As a coach, I love presenting new thoughts and ideas about money to my clients. In this episode, I am joined by a friend and fellow money coach, Jess. Jess helps business owners manage their time and money. Together, we share our personal journeys that led us to become money coaches and our motivations to help women gain control of their finances.
In addition, Jess and I compare notes on common challenges our clients face when overcoming shame about money. We discuss why people hesitate to ask for help from a coach and advise on habits to build wealth now. We know that it can be scary and intimidating to enlist help with your finances. As coaches, we help release shame and worry around money conversations by looking at and understanding your numbers. Remember, no matter how much you make, a healthy financial mindset starts by learning what your money does for you.
Tune in and listen to us discuss money as coaches. I hope you gain insight into how to talk about money differently and get answers to questions about coaching that may have been holding you back from starting the process.
While listening to this episode, consider these questions…
[00:11:00] There is no guidebook to personal finances so wherever you’re starting and whatever questions you have, or haven’t asked yourself don’t use it against yourself. Start where you’re at and then start asking yourself those questions now.
[00:13:25] What are those personal finance things that people should be considering and thinking about when they’re just trying to make decisions for their basic lives, if they want to grow their income or their wealth.
[00:16:45] The questions to be asking yourself are – What is my money going to do for me and can it currently? What is the next best thing that I need to learn about my finances or that I want to do this month?
Tune in to this episode of Money Files and listen to two money coaches discuss how to overcome fear and shame about money.
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 2023’S BIGGEST QUESTION: WHY DO YOU WANT TO BE RICH?, CHECK OUT MY EPISODE ON SETTING, REACHING, & EXCEEDING YOUR FINANCIAL GOALS!
Transcript for “Join the Money Conversation With Keina and Jess”
Keina: 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.
Keina: Hi, and welcome back to another episode of Money Files. So I am actually sharing an episode that I recorded with my friend Jess. She is a business owner and she used to be a happiness scientist and now she coaches business owners on time and money. So we both coach on money, we both coach business owners. I also coach clients that work in nine to five. But we decided, she reached out to me, she decided to be fun, to just have a conversation about money as money coaches and to really be thinking about what are some of the trends we see with our clients. What are some of the habits that they have? And so I hope that you find this conversation to be insightful. I also want you to know that as you listen to this, you too can be talking about money in a different way.
You can be talking to someone whether they’re in your circle or outside of your circle about money. Money conversations don’t have to just be about how much debt you’re in or how much you saved or how much money you make. I want you to know money conversations, you can start talking about what’s the cost of daycare? I’m getting ready to have a baby, or I’m looking to buy my first home. What are the lessons that you would’ve liked to have known when you bought a home? Or what’s the advice you would’ve given yourself 10 years ago when it comes to managing your finances?
As a coach one of the things that I love doing is presenting you with new thoughts and new ideas that shake up your current beliefs around money. But before you tune into this episode, I also want you to know on Wednesday, March 22nd at 12:30 PM Eastern Standard Time, I am going to be doing a special money class called How to Budget Without Restriction. And so before you get into this episode, I want you to go to the show notes and I want you to join me for that money class because as a six figure earner, as a business owner or someone who’s still in the corporate world, I want you to have confidence managing your finances. And I want you to have peace of mind and I want you to have a new relationship with your money. So you can go to the show notes, you could also go to www.wealthovernow.com/masterclass. And I look forward to seeing you and giving you an exclusive opportunity to work with me in my one-to-one coaching partnership. So enjoy this episode and I will chat with you guys next week.
Jess: Do your people call you themselves? Anything?
Keina: No. I don’t have anything. No, they don’t call themselves anything that I know of. The only metric that I have is like some people that get on a console with me will say like, I’m a Keina lurker, which someone deems that they’ve been like lurking on social media.
Jess: That’s a big thing. So tell us why people lurk you because I would say it’s the same thing. People are kind of probably even scared to engage with our content because what do they think is going to happen?
Keina: Well I think it’s like raising your hand to say you have a problem. And so you don’t want to self-identify as the person that has the problem. There are so many things about money that are shameful and I don’t know what you say to your people, but I will joke with people on consults, and I’ve said this in my content as well, that it’s going to feel like you’re showing me your underwear drawer. Like I think everyone can relate to that where you’re like, no, no, no, don’t look at those. I’ve had those since high school. But look at these. I just got them.
Jess: I love it. It’s true. I mean I haven’t used that analogy, but what I do always say is that there is nothing that you cannot show me that will shock me because truly, and we talked about this a little bit before we pressed record. It’s this phenomenon where everybody thinks that they’re the special snowflake that has this issue with money or has this lack of understanding. And probably most of it is coming from the fact that financial literacy is not really taught to us at all unless you go on to be a finance major. And even if you do, there’s no such thing as a personal finance major.
Keina: I was going to say being a finance major, which I have a background in finance, like according to the University of Tulsa, that doesn’t help you manage your money well. So I learned the time value of money.
Jess: Yeah. So tell me. I’m pretty sure, so for those of you listening, Keina and I, we met in a mastermind. We both are coaches and we both coach on money. I also coach business owners on time and on their CEO Mind drama. But Keina really is like all things money, all things personal finance. So tell me, if people are coming to you, what are you guys specifically working on together? If they’re raising their hand, they finally identify themselves as the Keina lurker.
Keina: It’s me. So I work with professional women and solopreneurs around money. And I mean I know that we do the same thing, but I think the people that are coming to me self-identify with the fact that they’re making more money than they’ve ever made before, but yet they don’t feel more ease or they don’t feel more in control. So they’ve been making more money because that’s what we’re told, like make more money. And so you assume that if you’re making six figures, then your life is going to be better than making $30,000 a year, which in some ways like life is better, but when they’re specifically thinking about spending money, they have thoughts about spending money. If they’re thinking about looking at their savings, like they have thoughts about how much money they do or don’t have saved or they have thoughts about their debt. And then I also have a unique little branch in there as well. Like some people come from family money and they also have thoughts about it. So it’s all centered around thoughts about money.
Jess: Yeah. And so before we even dive into what we help our clients with, it’s like can you tell me what was your journey to having all these healthy thoughts about money? Because I think mine was very odd and unique how I ended up being someone who coaches on money and I always think, I wonder how we landed here. Did you always have good money thoughts?
Keina: I feel like I learned how to manage money early on. Like I think about college, I was rich by the way in college I made $300 a month for work study. And I had student loans out the Lazo so I was very wealthy, but I felt like I was managing money at that time and it was like, oh I need to pay to get my hair done. I needed to pay like for my cell phone. So it was a small amount of money that I was managing. But then like I said, I have a major in business and finance or management and finance and I actually signed up for Teach for America my senior year of college and I was like interviewing for grad school because I was going to get an MBA, like all of this to say I was destined to be wealthy. But then I decided to do Teach for America and turned down a job that was making, I think I was going to make $55,000 a year coming out of college with a job in oil and gas that I accepted. And then when I accepted the Teach for America offer, I was making like $30,000 a year. And so like that’s when I started having a budget conversation literally with this guy that’s recruiting me. I was like, tell me how I’m supposed to live.
Jess: $30,000, where were you moving to for Teach for America?
Keina: I was moving to St. Louis but I knew I had student loans and at the time you think like nobody would actually give you money in a loan form if you couldn’t afford to pay it back. That would be responsible.
Jess: That’s what you think.
Keina: That’s what I thought. Yes. The misconception there. So me focusing on money really came from wanting to do something. Like Teach for America for me was really about, like, passion and wanting to help people. In this particular case it was like helping students but not feeling. It was like, okay, but how can I do this if I don’t feel like I’m making enough money? So I needed to know. At that time I was like, I need to know if the numbers work. Like can I afford to pay rent? Can I save any money? Like I was asking myself those questions at 21, 22.
Jess: Ahead of the game. Yeah, I know it seems so basic for those of us who are, like, more seasoned in asking ourselves high quality questions about money. But I know people that come to me that are in their thirties or forties even and they have not yet asked myself the question of is my income or is what I am making in my entrepreneurial pursuits enough to support? Or what would I have to earn in order to support my expenses? And they don’t even know what their expenses are at a basic.
And it’s like, it’s the most important question to ask. For me also working with professionals, like, have a nine to five, I encounter people that they’re like, Keina, I got a raise. And I’m like, okay, how much was it? And they come back and tell me $5,000, which I’m not knocking the $5,000 but I’m like, do you know the purpose of that $5,000 in your life? Do you know that they’re going to tax it? So really you’re only getting like $2,500 spread out over the course of the year. So really you’re getting about a hundred extra dollars a month. And so there’s like a misalignment for a lot of the people that I work with because they don’t know their numbers and they’re scared to budget because budgeting is a dirty word and what ends up happening is they sometimes put themselves in a position where they’re under earning or they overestimate what additional income can or cannot do in their current financial circumstance.
Jess: Yeah. And I think that, so for those of you who are listening who are like, oh God, and you’re feeling that like underwear shame that we are talking about where you’re like, oh my gosh, I haven’t asked myself this question yet. I don’t even know. Don’t worry. Like there is no guidebook as we said to personal finances. So wherever you’re starting and whatever questions you have or have not asked yourself, don’t use it against yourself. Start where you’re at and start asking yourself these questions now if now is the time.
Keina: When I was asking myself that question at 21, 22, I just want to frame like the example which in that case I was making, I chose to go for making $55,000 a year. Like that was a solid offer to making $30,000 a year. And so sometimes it’s not always about making more money, but I just wanted to be knowledgeable. So I want people to, when we’re talking about the question, like I don’t even know the question that we framed.
Jess: What are your expenses or is my income enough to support my lifestyle really is the question?
Keina: What does this money do for me? Like it’s just being curious in that space because by asking that question, I knew what I could afford or not afford to do. And I didn’t want money to be the thing that held me back from leaning into something that I felt like was purposeful, which I think is another value of a lot of my clients is they have really strong community family values and so they want the freedom and flexibility to be able to make choices that feel good like when we talk about value. So I also don’t want people to ask that question and hear like, oh my God, I always need to be like making more money. But I just want you to feel in control because the decision could be we’re going down to a one income household and that could feel good to you, but if you know your numbers, you know exactly how that’s going to work.
Jess: Yeah, that is a really great example because I think I know a couple of people that are going through that right now where they’re making decisions. Either they’re moving to a new city where one person has gotten the job and the other person hasn’t gotten the job yet and they’re like, does it make sense? When do I need to have a job buy or maybe they’re having another kid and at what point does it not make sense to send two children to daycare for your income? Do you know those numbers? Do you understand it? Ultimately it’s a math problem. But there are several factors like there’s an X variable, a Y variable. So what are those things that people listening basic personal finance should be considering and thinking about when they’re just trying to make decisions for their basic lives if they want to grow their income, their wealth rather.
Keina: And you probably just scared a lot of people by using X and Y variable. I was a math teacher and I’m always like, you’re not allowed to tell me that you’re not good at math. It has nothing like, yes it’s math but it’s not math. Like everybody that’s listening to this, you are equipped with the two plus two equals four skills that you need. It’s more so that you need support with managing your thoughts and your emotions around the money. So don’t let Jess scare you with her algebra that she described.
Jess: You know what, it’s so funny because I’m actually teaching my son who’s six years old. I’m teaching my son some basic things about money and he knows literally up to 10 addition and subtraction and he’s starting to get some of this stuff. So you’re right, when I’m saying it I’m thinking, oh, my son’s not scared by this. So people shouldn’t, but I think there is that thought. You said managing your thoughts, there’s this thought that I’m in my thirties or I’m in my forties or I’m in my fifties, I should know a lot, whatever that means. And so just pretend you have the basic understanding of a kindergartner of math that is enough to understand what we’re going to be talking about today. So you’re right. Thank you for saying that.
Keina: And I also tell people like imagine that where you are right now, that you have created the best results with like what you know. So just like being able I think to allow people to release shame because there’s a lot of like shoulding that people do. Like I should have more money saved, I shouldn’t be in debt. And so when you’re constantly going around and you’re talking to yourself in that way, then it’s just digging you deeper into like putting your head into the sand and ignoring it. That’s why when you were asking about Keina Lurkers, like your shame is digging you further and further into the hole because you’re also worried about what are all the things that I’m going to have to give up? And if you just consider that where you are right now, you’re perfectly fine. You’re perfectly whole. You’re perfectly okay. You don’t need to do complicating math. You can only go forward from where you currently are.
Jess: Yeah. It’s good news. I mean what I was saying and I think I have such a healthy relationship with the word math that you’re right, it’s like so not triggering to me. And I do think because I work with entrepreneurs, like a lot of them maybe have a more healthy than the average human being relationship with that word. But really why I think it just makes everything simpler is because I think that it’s actually scarier when we think that we need to be very well-adjusted human beings, either in order to get our money stuff together. It’s like no, we just need a couple of basic things. Understood. And I think the questions here to be asking ourself, we said what is my money going to do for me? What do I want it to do for me and can it currently and what’s kind of like the next best thing that I need to learn or that I want to do this month? So do you work with people trying to set them up for a year for a month in habit form? Kind of tell us what.
Keina: Yeah, so with clients I always start like in the opening session with them. I get them to think about where they want their life to be in different increments of time. And so I actually ask them to think about what kind of life they want when they’re 80 years old, push them out far because I don’t think we pay attention to that version of ourselves. And then I asked them to think about like, well what does that mean six months from now, what do you want to be true? A year from now, five years from now? And so when I’m helping them build a spending plan, which is what I call it, then we’re tackling the things that they talked about.
And some of them are financially related in the sense that they may have a concrete goal like I want to pay off my credit card. Or they may have, another goal that’s like I want to get married in five years. So like we’re even able to insert into our conversations, what does that look like as your money changes from year to year, what conversations would you want to be having with partners? So back to asking questions, we ask a lot of questions to get them to think differently about their money.
Jess: Yeah. And so one of the things that we talked about right in the beginning and then we kind of got away from it was like, as you make more money, let’s say you’re a business owner and you are kind of figuring out the earnings part where you have a product or a service and people are starting to buy or starting to get things rolling there. What is this phenomenon that we see where as people grow their income they’re still feeling that same exact discomfort? What is that about? Like what do we see the most that continues to happen as people make more money that’s kind of keeping them in the same financial mindset?
Keina: I’m curious on your thoughts first.
Jess: Yeah. So what I see happening is that we’re sold this thought that if I just make more money I can outearn my scarcity thoughts. And we said the thoughts and feelings are really at the core of it. And if you believe I don’t have enough money, I need more of it. That thought that has no bottom to it. It’s like a bottomless pit and we just need to earn and earn and earn. And the other thing is, is that when we’re operating in our day-to-day based on I don’t have enough, that feeling of not enoughness often causes us to want to spend in order to feel better. We want to spend because we think the spending more money is going to make us feel more enough, is going to make us feel more whatever we were looking for when we desired to earn more money.
And so I think it’s what we said all the time is that there’s no difference actually between the money habits necessarily of someone who earns more money or earns $30,000 or who earns $300,000. And we’ve seen it firsthand behind the scenes of people who figured out the earnings part. But they’re just like, why isn’t this getting better? What’s happening? How do I solve for this? So having a spending budget sounds unsexy, but what I say to my clients is there’s something that happens where my clients think I don’t want to experience deprivation. If I can’t spend on this, I won’t have as much fun or I won’t have as much pleasure or as much joy. And what I am watching happen for them is actually the things that they’re buying are not causing them joy. What they’re experiencing is a lot of stress, a lot of overwhelm, lack of control really.
They don’t feel like they have control over their life because they’re spending and then they’re in this situation where they’re like, I need to keep making more money. So if you’re listening to this and you identify with that, I would just ask yourself, can we rewrite our thoughts about control and about joy and pleasure? Does joy and pleasure come actually from you spending on these things consistently? Or is there a deeper wellbeing that comes from feeling like you can trust yourself and know when you want to spend and when you don’t want to spend? Does that make sense? Or do you see that with your clients?
Keina: I definitely do. I wrote down a couple of notes because the last part you said is like people as they’re earning more money, I think it goes back to the first question that we were asking, which is like, what will my finances right now currently allow me to do? And I think the fundamental breakdown for a lot of people is like there’s a gap in understanding for like the lifestyle that they desire to have and how much that costs. And they may actually have enough but they haven’t actually like mapped it out. Like I always tell people when I think about budgeting, I think about it in terms of expansion. So like if generational wealth is the goal, it can start with writing the numbers down. If peace of mind is the goal, it starts with writing the numbers down because I think the habits that people have at $30,000, $40,000, whatever is under six figures is like, well let me just pay the bills and then I hope I have something left.
And a lot of people I think also identify when they’re making like what seems like not enough. They were good at managing their money. So they’ve also built the thought that a budget is only for when I need to manage money to like make my ends meet versus being able to see that like I can like plan out my numbers so I can also do all of these other things because I have been bold and asked for more money. Like I have invested in myself or I have raised my prices in my business, whatever that is. And being able to know that as a byproduct of that how I manage my money, I have access to all of these other pieces. So I think like one, there’s a gap in understanding. I also think that people don’t realize that lifestyle creep is real and as you make more you’re like ooh.
And even just thinking, like I told you I was rich in college with $300 a month. And then as you get older you’re like oh I want to buy a house. Oh I have a car payment. So there’s like also new things coming up and some of them are actually needs and then some of them are wants. But when you aren’t actually assessing what’s happening in your life and you’re just going for like whatever that offer amount is from your job or whatever you think your goal is in your business, you’re just kind of blindly chasing money because you’re not actually sitting down and looking at the facts. Because like you were saying, those scarcity thoughts where you’re attaching that like well I make a million dollars a year so I shouldn’t have to budget. I make $300,000 a year I shouldn’t have to budget and I deserve this YSL bag. But you can have all of those things and have peace of mind if you just sit down and look at your notes.
Jess: Yeah. Right. And that’s where it came back to. I was saying it’s just about doing the math but it’s really just about looking at your numbers and understanding and just making some decisions ahead of time about where you want to spend your money. And let’s just talk about, since we do have entrepreneurs that our clients, let’s talk about paying ourselves a salary versus owner draws because I know this must be something that you teach your clients how to do because this is one of the most consistent things that I see. Like those people that reach multiple six figures are six figures pretty quickly in their business really struggle with, where it’s like you said too, it’s like ooh, I’m making all this money and it just kind of, you want to just take it from your business and put it into your account and there’s no understanding of how do I get it consistently?
How do I actually treat my business like a business? How do I treat my income as if I were an employee of my own business? And shifting to that mindset. As you see people trying to solve for their finances with owner draws all the time or like the thoughts that they can make more going back to this like I can make more money. Like if I have $10,000 a month, I’m like yeah, that doesn’t mean anything. First off, if you’re lucky you get to take home like $3,000. I feel like when people get into business they don’t think about the financial piece of it. I also don’t think there’s a lot of good like resources to help people think about, like it sounds really sexy to leave your job until you realize oh I need to pay for insurance. Oh 401k.
Like the total value proposition of when you work with an employer versus being your own employee of your business. I’m like dang, you know like even in my business I’m like wealth over now you got money, Keina, I mean you got some money but like wealth over now is really the one that has the money. So being able to like understand all of those pieces. And I was saying that because when we’re talking about salary or owner’s draw, that if you really understand what you want to do with a dollar that comes into your business and like for me, I teach clients to do, for consistency purposes. Like regardless of it’s a dollar or $2 or $3, I still want you to manage it in the same way.
And so for my clients, I don’t know what you do with yours, but I help them look at their trends, let’s actually see what’s happening, what’s been happening annually, what’s been happening the last six months and let’s see how much your business can actually afford to pay you and keep other things in your business alive. But then we also, I also want them to know their personal numbers because I’m like how much do you need to be paid? So it’s not just about how much your business brings in. I feel like there are a couple of different moving pieces at the same time.
Jess: Yeah, absolutely. I think for me, like you said, the key piece that you said was consistency and when you can just build a habit of paying yourself the same amount, it actually matters less what you’re paying yourself at first. And it matters more to me that they can see that they can pay themselves, even if it’s $500 a paycheck every time consistently. Instead of being like, okay, I’m going to pay myself a thousand dollars a paycheck or $2,000 a paycheck and then next week, oh I can’t do that so I’m not going to pay myself at all. And then, you know what I mean? I think it’s more important that we build up this habit of consistently paying ourselves so that you don’t have that entrepreneur roller coaster.
The entrepreneur roller coaster as I define it is this experience of I just had a 10K month yolo, let’s owner draw. When I say owner draw, for those of you listening, it’s just essentially when you take money from your business and you just transfer it from your business account to your personal account, but it’s not in that consistent way that it was a planned expense for your business of paying yourself a salary and you’re just kind of taking it as you want it and as you need it.
Keina: When your personal bank account is low, generally speaking.
Jess: Personal bank account is low. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so if you know that your paying yourself, even if it’s just $500 or $250, depending on where you’re starting. Let’s say $500 a week, you’re paying yourself then you understand okay, I’m going to be making $2,000 this month in my personal business, my personal account, my personal expenses need to live with that. So you’re not going to let yourself get down to what the amount or the situation where you need to pull from your business account. You just don’t give that an option. Like imagine as if you were a corporate employee and you were like, oh, my personal account is low, can I just like get a forward on my paycheck?
Keina: People do ask that.
Jess: They do but I would say a lot less regularly than an entrepreneur asks for it from themselves. So anyway, I think that when I am looking at an entrepreneur and I’m saying, hey, it’s time for you to hire a money coach. Like what are the telltale signs that it’s like the perfect time to start thinking about money because I think a lot of my clients think that the time is when they’re starting earning six figures. But that’s not true. What are the things for you that you say that they’re going to get out of it?
Keina: My clients self-identified business owners when they’re in that like feast or famine. So when they’re noticing the trend of like, I’m making more money but I’m not experiencing more control or I think another telltale sign is like, these taxes came out of nowhere. I’m like, no honey, they didn’t, you knew you had to pay taxes. You didn’t have a plan for it. And so I think those are generally the things that bring business owner to me because they are describing themselves in that feas famine cycle or the taxes have kind of caught them off guard and they can look and see like, I make way too much money for this to be happening.
Jess: Yeah, I agree. I think that if you’re an entrepreneur listening, how you know that it’s the time is if you want more peace of mind and control with your money, it doesn’t really matter how much money you are earning. It matters that you have an understanding of what you’re going to do as your business grows. And there’s not a better time than now to get an handle on your personal finances. Especially as if you have a lot of control over where that money is coming from. If you’re in the habit of pulling money from your business. Listen, if you’re going into the farming industry and you are like a really hungry person, you would make sure that you understood how to let your crops grow before you just ripped them out of the ground for your dinner that night. And so Keina and I are here to support you. I am so glad that we got to have this conversation. I always feel like there are too many things to talk about when it comes to money and maybe next time we have this conversation we just like bring a client along for the ride that can just ask us questions because I’m always like, what do the people want to know?
Keina: I was like, what do the people want to know? I feel like they want to know where to start, but I also know that we’re wrapping up so we’re not going to go down that. But I feel like just to a stamp that I would say if you were looking at starting is just looking at what you want to spend money on. Even like how you spent money this week and thinking about like do you agree with how you spent money this week? And then also taking some time to celebrate what you’re doing well.
Jess: Yeah, my producer I think has a question for us. What do you want to know, Christine?
Christine: Thank you. What are three habits to build that I could start adapting to build wealth now?
Jess: Okay, do we want to tag team this? What are you thinking?
Keina: I mean I think the first one I would say starting right now is contributing to your retirement. So as a business owner setting up, like talking to your accountant, talking to a financial advisor, getting a step IRA or solo 401K set up. And I think it’s just, it’s as similar as paying yourself consistently. Like just contributing some amount and once you start to actually know like, oh yeah, I am going to pay my future self, that amount will increase over time, but just creating that habit right now.
Jess: Yeah, that’s so good because that’s going to contribute to your personal finances growth over time. And the second one that I would say is that habit of consistency of paying yourself a salary even if it’s super, super low. If you are not yet paying yourself consistently the same amount, even if you have to start with a hundred dollars a week, do that and build up that habit. Because what that’s going to do, it’s not only going to contribute to a consistent growth of your personal account, but it’s also going to build up that respect for your business as a separate entity and respect for your businesses money separate from your money.
And then as you do have those higher months, as you do see that the trends are going upward and you are making more and more money, you can make the decision to give yourself a raise. I’m making that decision in advance. I made it at the beginning of this year that I’m going to give myself a raise in June. Could I do it right now? Probably. But I don’t want to have a situation where I end up having to be like, oh, can’t do it this month, or I’m not going to do it this month. Or I’m putting my business in a kind of uneasy situation. I want to make sure that I’ve built up the reserves enough to where giving myself a raise just makes absolute sense. So that would be number two for you, paying yourself consistently a salary.
Keina: I think I would go back to saving money and I would also say like save money in your business and save money on the personal side. Like just making that a habit because that’s going to give you that freedom. Like on the personal side, like let’s talk business finances and just business ownership. Like there could be a lola in your business, but when you have that savings, whether on the personal side or the business side, it’s going to give you comfort because you’ve prepared in advance. So just making sure you’re not neglecting that area of your life. I think there are a lot of financial gurus that are like pay off debt pay and I’m like, do both at the same time. If you’re like in that position because the saving money is also going to prevent you from getting into more
debt.
Christine: Absolutely. Yeah. And it will help you out with those situations. Now a reserve or saving money is not the same thing as saving money for taxes. There are taxes, there’s that specific budget and then there’s just what I call a line item because we use a specific way of budgeting a line item for reserves. And for me, like that would look like I have a money-back guarantee. So I haven’t had anyone ever ask for a refund, but if someone does, where’s that going to come from? Like I want to make sure that I have the reserves in order to afford any unexpected business expense that might come up. So good, yeah, I think those are a good three places to start.
Jess: I love it. And if you’re kind of ready to have a more in-depth conversation, if you have some objections that you’re like, but wait, my special snowflake situation, it’s probably time for you to set up a consult. Have a consult with Keina and me, who knows? We are probably slightly different approaches and slightly different vibes. And I think it’s important for you to find a coach you really vibe with because we know that at the end of the day we’re helping you both with the same exact problem. And we want women especially to have this be a norm for them. I think men just have more access to conversations about money, this conversation that’s happening between two three because if you guys can’t see my producers in the background listening to this conversation, it is important that women are having these conversations.
Men, you know, my brother had access to these conversations, my grandfather and my dad in ways that I really wasn’t spoken to about it. So the more you can even just, even if you’re not ready to hire, the more you can just have these conversations, ask these questions will help you feel more comfortable, which will ultimately help you lean into and make better decisions in your money.
Keina: Yeah. I’m a big proponent of like money conversations and money conversations don’t have to be about like, how much debt are you in? How much money do you make? How much are you saving? Like even having a conversation about, yeah, like home ownership. Like if that’s something on your radar, like being able to talk to a close friend that maybe bought a house in the last few years or whatever that looks like or we were talking about your kids earlier. Like even thinking about childcare costs. Like there’s so many little micro money conversations that I just encourage people to have because it allows you to learn from other people and maybe your family didn’t talk about money or they’re not even comfortable talking about money.
I think that’s another reason to engage with a coach because you have someone that is open to having these money conversations with you. And then you can use like, you can use coworkers, you can use your peer circle to also just engage in money conversations and build up your confidence and how comfortable you feel talking about finances.
Jess: Absolutely. I think that’s a really great lesson to leave people with. Alright, you guys, if you want to have these conversations, we’re going to drop the links to our consults in the show notes. It’s very casual conversation. Again, don’t worry, we’re not going to show your underwear to the world. There’s nothing we haven’t seen. And also in many cases I didn’t really even explain, but I have been in this situation where I had no money, I had debt, I had bad habits, all the things. So we’re here to support you. Alright, talk to you later guys.
Keina: Bye. Thank you.
Keina: 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.
