Did you enter 2025 with big financial goals, only to find that your momentum faded by the end of Q1? Don’t worry—you’re not alone! In today’s episode, I’m sharing my Q1 reflections and how you can use this time to reset and reflect on your finances. Whether you’re feeling great about your money habits or realizing it’s time to adjust your approach, now’s the perfect moment to check-in.
I discuss the power of reflection in managing your money and the importance of building a relationship with your finances. I’ll walk you through how seasonal changes can affect your spending and how to avoid falling into the trap of “fake math” when it comes to social spending. I also share practical advice on how to repurpose your budget to match your real-life goals and expenses.
As we approach Q2, I challenge you to assess where your money has been going and make thoughtful adjustments. Your budget is a living document—it’s meant to grow with you and reflect your changing needs. So, take a moment to pause, reflect, and consider where your money is going this year. Let’s make Q2 the season of intentional spending!
Learn how to reflect on your Q1 finances and start planning for Q2…
- [02:54] The importance of reflecting on your Q1 spending & budget
- [06:18] Seasonal spending & fake math
- [08:45] Repurposing money to align with your lifestyle
- [16:27] How to treat you budget like a working document
Tune into this episode of Money Files to learn how to reflect on your Q1 spending and adjust your budget to align with how you want to spend money in Q2.
EXCLUSIVE BONUS CONTENT
Want more Money Files? Check out my private podcast series that covers four types of shame that keep you stuck when it comes to managing your finances. I give you systems to overcome the shame and make your money work for you. Download these exclusive podcast episodes here.
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 the discussion about reflecting on your Q1 spending, check out the episode, How to Align Your Budget with Your Financial Reality!
Transcript for “Resetting Your Finances: Q1 Reflections and Q2 Planning”
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. Before we dive in today and I tell you about like my Q1, quarter one Reflections, I actually want to tell you about a free private podcast series that I created just for you. So on this series, I walk you through four things that are keeping you stuck with your finances, especially as a high earner. And those four things are all related to shame. So in this private podcast series, I introduce you to four different types of shame that show up for you. They show up for me, they show up for my clients, and most importantly, I tell you how to create a system that’s going to work for you so you can move beyond these four types of shame.
So the four types of shames that you’ll be introduced to in this podcast series are spending shame, system shame, situational shame and stalling shame. In each podcast episode it’s maybe 10 to 15 minutes. I will let you know, I define shame for you and that specific type of shame and tell you how fake math shows up for you. You know I’m really big on fake math because fake math is the number one killer of all budgets. It is not you. It has nothing to do with the fact that you’re bad at math. It has nothing to do with the fact that in third grade your teacher said you didn’t know how to do fractions. None of those things are true. We just got to change our belief system around how we feel about money.
And this podcast series is really there to support you in developing the language for the thing that is keeping you stuck with your finances. And I can guarantee you it has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t want to stick to eating beans and rice. It has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t want to use cash and only use cash to manage purchases because I think in 2025, not a lot of people are using cash. Like those aren’t the reasons that you’re stuck with your money. So if you go to wealthovernow/money-shame, you can download that private podcast series or you can also just go to my show notes and you can grab that private podcast series for yourself. So enjoy and let me know what resonates with you in that podcast series.
If you enjoy it, I would love for you to share it with someone else in your life because what you all don’t know is your friends are going through the same thing with their finances. I feel like I have to talk to my friends all the time and they’re like, oh, but did you see that such and such did this? And I’m like, girl, they ain’t got no money either, they just out there spending because they trying to keep up with the Joneses. But let’s go ahead and let’s dive into today’s podcast episode. So I just wanted to share with you some of my quarter one reflections about money and just help you also have a time and a space to be able to think about your money as we go into the remainder of this year. If you are someone who you came into this year and you were like, oh my goodness, this is my year for my finances, and maybe you don’t have that same energy, that’s okay.
This is a great point to reflect. I think the best thing you can do with your finances is to constantly be reflective because it’s going to allow you to look for non-budget victories. It’s going to allow you to see what you want to change and what you want to adapt. I want you to basically have, when I say have a relationship with your money, I want you and your money to be able to talk to one another, literally, because your money, your bank accounts, they’re going to tell you what they need, they’re going to tell you about you, and you’re going to be able to change the things that you desire to change. I think one of the biggest reflections in thinking about changing your money and changing your relationship with money is sometimes those changes don’t happen overnight and they may not be as sexy as you want them to be.
If you listen to my podcast on like non-budget victories, I think that’s one of the most foundational pieces to this work. And your non-budget victories will change over time. In the beginning, they might just be like, Hey girl, you opened your bank account, like you haven’t done that consistently. And eventually that’s going to turn into, Hey girl, you paid off $10,000 or you saved $10,000. So just be along for the ride, be along for the journey and the process. I always remind myself that time is going to pass me by regardless. And so I want to be in control of how I use that time. So as I wrap up the first quarter of this year, I’ve been just doing some personal reflection and looking at how I’ve been spending money and looking at what shifted and also how I want to move forward in this next 90 days.
So looking at April, May, and June, and for me, I feel like January through March just tends to be a little bit quieter for me financially, just with the seasons. Like it’s colder outside, I’m staying in a little bit more, I’m like cooking at home. I’m a little bit more locked into my routines. So that just naturally helps my spending to also be lower and my environment is supporting my budget without me really doing too much adjusting. But now a spring is coming and it’s like, oh, the sun is out. The temperature is like, oh, I can wear like a sweatshirt with some shorts. It’s a nice day to sit outside. The sun is shining. Like I think we should be somewhere on a picnic blanket with a charcuterie board, like all of those kind of feelings come in. I know that my spending is going to change. So I’m just taking some intentional time to think about that.
I know I’m also going to have more opportunities to connect with my friends because nobody’s thinking about how many layers that they need to put on in order to come out and to visit or to be with you. So I know that I will say yes to more things socially, which is going to shift how I spend money. This is where I feel like I really have to watch out for fake math is in this seasonal spending. The temperature, literally seasonal, the temperature is heating up. So it’s the tendency here to often underestimate or ignore some of our behavior shifts over time. So when the weather heats up, I know that I am much more likely to go grab coffee with some of my friends because it’s like, oh, let’s go sit, you know, outside on the patio at the coffee shop down the street, or let’s go to happy hour because there’s a great little place with cheap drinks and we should catch up because we haven’t seen each other in a while because we’ve been inside all bundled up.
So just saying yes more often to social plans is going to cost me more money. If I’m not paying attention, then I can slip into this cycle where I’m spending reactively instead of spending intentionally. So that’s how fake math can creep in. And you get in a mode where you’re like, oh, it’s just one lunch, or I haven’t seen that person in a really long time, or I haven’t spent that much lately and I’m not actually like, am I actually checking in with the facts. As these warmer months come, it is really, really imperative that you are doing your money dates. It’s imperative that I am looking at my social calendar. And also like one of the things that I do is balancing. If I know I’m going to be meeting up with friends more often and my grocery shopping hopefully ticks down because the fact that I’m trying to also not to waste food, you know, buy that bag of spinach that you don’t really eat.
So one of the things I’m asking myself as I’m going into this season is like, where and how do I want my budget to turn into like a more outside focused budget. I really didn’t spend a ton on eating out in quarter one. I mean, I ate out a little bit, but not a ton. Some of that too was because I was locked in to my nutrition with my coach. So I was cooking a lot more at home. But once again, I know these opportunities are going to come up. So where do I need to potentially beef up my entertainment budget or even just beef up my eating out budget and also asking myself like, where do I want to repurpose money so that it matches my real life? One of the areas that came up for me as I was thinking about this is, I told you guys how I reworked my budget for 2025 and last year I was going to a workout class in addition to going to the gym in the mornings, don’t judge.
Working from home is probably one of the hardest things that I’ve ever done in life. It sounded really sexy, but it’s hard in the sense that I don’t have coworkers. So I talk to my clients all day and I talk to myself all day and my mom and my dad. So in doing that, I have to have a routine to get myself out of the house. It’s one of the reasons that I go to the gym in the morning. And last year I was also going to an evening class a couple of days a week. At the end of 2024 I scaled back on that and going into 2025, I was like, oh, I think I’m going to just buy a class pass and I can like take just some different classes and try different things around town. I haven’t done that. So it’s been three months. I haven’t bought a class pass. One of the reasons I didn’t buy the class pass is because one of my friends told me about a free hot yoga class that I’ve been going to on Sundays. So they have a community class, I go to this hot yoga class and it gives me an opportunity to get out, move my body.
One of my favorite things and ways to like spend money is to move my body. So I’m not using this a hundred dollars right now and it’s just been sitting in my budget. So I’ve been thinking about do I want to keep it there or do I want it to use it differently? So as I’m thinking about repurposing in my budget, some of the things that I’ve thought about is like I could put the money towards being able to have more money for experiences, especially as the weather heats up in DC. Like there are a lot of different classes that you can take, different entrepreneurs are putting it on, whether it’s like a pizza making class, a cocktail making class, a floral workshop or just like different events where you can meet different people. So I’ve been thinking like, maybe it’s going to go towards something like that. I know last year I met a new group of friends because I went to, a chef prepared dinner with a wine pairing. So that money could be used towards experiences like that, that I just enjoy. But I’ve also thought like I could use that same money to host more people at my house.
I’ve been hosting some people for like coworking days and like doing lunch at my house or doing a weekend brunch or just even saving that money because I also like to travel and I like to be able to take even just short like three to four day trips to be able to recharge and reconnect and get back into my work. So that’s, as I’m thinking about Q2, I’m thinking about my budget and what my real life is. Those are some of the things that I’m thinking about. So I also know that one of the things that I want to do more of this year, and I should say I want to do it more intentionally is travel. But here’s the truth guys, I haven’t actually mapped out the travel and so I have the flexibility of just being able to travel whenever I want. But I also think it’s a challenge because it makes it really easy to say yes without a plan and that’s where you can easily just overspend or it’s like, I’m doing things a little bit more like last minute than when I actually had a job and I had a very discreet like, Hey, you have spring break, you have Christmas break, you have Thanksgiving break.
For those of you who are wondering why I had spring break, it’s because I was in education and so I had very detailed times off and now I can just change my calendar and go wherever I want to go. But one of the things I did this last month was I actually took a trip and I went to the Smoky Mountains. I went from like a Sunday to a Thursday, rented a car, booked a flight, stayed in a hotel, like all of that. It was like a thousand bucks. And in being able to reflect on and I didn’t reflect retroactively on how much that cost me, I actually knew how much it cost before I went into it, like it’s a thousand dollars to go, like I live in DC, I went to the Smoky Mountains, those are in Tennessee. And that wasn’t necessarily, in my opinion, an expensive trip in the sense of like, I took a flight, I rented a car, I stayed in a hotel.
When clients tell me they’re taking a weekend trip and they tell me it’s not going to be that much, I’m like, what do you mean by not that much? Like if we actually do the math of it. So a thousand dollars may not “be that much,” but if you are doing that once a month, that’s $12,000 a month, or not a month, but $12,000 a year. So the reason I’m telling you about knowing how much that trip costed me in Q1 is because it helps also ground in the reality of saying like, how many of those little weekend trips do I want to do? Do I want to do those little weekend trips in exchange for like a bigger trip that might be 3 or $4,000? Like what’s kind of my expectation there? Because the reality, if I’m thinking about not using fake math and using real math is that, we’re not in 1995 anymore, gas isn’t 80 cents and hotels are not $100 a night, not the ones I’m staying at, at least.
So I want this to be your invitation to look back at your actual numbers for what you did in January, February, and March so that you can see like, what did things really cost when I paid for the things that I paid for? Especially if you did travel, like was it worth it? What do you want to adjust? What do you want to keep moving forward? Because it’s going to help you be more thoughtful as you’re planning for Q2. Even looking at Q3 and thinking like what do you want to say yes to? Because when I’m looking at, in Q2, I don’t necessarily have any plans to travel, I probably will go somewhere, but as Q3 comes up, I know that there are like two friends’ birthdays. I know in Q4 I’m going to go home again. Probably in Q2 I’ll go home as well. So just thinking about like when I go home, my expenses are pretty minimal. I pay for a flight home, but it still could be a 4 to $500 plane ticket.
So those numbers are pretty baked into my travel budget. It’s being able to say yes to the spontaneous things. So that’s where I’m thinking about where do I wan to repurpose some of the money in my budget to be able to say yes to some of the more spontaneous things. Because otherwise, like I said, that’s how you end up realizing in hindsight, wow, I spent $12,000 on travel because I took a lot of quick weekend trips and they weren’t that expensive, but you took 12 of them and they were a thousand dollars each and you weren’t honest with yourself about it. So it’s just about bringing that honesty to your budget and deciding like, is that how I want to spend my money? Or are there different ways that I can get some of those experiences without being out of $12,000 at the end of the year and having some type of spending shame about the fact that I spent $12,000.
So one of my core beliefs about budgeting is that your budget is, it’s really a working document. I think that’s the thing that I want you to hear the most in hearing me kind of be reflective about Q1. Like it should grow and evolve with you. And that’s where I’m building in moments to have these conversations with myself. Because whether these are monthly conversations or quarterly conversations, they give me a chance to be able to pause, reflect, and kind of listen to what my money’s telling me. And when you’re pausing and you’re reflecting and you’re listening to your money, it gives you that chance to actually not be reactive with your spending, but to actually be intentional with your planning. And that’s how we stop that cycle of spending and then having shame and scrambling and then trying to start over. And so, I’m a financial coach, but I still have some spending shame, especially when I realized like, I think one of my biggest things is when I realized that I’ve been ordering stuff offline and then I just realized, oh my goodness, how did all this stuff get to my house?
And usually what I realized is that I’ve been in an autopilot kind of mode and I may not be really well rested or connected with people. I think the biggest time that this happens is probably in the winter months where you feel a little bit more isolated. And then I’m having to do that like walk of shame to return things. And let me tell you, that walk is is growth because I’m definitely better about not keeping the stuff that I bought or just like buying because I see something on sale or just some of those things that you tell yourself, like I’ll figure it out later. But really just taking the time to pause and reflect and just remind myself like budgeting isn’t restrictive, it’s very freeing. It gives me the space to be honest. I can course correct and I can plan to like get myself back on track.
So your call for Q1 to Q2 is like, let your budget and let your life speak back to you. I want you to understand like what’s shifting for you seasonally, what’s shifting for you emotionally? How are your numbers actually reflecting your lifestyle? And really start to just develop this conversation with your finances. The next thing I want you to do is also decide like, where do I want to repurpose my money? Don’t just let things drift. Is there money in your budget that maybe it doesn’t serve you, doesn’t serve its original purpose? And where do you want to reassign it? Or maybe you find, in one area of your budget where maybe it’s over purposed in the sense that you keep overspending in that area. And so you need to intentionally look at how you’re spending and saying like, oh, I keep telling myself that this is going to get better next month, but it’s not getting better next month. So what do I need to shift? It could be something that’s a staple, like how much you spend on gas, it could be how much you’re spending on your utilities, but just being really honest as to what’s happening and thinking about where do I need to reassign money?
Use your past 90 days to plan your next 90. So look at your real spending. What did it cost you? What felt good? What needs to shift? And then most importantly, give yourself grace and structure. Like budgeting doesn’t have to be perfect. You just need to bring in honesty to your budgeting. Like your budget is a working document. And don’t let fake math lead you into a space where you’re taking on debt that you don’t even realize that you’re taking on. And now you’re regretting and you’re in that cycle of like, oh my goodness, here I am back in this debt cycle that I didn’t intend to be in. So if you want some additional support on this, I would definitely tell you, like earlier in that episode, I told you, listen to that five part podcast series on feeling stuck with your money, but also if you want to dive deeper into this, into a one-to-one container, you can apply to work with me in my five month coaching partnership. And this type of reflective work is also just what we do in the partnership so that way you feel like you have that sustainability with how you want to spend money.
I actually had a coaching conversation with a client this week and she’s telling me like, Hey Keina, my birthday’s coming up and I want to spend $2,000. I love that she’s able to bring that into our coaching container because we can figure that out and she’s being honest. So with that honesty, we can start to work on what are those numbers, what does that look like? And planning out her birthday celebration so that when she’s through her birthday, she’s not being walloped by this level of shame and waking up and realizing, dang, I spent $2,000 and I didn’t have a plan for it. So thank you so much for tuning in and I look forward to talking to you next week. 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.
