dip into your savings account. Like if you have an auto maintenance fund, it’s okay to dip into that when you have auto maintenance that you need. If you have a medical fund, it’s okay to dip into your medical fund because that’s what it’s for.
And then number four, I want you to use rolling savings. So don’t just save a lump sum like plan for predictable recurring expenses by saving for them monthly, even if they only happen quarterly or yearly. It can be thinking about your car registration, your holiday spending. One of the ones that I think about a lot right now with clients is lawn care. I have a lot of clients that have homes and so they do a lawn cleanup or I have a client who’s talked about like, she needs to put gravel down in her driveway. And so like those are things that when they come back around, it could be easily $1,500, but that’s a really big expense when you haven’t been planning for it.
And I don’t know if you guys know this, but your paycheck is usually the same each month, and so many of your other spending habits are also the same. And so that’s why we want to make sure that we include that so we have the big picture of where your money is going from month to month. So if this is you, I need you to stop reacting and just start planning for the things that you know are coming up in your life. So if you are stuck in this dipper identity, I want you to hear this that you are not bad with money and you actually don’t need to try harder. I just want you to go back and create a budget that reflects your true and honest life. And this is exactly what I do in coaching. We take your bills and we take your lifestyle into account and then we build your savings with intention and we build it with clarity so that way you have money for what you want.
I know one of my clients, we were working together and she was like, Keina, I just love opening my savings accounts because I always feel safe because there’s just money here. And that is one of the best feelings to have, especially when you are able to shift from someone who never believed in being able to save money. And now you’re able to see like, oh, I actually do know how to save money and I don’t have to be stressed about my car having a flat on it or being stressed about my kids needing some equipment for the baseball team that they’re on because I’ve actually prepared for it and I took the time to think about this version of myself. So if you’re tired of this cycle and you’re ready to feel like your money is actually supporting you, I would invite you to apply to work with me. You can go to Wealthovernow.com, right at the top. It’ll say apply or book a call. And you can also go to my show notes and you can apply to work with me there. And then next week we’re going to be tackling another saver’s identity. So I look forward to talking to you. And until then, 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.
