A listener asked me a question that I know has crossed your mind too, especially if your birthday is coming up or you are someone who loves to celebrate. The question was this: Keina, how do I treat myself for my birthday while also honoring my financial goals? And I love this question because it gets to something I think about a lot, which is that treating yourself and being intentional with your money are not two opposing things. You just need a framework for how to do both at the same time.
Before you book anything or buy anything, I want you to get clear on what treating yourself actually means to you. Not what social media is telling you it should look like, not what your friends are doing for their birthdays, but what you actually want to feel when it is all over.
In this episode I am walking you through a four part framework for thinking about your birthday and how to make a decision about celebrating yourself that you can actually feel good about, both in the moment and when you look at your bank account afterward. I also share how to start planning for your next treat right now so that the next time your birthday comes around, the money is already there and the guilt is not.
In this episode you’ll learn…
[00:04:20] How to define what treating yourself actually means for you
[00:08:45] How to build a menu of treat yourself options so you have real choices
[00:18:15] What to do if your birthday is this week and you do not have a plan yet
[00:22:40] How to plan for your next treat by creating a dedicated treat yourself savings fund
Tune in to this episode of Money Files to learn how to treat yourself for your birthday in a way that feels really good and still honors the financial goals you have set for yourself in this season of your life.
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 episode on the financial tripod and finally understanding what budgeting is actually about, check out Episode 157 | The Power of Micro Habits for Financial Success
Transcript for “How to Treat Yourself for Your Birthday Without Derailing Your Financial Goals ”
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 this podcast to be a response to a listener question. And the question that was asked is like, Keina, how can I treat myself for my birthday while also honoring my financial goals? And this listener is like, I know that you’re always asking, like where’s that money coming from? So I wanted to tackle this question because if this listener has a question, I am sure that you may also have the question too, or it has come up for you. I feel like it can have a lot of different flavors, especially if you are someone who likes to celebrate.
So I want to first think about what does it mean to actually treat yourself? When you say that, I want you to define, and I think we would all have different definitions, but what does it mean to actually treat yourself? When you say I want to treat myself, what’s the feeling that you’re trying to create? What’s the outcome that you want? And being able to get clear on what that means for you. Knowing what treating yourself means for you, I think is going to help you with the next portion. For me, treating myself, when I think about treating myself, I usually want something that would feel like relaxing and rejuvenating. I’m not really a big materialistic person, so I don’t necessarily want stuff.
I’m not your girl that’s buying shoes. I’m not your girl that’s buying bags. My friends have shoes and bags, but that’s just not something that I’m interested in. So if I were talking about treating myself, it would really be, I am going more on like, I want an experience. I want to make sure that at the end of the experience, I want to feel relaxed. I want to feel rejuvenated. I don’t necessarily want just the dopamine hit of the joy of getting something new. So for yourself, defining what does treating myself actually mean? What thoughts do I even have about treating myself? And I think this is a place just for you to be honest so that once again, you can filter through what your next steps are.
This is not a, you must do this and you must not do this type of podcast episode, but it’s really an opportunity for you to have some agency on how you like to spend money. I am really, really big on just because you spend money in a particular way and you’ve spent money in a particular way for the last three decades, four decades, two decades, however many decades you’ve been alive. Just because you’ve always spent money in a certain way, doesn’t mean that you have to continue to spend money in the same way. So this is an opportunity for you just to get to know more about yourself.
So you’ve defined what it means to treat yourself. Because we’re talking about a birthday here from this listener. I would then say like, I want you to make a list or you can even think about it as a menu of options that would make you feel like I have been celebrated. I have been loved. What is on my treat yourself list? Like what are all the things that have come up? As it’s been leading up to your birthday you’ve been thinking like, Ooh, I’m going to get these headphones because my birthday’s coming up or I’m going to book this spa date because my birthday’s coming up, but just create an exhaustive list.
Maybe things that might come up for you is like, yeah, I do want some new shoes or I want a new purse or I want a necklace. Maybe I want all of those things. Or it could be I want to take myself on a shopping spree or I want to take a weekend trip out of town, or maybe I want to stay at a really nice hotel that just opened up and I want to do a staycation or maybe it’s a bed and breakfast. Maybe I want to go to a chef’s dinner and I want to sit at the chef’s table or I’m thinking about a spa day. But what are the things that are coming up for you that would be on your list of things that would make you feel loved?
And I went loved celebrated. If love is not the right word, find the word that’s right for you. But when I think about in particular birthday, you want to come out of this birthday and you want to say like, Oh my goodness, I had the most amazing birthday and here’s what made it amazing. And maybe it could have been things that other people did for you, but in this case I’m thinking about what you want to do for yourself, so make that list. What’s your menu of options? And I want to focus on options because right now you haven’t done anything. And this is where you get to have choice.
And I think choice is very important because choice is going to give you once again, financial agency. Financial agency for you to think about what is it that I always do? What is it that I have thought about, that in the moment it sounded really good, but now that I’m walking myself through this moment, that maybe I actually don’t want to do that. Maybe I thought about a spa day, but when I think about the spas in my town, they’re actually not that great. So I don’t want to go on a spa day or maybe I have a spa day that’s already booked out, two months from now. And so I could forego a spa day for my birthday because there would be something else that would make this day feel more special, more appropriate for me. So that would be the next thing.
The next thing that I would ask you to think about is when you look at this list, when you look at this menu of options that you have given yourself, what on the list, what on the menu is the best for this season of your life, given your budget and your financial goals? So this one might be a little bit harder. Maybe you’re looking at your list and you really want to take a trip to Bali. Like that would make you like, no Keina, like I want to go to Bali or I want to go to Hawaii. I want to go to Turks and Caicos. I don’t know what it is for you, or I want a really nice piece of jewelry. Like this was the birthday that I told myself I was going to get this nice piece of jewelry.
That might be true. And I want you to ask yourself the question, very sobering question of which one of the things on my list or my menu of options is the best for this season of my life, given my budget and my goals? This is where you get to treat yourself and you get to honor the financial season that you’re in. So depending on, maybe you have a goal to save some money because maybe you want to buy a house, or maybe you’re looking to buy a car. Maybe you have a goal to pay down your debt because you want some more flexibility in your cashflow.
So keep those things in mind because some of the things on your list, like if you have a trip to Turks and Caicos, as one of the things that you want to do, then you might say like, that is something that sounds so relaxing. I would love to do it. But in this season of my life, it doesn’t align with my budget and my goals. It’s not that I can’t do it, but it means that I might delay my goal of being able to buy a car, or it would delay my goal of being able to buy the house. So I could best use that money in a different way. So I’m going to choose something else. And so maybe I’m going to choose to go to a hotel and have a really nice stay-cation. And I’m going to spend $500 versus spending $5,000 on a trip.
So it’s being able to understand and talk to yourself about what those trade-offs are. And if you’re listening to this and you’re like, Keina, $5,000 and $500 are two very different numbers. I would agree with you. But the reason I’m talking it out is because I work with a lot of clients that they don’t actually talk numbers out in their head. They talk numbers out in a way that they justify them. And they can make anything work based off of the amount of money that they have in their bank account or the availability they have on their credit card, but they’re not actually talking about numbers and reconfiguring or realigning their numbers based off of what they’re saying is important for them right now.
So when we are talking about treating ourselves like, yes, we want to think about how we want to feel. I want you to choose something that you really want, but then I also want that choice that you make. I want you to experience the joy while also being able to experience the joy of honoring your budget and your financial goals in the current season, because they are both equally important. And the reason I am calling it a season is because your financial seasons will always change. There will be ebbs and flows in your financial seasons.
And so, like I said, maybe it means that you can’t take the $5,000 trip, but you can do the $500 staycation. And if you knew that if I take the $500 trip this year, but next year I can take the $5,000 vacation, is that worth it for you? If you also get to move towards the other financial goals you have set for yourself. It’s bringing in a different level of financial maturity. It’s bringing in a different level of financial awareness in what you actually want to do for yourself. It’s being able to know that it’s okay to tell someone, well, I didn’t actually go on that birthday trip that I wanted to go on this year because it’s not the thing that I’m valuing right now, but next year I’m definitely going on the trip.
That is an accomplishment to be able to say that to yourself or to be able to say it to someone else. But oftentimes we think that saying no to ourselves or not right now to ourselves means something about whether or not we’ve actually made it. If we’ve arrived, especially given you being a six figure earner or you being a multiple six figure earner, your flexibility around getting what you want is much more focused on you being able to have the thing and not having to experience any type of delayed gratification. And I think this is even more dangerous in the current environment that we live in, where you can see everyone doing all the things when you look at social media.
And so they’re telling you, honestly, they’re telling you how to celebrate your birthday. So that’s why I think it’s so important, like I said, for you to be able to make this list and to be able to go with the things that you know you’re going to be excited about and not feel like you have that middle school, high school pressure where you got to come back to school and be like, Oh yeah, I did. I went to Paris and I went to Australia this summer. We were in Sydney. Like you don’t have to come back and have all these grand wins. So that’s number three in terms of thinking about what’s best for this season of your life and what fits with your budget and your goals.
Now I want to be really clear. If you are a month away from your birthday, this week is your birthday even. And you haven’t actually made a budget plan. I need you to actually know how am I going to afford the thing that I want for my birthday? So I need you to know what money am I setting aside to actually make sure that I get to take this birthday trip. I need you to state your trade-offs. Maybe for some of you, it looks like I’m going to forego putting the $500 I said that I was going to put in my savings account this month but being able to say that out loud. Or maybe it means on the flip side of that, I’m taking $500 from my savings account, my emergency fund, and I’m going to fund my birthday.
Or maybe it means I’m not putting extra money towards my credit card this month, that I am making a conscious decision to use this to fund my treat yourself gift. Because those are the actual trade-offs that you’re making. If you can honestly say like, Keina I don’t have a budget and I really don’t have a plan, which that’s okay. I’m giving you permission to say that because I do want you to have that level of honesty with yourself.
And then lastly, you have this list where you wanted to treat yourself. I want you to plan for your next treat. Maybe in six months from now, you pick something else off this list and you can celebrate your half birthday. You can just celebrate, like, listen, I made a plan and six months from now, I want to be able to do this thing. But when I talk about you planning for your next treat, I am thinking about you physically setting money aside because your desire to treat yourself is probably not something that’s new. It is an expense that we can plan for like every other expense. And you’ve probably seen yourself when you look at the last 12 months where you have wanted to treat yourself.
So you could make a savings account that is literally just your treat yourself fund, where you’re like, okay, I’m going to put aside a hundred dollars a month into my treat myself fund. And I have $1,200 that I get to spend every single year on just treating myself. When I want to spend something that maybe doesn’t fit beautifully in how I said, I wanted to spend my money this year or my treat myself fund is for my annual, Keina day. That is my annual year, my annual new year. Like that’s what my $1,200 is for, because that is going to help you have less guilt about wanting to spend money on yourself. It is also going to help clarify from your list, from your menu of options. What do you have cashflow available for?
I had a client, she’s on my podcast, we worked together a couple of years ago. And she loved like for her birthday, she wanted to be popping bottles. She wanted to be on somebody’s yacht. She wanted water involved. I am thinking about one of my other clients, even for her birthday, I think it was last year she turned 40 and she was like, Keina, I want to be able to take a trip, like travel was her thing. And we built those things into the plan. So not only addressing how do I want to treat myself right now, but I also want you to address how can I treat myself in the future so that whatever decision that you make from your list of options that you created, you’re going to choose one right now. But then you can start working towards the one that maybe sounded really good that you’re like, okay, based off of what Keina said in this podcast, maybe I shouldn’t spend $2,000 on that necklace that I wanted, but I know I want that necklace so I’m treating myself to that necklace next year.
And then you start putting away if your budget allows, I’m putting aside basically almost $200 a month so I can buy that $2,000 necklace next year this time. You see how I’m wanting you to think through this treat yourself. So I just thought that it would be fun to record an episode that just directly answered like a user question or a listener question, because I think these are things that other people are thinking and you’re just not sure like, okay, well, how do you address that? How should I go about thinking about this? And so I just wanted to give you a little flavor of a different piece of content.
So if you are in a place where you are getting ready to treat yourself because it is your birthday, I want to tell you happy birthday. And if you are listening to my podcast, you’ve been an avid podcast listener and you’re like, Keina girl, I need your help. I want to encourage you to apply to work with me. You can go to wealthovernow.com/appointment, or you can go to my show notes and you can apply to work with me there. And until next time I will talk to you later. Bye.
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.
