We are halfway through 2024, and it’s time to reflect on the financial goals and intentions you set in January. Whether you are crushing your money goals or need a financial reset, getting crystal clear on your numbers is essential. It is never too late to regain control of your finances!
Between school breaks, vacations, and beautiful weather, it is easy to lose track of your finances in the summer. So, let this episode be your sign to pause and evaluate the progress you’ve made so far this year.
In today’s episode, I give you questions to jumpstart a mid-year financial reflection, celebrate wins, acknowledge surprise expenses, and create a plan to hit your money goals in 2024. Tune in and follow my framework for a practical six-month financial evaluation.
Stay tuned for insights on these topics:
- [01:39] Breaking financial goals into habits
- [03:29] Reflecting on progress of 2024 financial goals
- [06:42] What’s going well?
- [09:20] Surprise expenses
- [12:09] What do you want to do differently?
- [13:29] Other money goals to check on
Tune into this episode of Money Files to jumpstart a mid-year reflection on your financial goals for 2024.
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 about Mid Year Financial Check-in: Breaking Money Goals into Habits, check out my episode on a quarterly number review for your personal finances!
Transcript for “Mid Year Financial Check-in: Breaking Money Goals into Habits”
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 and congratulations on making it through six months of 2024. I cannot believe we are halfway done with this year and I’m sure that whatever intentions you set in January, I’m curious if you remember what intentions those were, what you thought you wanted to do this year. I know that the new year can come with a lot of energy and then you get into the middle of it and the summer is here, the heat is here, the humidity is here and you are looking around like wait, hold on, what are all the things that I said I wanted to do this year? And so I want you to take today as a place to basically like take a dipstick of where you are financially. I think that even myself included, we can get so caught up with the day-to-day that we can lose sight of maybe some big goals that we have.
One of the things that I’ve been really into in my life right now is thinking about how can I break things down into a habit? Habits that felt really sustainable. Goals are, like, really, really big. But when I think about habits, you know you’re coloring in a dot every single day or five days out of the week, out of seven so that results in some type of consistency for you. If you followed me for any amount of time, you know that one of the habits that I’m in love with is going to the gym first thing in the morning. I generally go at 5:00 AM. I’ve been going a little bit later because my gym buddy has been doing a different workout. So I sleep in a little bit later, but I’ve been going to the gym. I’ve had this habit now for over or about a year and a half.
And so it is one of the habits that I love the most. Another habit that I’m working on for my nutrition is putting veggies on my plate. And so I’m building some habits in my business in regards to how I desire to show up for you guys, how I want to show up for myself. And I’ve been doing work around becoming a 500k earner. So there are so many things that for me I’m trying to align with this habit focus and we have a big vision or we have a why, but I’ve been asking myself but what are the habits? Who are you keno when you become this person? And what habits does that person have? So I would just offer that to you. I don’t know where you are with your goals this year, whether financial, personal or professional, but really just thinking about if I can maintain one habit, like what is the habit that I want to be able to do day in and day out that will make me feel like I can actually have a touch point and some amount of accountability to it for myself and for the goal that I want to reach.
So just to dive into today’s episode, I want us to take some time to reflect on where we are at this point of the year. Maybe you came into this year and you wanted to get a new job because you wanted to get a raise or you wanted to make sure that you paid down debt or maybe your goal is to save $10,000 this year. I don’t know what it is. But I want you, I think this episode is going to be best done with a notebook in front of you or if you are an electronic person, I’ll open up the notes tab on your phone or a Google doc, whatever that may look like for you. And I want you to think about what are the big goals that you set this year or what are some of the things you told yourself that you wanted to do financially and just dump all of that out. And I want to let you know that as you’re dumping this out, do not monitor your writing.
Nobody’s going to look at this. This is not a grade. I don’t want you to judge yourself based off of what you said you wanted to do or what you have or haven’t done. And so I know that for myself I have to be really mindful of what are the goals that I said I wanted to achieve or the intentions that I set. Because sometimes, like I said, just in the day-to-day, you can kind of forget about what’s the thing that you’re actually working towards. I was actually doing this exercise for my business and I realized that at the beginning of the year I told myself I want to have consistent 40K months and I ended quarter one, I made a hundred thousand dollars. And then it’s like I lost sight of that goal and it’s just one of those things where I’m like, oh, where have I moved that needle for myself just because I haven’t been checking in on it? So that’s why I want you to write that goal or whatever your financial goals are out on paper because once again I think we can lose sight and whether or not you’ve achieved the goal or not achieved the financial goal that you’re writing down, just putting them back in front of you is going to hopefully reignite something within you to be like, okay, how do I build some habits around that? Or how do I make space on my calendar.
If I said that I wanted a new job? What are the habits around me getting a new job? How does that mean that I show up day to day? How does that mean that I show up on a weekly basis? And you can ask yourself some of those questions. And transparently, I wasn’t even going to come into this episode really talking about habits, but as I’m talking to you right now, habits have been something that I have focused on for myself and they’ve been transformational in different areas of my life. So I’m always asking what can I do to translate one area of success to another area in my life? So if you’ve never read the book Atomic Habits, I think that is a phenomenal book. I have it on Audible and it’s one just to easily, you can listen to it while you’re folding laundry and just being able to think about how can I apply the things that James Clear is talking about to my current circumstance and what I’m wanting to create in my life right now.
So you have now taken the time to really dump out your financial goals and what you said you wanted to achieve this year. And now I want to take you through an additional reflection. And the first question I want you to answer in relation to where you are financially is what’s going well and just braindump like all of the things like what have you accomplished, what are the things that if last year’s version of you could see you right now, what are they excited about when it comes to where you are financially? So just take some time and write down what those wins are for you and what’s going well. It’s actually a practice that I have with clients every single time that I meet with them. And it’s so funny because clients look at me and they’re like, I know you’re going to ask me this question and I haven’t thought about it but I’m always like, hey, what are your wins?
Because if you don’t stop and look for wins, you will just blow right past them. I do this all the time. Actually my nutrition coach, one of the check-in questions that’s always on the check-in form that we do weekly is she ask, like, what’s a non-scale victory? Because people are so obsessed with the scale going down and so she wants you to have or to name a win that has nothing to do with the scale going down. So I want you to also be thinking about that with your finances. Maybe you haven’t cleared all of the debt, maybe you haven’t saved a thousand dollars yet or $3,000 yet or maybe you’re still getting the hang of budgeting. You’ve been listening to my podcast and you’ve implemented some of the feedback. But even in the midst of you paying down debt, learning how to save, learning how to budget, you can still have wins.
Your wins might be you have taken your credit cards and unlinked them from all of your shopping apps. That could be a win for you because of the fact that now it takes you an extra day or two to actually make a purchase because you’re not pulling out your credit card and actually putting it into the app and you don’t have that accessibility of the app or the credit card being linked into everything. So that could be a huge win for you, especially if you’re someone who finds yourself impulsively shopping or maybe another win might be that you’ve started to talk about money with your partner or a win could be that you started a conversation with your boss about a promotion in the next quarter or in the next six months, whatever that might look like for you.
Maybe you’ve like Keina, I’m listening to Money Files every single week and I’ve started to have money dates with myself, because you talked about it and I want to be someone who looks at my numbers. So I’ve committed to looking at my numbers for 15 minutes every single week. You could have a plethora of wins and I want you to know that these wins are going to help you create the ultimate results that you desire to create. Whether that’s paying off debt, earning more money, saving more money, being someone who just feels more calm about looking at their bank account, could be a plethora of things.
The next question I want you to ask yourself and to answer is, in the last six months from January until the end of June, what expenses have caught you by surprise? So maybe like what hasn’t gone well, maybe you forgot that you have a car and you feel like, oh my goodness, I remember in April I had to get my car fixed and I hadn’t really thought about the fact that I was going to have to get my car fixed. That could be something that caught you by surprise or maybe you had to help your family a lot in the last six months and that expense caught you by surprise or you had some housework done and the plumber has been at your house, I don’t know, every month since March. And those expenses have caught you by surprise. But I want you to take the time to really reflect on where you came in with a plan this year and then even despite your plan, you felt caught off guard or you got caught by surprise when it came to your expenses.
And the reason I want you to think about this is because as you plan the next six months, those patterns and the things that were happening in the first six months of the year, you now have the ability to start planning for those things in the last six months of the year. And even the car, the plumber, all of those things are things that you can plan for. And the reason I’m telling you to plan for them is like if you have a car, you are going to have some type of auto maintenance. You may not know what it is, you may not know exactly how much it is, but if you can take the things that have caught you by surprise and start putting them into your financial plan, the next time that an expense like that comes up, you are going to feel prepared.
It may be that you have to pay $500 to get two tires fixed, but if you already have $300 in the bank for auto repair, you’re now only talking about a $200 difference and that is going to feel much different in your body. You are not going to feel as anxious if you already know that you save a hundred dollars a month towards auto maintenance. If you have to put the $200 on a credit card, you know that for the next two months you can pay a hundred dollars towards that credit card and get that paid off. And so those are the things that I want you to be learning and to be thinking about from the expenses that have caught you by surprise this year. And maybe you didn’t prepare even for tax prep season and maybe you owed money on taxes or maybe you just forgot that you pay your tax preparer. Those are all things that you can think about in the next six months to a year. How do I make sure I prepare for those so I don’t feel like I’m caught by surprise?
The third question I want you to ask yourself is what do I want to do differently in the last six months of 2024? So when you think about how you’ve spent money this year, I want you to write yourself a note and I want you to write it as though you are in December of this year. And I want you to think about what are the things that you’re celebrating, what have you shifted from the beginning of July until December? And that’s going to be a letter to yourself basically where you’re celebrating wins because there’s going to be things that have changed, but you’re also going to be naming for yourself what you’re doing differently. How are you managing your finances differently? How are you preparing for things that seemingly feel unplanned but you are paying attention to your own patterns? And so how has that made you more prepared and equipped to handle those situations?
So there are three questions you should have answered. What’s going well? So you’re celebrating. Do not skip over that. What caught you by surprise? So what financial expenses caught you by surprise? And then what do you want to do differently in the last six months of the year? So that is the basis of the six month evaluation that I want you to do or six month reflection that I want you to do. And I’m also going to give you some other quick hits you can do, especially mid-year. One of the things, if you’re a homeowner, I want you to just check in on where your mortgage account is in relation to your property taxes being paid and also your home insurance. These are things you don’t need to check all the time, but it’s good to have a baseline for where you are.
And when I say check into your escrow, you have your principal and interest that you pay and then some people may or may not have escrow. But generally what’s below that is that you also have property taxes that you pay into and you’re also paying for your home insurance because automatically your mortgage provider pays for them because they’re making you give them money in advance. But this is something good to check on because home insurance can increase year to year and property taxes increase year to year and sometimes your escrow could be enough to cover the increases, sometimes it’s not. But it’s important to know where are you in relation to how much you’ve already been charged for property taxes?
Where are you in relation to your home insurance increasing this last year or decreasing this last year? And the reason I want you to know that is because when they go and rebalance your account six months from now, three months from now, everybody’s on a different cycle. I don’t want you to be caught off guard if they tell you, we need to increase your mortgage by $200 every single month. If you’re paying attention to that right now, it’ll just be something good for you to have a pulse on. Your property taxes. You can actually, you can file an appeal if you don’t agree with how much they’ve gone up. You can also call and check on your home insurance and make sure that you’re getting the best value for your home insurance as well as that you have enough coverage given like inflation, etcetera, in the event that you needed to rebuild your home. So that’s one thing I want you to check on and just, it’s not an immediate thing that you need to do in terms of maybe shifting anything, but it’s something for you to be aware.
It’s also mid-year so I want you to check in on your holiday funds, holiday funds being from November to January. If you have zero holiday funds, I need you to ask yourself, am I really a $0 type of person. Am I really not going to spend any money over the holidays? I want you to be thinking about travel, I want you to be thinking about hosting, I want you to think about gift giving, all of those things. And so in thinking about that, you can assess for the next six months, how much do I need to be saving towards the holidays? If you are someone who has been siphoning off of your holiday fund account, it may be a good idea right now to be like, hey, cut that out because we want to make sure we actually have those funds for the end of the year.
And also look at your travel and birthday funds. As we go into summer, people are still traveling, birthday season is still here, you have six months left of the year. So really just looking at what travel do I have coming up? What birthdays do I have coming up? What do my travel and my birthday funds look like? What do I need to shift in my budget to make sure that I’m not going into debt to cover these things? And then check your credit report. Always good to have an annual credit report check just to make sure that you agree with the things that are on your credit report because sometimes there can be fraudulent charges. Somebody could have gotten, stolen your identity, any of those things. And so just this is a great time to go to Annualcreditreport.com and just check your credit report and making sure that you agree with everything that you see.
And the next thing is I want you to also reflect on your medical expenses for this year. I want you to reflect right now because at the end of the year there’s going to be open enrollment. I actually have an episode all about open enrollment, but I like people to be thinking about medical expenses. I like them to be thinking about copays. I want you to be thinking about dental work. If you are going to have a baby next year, like these are just great things to be walking yourself through and thinking about, okay, how much have I paid out in different copays and has my doctor told me that I need a root canal in the next six months or that I need a procedure in the next year?
And by asking yourself these questions, it’s going to prepare you for open enrollment season, not only one, to take advantage of your FSA contributions or your HSA contributions, but if you know that things are going to be changing for you, you can actually talk to your HR department, the benefits consultant and really go through like what is going to be the best plan based off of what your medical needs either have been in the last six months or what you see them being in the next year. So this is just a good midway checkpoint to kind of think about like have I spent a lot in medical this year or do I know that I have medical expenses coming up? And so this can help you prepare financially to just have it on your radar.
And then lastly, I am rooting for you and encouraging you to update your 401k contribution. So increase it by 1%. If you are not maxing out and meeting the maximum contribution limit of $23,000 this year, just bump up, go into your HR portal and increase your contributions by 1%. I promise you won’t miss it because you probably use that same money on a DoorDash meal, but your future self will thank you because you did that. While you’re checking on your 401k contributions also, just like look and make sure the money that I’m contributing to my 401k or my 403 B, is it actually invested in the market or is it sitting there in cash?
That’s another great thing to check. Hopefully you are invested in the market and you’re not just sitting there. Your money isn’t just sitting there in cash. I will say that companies will keep a little bit of it there in cash, but that’s just more of a safety net. So they can take advantage of different things that happen with the market, but you shouldn’t see thousands of dollars just sitting there in cash. So thank you so much for tuning in to just this mid-year. Check-in with yourself and if you found this episode helpful, share it with a friend. If you’re like Keina, oh my goodness, I’m going to tell you something, I love it when either people message me on Instagram or if you email me at keina@wealthovernow.com. I enjoy hearing from you.
But most importantly, if you know like Keina, I have been putting off, I don’t have a lot of wins to celebrate or the thing that I really want to have been working, I want to work towards this year, I haven’t made as much progress as I should have. I would encourage you to apply to work with me. We will work together for the remainder of 2024 and we’ll probably ease onto 2025 together as well. So you won’t be in the same place that you are in right now and you won’t have to put budgeting as a part of your New Year’s resolution. So it was great talking to you today and until next time 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.
