Today’s podcast episode is a cross-replay of my conversation with my friend and client, Lindsay Dotzlaf. Lindsay is a coach specializing in empowering other coaches to enhance their effectiveness and make a more significant impact.
Tune in as Lindsay shares her personal journey of working with me as her financial coach and the profound transformation her mindset has undergone in managing her finances. We also discuss Lindsay’s newfound passion for budgeting and how to make a budget work for your unique lifestyle. I hope you enjoy our conversation and gain valuable insights into the experience of partnering with a money coach.
Hot topics discussed in this episode include:
[12:20] How working with Keina shifted Lindsay’s money mindset
[22:45] Balancing debt vs. investing vs. savings as a business owner
[27:40] Budgets are about awareness
[30:03] Keina’s top financial tips for business owners
[40:00] Lindsay’s experience and learnings from working with Keina
[53:40] Thinking about educating the next generation about managing money
[01:04:01] Managing money as a couple
Tune into this episode of Money Files to learn what it’s like to work with and how to fall in love with budgeting!
If you’re ready to improve your relationship with money and start making moves towards your financial goals, apply to work with me so we can create a plan to get you there.
IF YOU LOVED THIS CONVERSATION ON SHIFTING YOUR BUDGETING MINDSET WITH LINDSAY DOTZLAF, CHECK OUT MY EPISODE ON THE #1 REASON PEOPLE STRUGGLE WITH BUDGETING!
Transcript for “Shifting Your Budgeting Mindset with Lindsay Dotzlaf”
Intro: 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: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Money Files. So today I am actually sharing a replay, or I should say cross sharing if you will. A podcast episode that I did with my friend and client Lindsay Dofla. And we were talking about how our relationships with money. We also go a little bit into the work that we’ve been able to do together. So Lindsay is a coach and she coaches coaches. I will make sure that I link her information in the show notes, but you’ll hear about my love of budgeting and you’ll also hear Lindsay talk a little bit more about how this work has shifted, how she thinks about finances. We also go into like wealth goals that we have for ourselves. So enjoy and I will chat with you all soon.
Lindsay: Hello, I am so excited to have you here today. Please introduce yourself, tell everyone who you are and what you do.
Keina: Hi, my name’s Keina Newell and I’m a financial coach. I help people fall in love with budgets. I work with women and solopreneurs to help them create systems to allow them to spend money drama free.
Lindsay: Okay, let’s just clarify right up front, you try to help people fall in love with budgets.
Keina: That’s not true. That’s not true.
Lindsay: This episode, I feel like it’s going to be half just like throwing me under the bus and I’m okay with this.
Keina: Here’s the thing is I taught prior to this work and so I have faith in all of my clients. Like I had faith in all of my students, so it’s alright. I’m always problem solving for where clients’ brains get stuck in actually getting to the result that they say they want. So I’ll just help them overcome barriers. It’s okay.
Lindsay: I love it. And you really do. You really are helping me so much. That was definitely a jab at myself not at you. And let’s just back up for just a second. You just brought it up. I am so curious. We’ve never really talked about this, but you were a teacher before coaching. What was the transition? Was there anything in between or you were a teacher and then you were a coach?
Keina: I was a teacher and then a coach. So I quit education in 2018. Like I quit. I was a vice principal at the time and I had this really great idea that I could start a business. I was answering the question like, if you could do anything for free, what would it be? And it was like, I want to help people budget. And so one of my good girlfriends, she was like, yeah, Keina like start a website and buy your domain. So in 2018 that summer I started a business. I had some money in savings and I’m like, oh I can totally do this. Then I found out that when you have money saved, it spends really quickly. So I did some contract work, did some educational consulting and ultimately ended up going back and getting a full-time job while I was building my business. So I did some leadership coaching for principals and all that stuff and then completely started working for myself in 2021 for the second time after I understood how money works with the business and building your business. It’s not just about pressing publish on your website. Clients don’t come.
Lindsay: Yes. Oh my goodness. Yes. Everyone, can we just pause for a moment to receive that? So true. Okay. I love that. And I actually didn’t realize it was so recent. That wasn’t that long ago.
Keina: No, not at all.
Lindsay: Do you love working for yourself?
Keina: I love it. I mean there’s definitely the rollercoasters of it. I actually heard someone talking about entrepreneurship and they described it. They were like, it’s not a roller coaster, it’s an amusement park. And he was like, sometimes you have to go to guest services and you need to ask for help and then sometimes you have to get off the big ride because maybe that’s making you a little sick so you need to like go to the teacups. I was like, it’s definitely an amusement park. It is not just a roller coaster ride. But no, I enjoy it. One of the reasons I wanted to start working for myself was because I wanted more freedom with my time in education. Like I worked in charter schools and I was like a bright-eyed, bushy eyed 20 year old. So they got the best years of my life and all of my time. And so now I enjoy, like a couple weeks ago I was at home in Oklahoma for two weeks and I like got to work from home and being able to spend time with my family without the requirement that I actually live in Oklahoma is priceless for me. So I enjoy that. And I enjoy working with the clients I work with, but I still feel like I’m doing purposeful work, which is something that I always wanted to do. And so yeah, I love it.
Lindsay: I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this but I was an education major and I had a full on meltdown when I started my actual, like when I was in schools.
Keina: Like student teaching?
Lindsay: Before that, luckily. It was like when you first start going for, like every Friday I would go for like four hours. I don’t remember what it was called but I thought I was going to be a science teacher and I was like, this is going to be amazing. And then I was like, I hate it. I hate it so much. And I just knew immediately I loved the kids, I loved so much about it, but there was just something I just knew immediately and I had a full on meltdown. I’ll never know what I want to do with my life.
Keina: Well I didn’t go to school to be a teacher.
Lindsay: Oh, you didn’t?
Keina: No, when I was in college, I have a degree in management and finance. So I joined [06:03 inaudible].
Lindsay: You’re like, I know how I’ll make money.
Keina: Yes.
Lindsay: Being a teacher.
Keina: Well I joined Teach for America. My senior year I applied for grad school, I applied for Teach for America because it was just like a cool opportunity to give back to the community.
Lindsay: I applied for Teach for America. This is so funny.
Keina: And I applied for jobs but I accepted a job that was going to pay me like $55,000 a year. It was like oil and gas, which is what you do when you’re in Oklahoma. And then Teach for America called me and they were like, “Hey we want you to teach middle school math.” And I was like, first off I wanted to teach elementary school because I’m pretty sure that’s where everything breaks down for kids. And they kept calling me back. I was like, no. And I accepted another job. And they’re like, no, we think you’d be great. And so I was like, oh, I don’t know. But this is where like budgeting comes into play because I had to figure out if the numbers worked for me to say no to $55,000 a year and yes to making $30,000 a year. So when the numbers worked I was like, okay, I’m going to go ahead and do this two years because I’m going to go get my MBA anyways after these two years. And then I fell in love with kids and teaching.
Lindsay: I love that. Okay, we’ll move on from teaching. But when they offered you that job, did they tell you about the deodorant situation in middle school?
Keina: No, not at all. They didn’t prepare me. Like teaching is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The hardest thing I’ve ever done because I’ve only worked in underserved communities, which is like my passion, which means that I was like a teacher, a nurse, a grandparent, like everything, a social worker.
Lindsay: Yeah. I think honestly that for me was why I realized it wasn’t for me. I realized this is the hardest thing I’m ever going to do and if I’m going to put my energy towards this, I don’t want it to be in this capacity. I want it to be somewhere else where I’m helping the kids in a different way where I don’t have to say like, okay, I know you didn’t have breakfast today, but let’s like learn science. Not that that’s, I mean of course teachers are incredible. I probably respect them more than any, like almost any other profession. But I just knew there was just something about it that I was like, it’s not my lane.
Keina: Yeah. You just learned to have snacks in your class and you’re like, we’re going to learn science and you can eat breakfast.
Lindsay: Yes. Well now my sister’s a teacher, although as of this year she’s not anymore, but she was. And so my job was buying all of the snacks and taking them to her class so that the kids were just always fed. So moving on from that. So you were a teacher, you became a coach, you’re loving it, you love working for yourself, the whole amusement park. So I know what we work on, but I’m curious like what are the main things you work on with your clients? I don’t know if what you work on with me is what you work on with everyone or if it’s like individual, client by client.
Keina: So my clients like, I would say overall they fall into the bucket of, I’m making good money or I’m making more money than I’ve ever made before, but I don’t necessarily have anything to show for it. So that may break down for a business owner where you’re like, I’m making $10,000 months, but I feel like I can’t pay myself or I’m not prepared for taxes. It also shows up where a client could be making $200,000 a year in their nine to five and they are like, I actually have money saved, but I don’t feel like I can actually get to my next step, which is I want to have a down payment on a house. Like that transition is really hard for me. I also have other clients that they don’t have any debt. They are actually like trust fund babies, but they have a lot of thoughts about having money.
Like they feel like they’re not deserving of it, they don’t like the way that money has come to them. And then I have clients that are like, I have five figures worth of debt and I’m trying to figure out how to pay that off. So it’s really helping clients move from, I mean they have thoughts about money, they want to shift their thoughts about money. But I would say like the thing that connects everybody is that they feel like they’re making good money, like I’m making more money than I ever have before. And they want to not feel guilt or shame or overwhelm about how they’re managing their finances.
Lindsay: Yeah. I described it in, let’s see when this comes out, I think it will be two episodes ago I mentioned that I was working with you and I talked about it for a second and one thing that I said is that, okay, now that I’ve learned how to be an entrepreneur and how to make money, one of my biggest realizations was like nobody’s ever taught me how to just have money, like what to do with it, where to put it, what’s the best place to spend it or not spend it or save it or just all of it felt so confusing to me. And I noticed with a lot of self-awareness that like, oh I’m really good at spending money and I’d never spend more than I have, but if it’s there, it’s like there’s a good chance I’m going to spend it. And you have helped me so much with that. So first thank you. And we’ll get into some of my top takeaways in a little bit because I think that they might be interesting for people, but I just think the work you do is so important and so good.
Keina: Thank you. As you were talking about that, I feel like you kind of fall into my bucket. I’ve been thinking about this as I am like selling and writing emails. There’s like a group of my clients and I would put myself in there too that are like first generation. And so like I’m the first in my family to make six figures. I’m the first in my family to have a business. And so with being the first, there’s a lot that comes with that. Like you’re supposed to have certain things figured out. And I would say all of the, I work mainly with women, they’re all very like type A, very organized. Like everything in their life is seemingly well. And so I like to help people, like how do you want to show up like knowing that you have this title of the first, like how do you want to show up in your family? Thinking about generational wealth and changing money stories for anybody that you impact. And it could be someone who’s married, you could be single, like you still have people that are going to be influenced by the way that you think about and manage your own finances.
Lindsay: Yeah. I think that I have noticed in so many ways how it’s changing. Just working with you has changed my thoughts about money, but also mostly the way I think about myself and the way I interact with money. And I’ve also started noticing it kind of everywhere, where it’s things that other people say about money or just that story that plays in the back of my mind. Like the voice of maybe for example, like my stepdad that pops up in the back of my mind that’s like, this is so irresponsible. You shouldn’t be spending this. Money doesn’t grow on trees or you have to work very hard for money. Like the more work you do, like you’re never going to be rich, but the more work you do, you’ll like be able to pay your bills or whatever. It was very like, and this isn’t bad, but just very like kind of blue collar like work ethic. Like just work hard, hard, hard, hard, hard and just have money to just live on
And when I was younger I always knew there was something about me that was like, this is not for me. Like I’m all about working hard, I’ll work hard all day, but I just always knew there wasn’t a cap. Like there has to be more than this. And so it’s been really interesting navigating kind of my way out of that. And you have been just so beneficial in that.
Keina: Thank you. I was writing a note down.
Lindsay: Taking notes.
Keina: I am. Because when I left education and started working for myself, I was actually having a conversation with a mentor and I was telling her that I wanted to like, I just wanted to replace my salary and one of the most impactful questions she asked me was like, what would happen if you made more than that? And I like hadn’t considered it, but I understood that my ability to only be able to think about my salary was by way of being in education. Because like if anybody is in education or even like government jobs, you are on like a pay scale and you know like I’m a step one, year three, whatever. So you only move up in increments. And as you were just talking about your experience growing up where like we’re going to make enough to live on. I think the question that I want everyone to consider is like, but what else?
What would happen if, and I think when I think about where people are with like their financial goals, even if it’s like paying off debt, I’m like, okay, we’re going to pay off the debt but then what? Because I think that sometimes we don’t push beyond like our initial dream. And so if we’re not pushing beyond our initial dream, like we’re not leaning into the vision of what we actually want. And it’s okay if you don’t know what that is because your experience has shaped like how you view money. But that’s like the question even for myself, I’m like, okay, but what else? But what else? Then I think that if everybody can think in that way, like even if I can share this, like in working with you, I was like, Lindsay, let’s talk about retirement.
Lindsay: Yeah. Just to be clear, you can share anything. There’s nothing I can think of that I would be like, oh my gosh, don’t say that.
Keina: Like your Costco run.
Lindsay: Besides Costco. We’ll get to that later. But this is great news because it’s not on me, we discovered, my husband’s the one spending all the money. This is such good news.
Keina: But in working with you, like my view of you is like, you don’t have a problem making money. I think you are really good at even managing money and you and your husband, you are the ideal client. Like, you guys make good money, but I can look at your numbers and I’m like, okay, where do you and Nate want to be when you’re 65? Like, let’s actually talk about retirement now because you’re anti-budgetting at this point in time.
Lindsay: I’m getting on board. It’s only taken like two rounds of coaching with you. I’m coming around.
Keina: But you’re someone where I’m like let’s actually start looking at the bigger picture. And so us spending time even talking and playing with a retirement calculator and being like, okay, if you and Nate want to retire with $7 million or $10 million in your account, like now you and Nate get to talk about the what else that isn’t just in your like day-to-day living and just like expanding that dream for you. I kind of lost my train of thought, but the whole point is to be able to ask yourself. Like, but what else? Because I even for my clients, yeah, I want to help you pay off debt, but that’s in service of you being able to create something else.
Lindsay: I think it made perfect sense. By the way, you may have lost your train of thought, but what you said made sense. And one thing that I had, DL, she’s your friend. I had her on the podcast, which is a little point of contention. I apologize, you were supposed to be on first. I’m just going to tell the world that was supposed to happen.
Keina: We can reorder the way that these come out.
Lindsay: Avl, listen, I’m going to need you. No, I’m just kidding. But one thing that she brought up when we recorded, and so anyone listening, it’ll be literally the week before this comes out, they’ll hear her talking about this. She talks about having wealth goals, which this might be something you taught her, I don’t know. But she flipped it and she asked me, and it was really interesting to see, and I’ve noticed this just from working with you and just thinking about money in general, that I have almost hit like a cap, like what I have in my life now, what I’ve created, the money that I’ve created, like all of that. It’s almost like I’ve hit the ceiling of what I thought was even possible years ago. And I didn’t notice it until I started looking at it recently of like, I don’t know what the next, like what the bigger thing is. So I’ve had a lot of fun thinking about that. But I’m curious, I’m just going to put you on the spot. I’m curious what yours are. Like what’s your next thing?
Keina: Gosh. I mean, I really want a custom built home.
Lindsay: With wood shelves, right?
Keina: With wooden shelves in my closet. Yeah.
Lindsay: Not wire racks.
Keina: Not wire racks. I feel like my goals, when I think about like building wealth for myself, the number one word that comes up for me is creating options. And I am one of three kids. I feel very fortunate. I feel like my parents are taken care of in retirement. Mom and dad, if you’re listening to this, it’s not shade to you, like not because they did anything intentionally. My dad’s retired from the military and so that has created a pension lifestyle for them. So like therefore, 1k knowledge and TSP knowledge is like limited, but I feel like, I mean I ask them questions about their numbers all the time. I feel like they’re going to be taken care of. But when I think about building wealth for myself, it’s not just for me. It’s also to be able to impact my family,
I want to be, I don’t have any kids. I’m not married right now, but I want to be the aunt that’s like, ooh, I can help my nieces and nephews. Like if they’re going to college, like I was talking to my mom, I live in DC right now and I was thinking about how cool it would be to be able to have my townhouse that’s here and in 10 years if there’s a child, one of my nieces or nephews that’s like I’m going to Howard or Georgetown that like they have a place to stay because when I saw, like, I grew up in a very affluent neighborhood. I wasn’t affluent, but the people around me were like they had access.
And I didn’t have the same type of access. Like mom and dad couldn’t buy a house on a college campus to make sure that I wasn’t having to pay for rent and like take out loans. And so when I think about building wealth for myself, it’s being able to have options. Like I know that I want, at least at this point in time, I think I want to be at a place where I have like $4 million to be able to retire. I want to be able to travel. Those are the things that I think about in building wealth. And it actually took me a while to get on board that I could create a million dollar business. My brain was like, hmm, you could do like 300,000.
Lindsay: Oh, me too. I feel you so hard.
Keina: But like, how are you going to get to a million? Because the math says, like you’re going to have to sell a lot of coaching. And so Lindsay, I don’t know that I have like a lot of concrete numbers, but I have a vision for the way that I want to be able to help and support other people including myself.
Lindsay: Yeah. I love that.
Keina: I feel like I can like do good in the world and bringing it kind of like full circle. Like when I go back to thinking about me teaching, I taught because I wanted to impact like black and brown students. And when I think about growing my business now I think about the impact that I can, like how do I have this like full circle moment to even create opportunities to go back to communities and do like financial literacy that’s hopefully shifting narratives and shifting stories for the families in which I used to interact with.
Lindsay: Yeah. I love that you’re like, I mean I don’t have a concrete answer, but that feels pretty clear to me.
Keina: Yeah, well you said wealth and I feel like my brain said it’s supposed to be a number.
Lindsay: No, you answered exactly how I was asking it. You know that I’m not focused on the number. Who needs a number? That’s ridiculous.
Keina: I don’t know. Yeah. Lindsay is not focused on the numbers. Like I think that sounds good. She’s go with the flow. You’re definitely learning. I think that you’re just going with the flow, which is good.
Lindsay: Yeah well speaking of go with the flow, I think this could be interesting because most people listening are coaches and most of the coaches are entrepreneurs. I definitely have a section of the podcast that listens, that are coaches that work for companies or work inside of organizations or of course people that want to be coaches and they’re just kind of studying out. They’re not doing it yet. But I do think the kind of go with the flow with money that I have served me a little bit in the beginning of my business because it allowed me to not kind of panic about the future or think like, oh no, I shouldn’t be spending this money now or I should be saving it instead or I should be fill in the blank, whatever other people think. And I’m curious what your thoughts are on that because sometimes I think it’s like, what’s the balance? Like how do you find the balance? And I know a lot of entrepreneurs kind of struggle with this in the beginning of the investing versus not versus figuring it out on their own versus putting it on a credit card or just all of it, like so much comes up and I’m just curious what your thoughts are about that.
Keina: I mean, I put coaching on credit cards. I put plenty of things on credit cards. I’m not like an anti-credited card money coach and like put all your money in an envelope and hope for the best.
Lindsay: Thank goodness because that would never work for me.
Keina: I think that when I’m thinking about go with the flow, I can see how it can serve people and I’m also like, where do you want your flow to take you? When I first started my business, I was definitely in the red. Like, I’m going to build a website that’s $6,000. You only made $1,500. Like that math doesn’t work. But in thinking about like literally I put my website on a credit card. I had a plan to pay it back and it was like a consistent plan. So it was like, alright, I’m going to, I can’t remember what I was charging for coaching at the time, but I was like, I know that I’m hitting basically, let’s say I was hitting like $4,000 a month at the time and it was like, well this much can go to pay myself this much can go to pay off the debt and this much can go to like putting in my operating expenses.
So like I had a plan for how to pay it off and I think that’s what I ask people to do is like, not just have a plan but have a plan. Because I think it prevents you from being in those crazy moments where you’re like in panic because you actually haven’t thought ahead. And I see people that they’re just thinking about that next invoice that’s coming in. And they’re not thinking about, okay, but what’s happening 60 days from now or 90 days from now, they’re caught in the moment. And I think that’s where it can be like a slippery slope.
Lindsay: Yeah. I would say for me, one thing I was thinking as you were talking about that, like one distinction maybe between what I was doing versus sometimes where I see people get themselves into trouble is I was very conscious of all of it and I knew exactly my balance on a credit card for example. And I knew how much would I pay off on that a month. Like I didn’t have a concrete plan, there wasn’t a spreadsheet. We both know there was no spreadsheet involved, but I was very aware of it. It wasn’t like I was just doing, I was very like, nope, I can’t make this investment. It wasn’t just like invest in everything and be unaware of it, which I think is sometimes what people do to make themselves feel better about it is just like, we’re just not going to look at it.
Keina: Yeah.
Lindsay: Like one thing I love working with you is like, well no, we’re definitely going to look at all of it, just all of it, which I thought I was pretty good. Ask some questions. I thought I was pretty good at it, but I was like, oh, I could see, here are a few areas that I was just kind of like, nah, shoes, we don’t have to know. We don’t need to know how much we’re spending on that.
Keina: Well if you’re not looking at all of it, and you said something to me that I was like, oh Lindsay is so profound, and I don’t remember the exact verbiage, but it was basically like, if I am choosing to buy, I’m just throwing out numbers, this isn’t really Lindsay’s numbers, $1,500 worth of clothes instead of saving it towards this goal that I said that I had, then I’m like delaying my future. I think if we can look at spending money in that way. Like you can do whatever you want, but let’s think about like, if you say yes to something right now, what are you potentially saying no to? And not out of shame, but just out of curiosity because you do have goals. Even if you say you don’t have goals, there’s a reason that you started your business from a financial standpoint.
There’s a reason that you’re making six figures from a financial standpoint. And so like, are you actually creating the life that you think you’re going to create? Especially, I think the one thing that I see is like, I see people making a lot of money and then they haven’t thought about retirement. They don’t have money and savings. And once again, this is not about shame, but I know that you’re making six figures, multiple six figures for a reason. But your day-to-day spending habits, you’re caught up in that and you haven’t taken a step back to say like, hey, what’s the larger vision that I have for myself? Let me actually start investing in these other areas of my life that I also, they’re also important even though they may be like 10, 15, 30, 40 years down the line.
Lindsay: That was one thing that I was going to share that I think has been the most beneficial for me in working with you because I’ve always had this thought about budgets that’s like a penalty or it’s all about restriction, maybe that’s the way to say it. And one thing I’ve just really learned in working with you is no, it’s really just about awareness, which is like my favorite thing. Just like being aware of, okay, not that we’re not going to buy, for example the shoes, but if you buy the shoes, like where is that money coming from and what is it affecting? So I still might decide to buy them. This is not an actual, I don’t think a shoe conversation that we had, but just whatever popped into my mind. But I just think that’s so useful and it gives me the freedom of like, it doesn’t mean it’s just a no, it just means we’re going to make the informed decision versus the like, I just want this right now decision.
Keina: Well I remember when we first started working together you wanted to add like an addition on your house, like in the backyard. You wanted to do like a backyard landscaping. And it was funny as we started to talk about it, you said you weren’t even sure if you wanted to do it anymore because we started talking about the functionality of it. It wasn’t about affordability, but it was like, your family, I feel like likes to travel. Are we even going to be outside in the hot tub and sitting outside with the outdoor grill or did we just think we were going to use that? Like is going back to these wooden shelves in the closet, is there another thing that we potentially want to invest in that would be more meaningful for us? But if you’re so caught up in like, I don’t even know the word for it, just spending money and not taking this time to just be like, oh why am I doing this? You’ll never have the opportunity to have these aha moments about what you actually love spending money on and what you potentially don’t want to spend money on because you realize that there’s no benefit for it in your life.
Lindsay: A hundred percent. Yes. And it doesn’t mean we’ll never do the landscaping. But it was such a big realization of this is a big chunk of money and realistically how often are we going to use it between all the other things that we’re doing? And it was just, yeah, it was really good awareness and that’s why I love working with you. That’s amazing. So like I said, obviously most of the people listening, I know you don’t work just with entrepreneurs, but most of the people listening are entrepreneurs, if you could give them just like a couple tips, just like takeaways from just listening today, what would they be?
Keina: Well, it may not be from just listening today or like in terms of our prior conversation. But one thing for all business owners is please separate your personal and your business finances. I feel like that’s the most common mistake. And I don’t even know if I want to call it a mistake, but it’s an opportunity to have clarity about where your money is going.
Lindsay: Yes. I’ll pause you. I talk about this all the time actually. I’m very, yes. If they haven’t heard me say it, they need to hear it today. Because I just think it’s so important when I hear coaches say like, well now I’m in a fight with my husband or my partner because I over invested and I’m like, wait, wait, hold on, this is like business expenses and personal expenses. Was there a conversation around like, I’m starting a business, like this is what it looks like? And I think there’s just a lot of messy crossover there.
Keina: And I think people use excuses that are like, oh, I just like haven’t done it yet. I’m like, go do it. Maybe the business account is the hiccup for you, even just put it in another personal checking account. But that’s where all of your invoices that cash flows into there. Because your business money and your personal money are separate and your business should be taking care of itself.
Lindsay: I promise it takes like five minutes. I put it off forever because I was like, this is going to be a whole thing. I have to go into the bank. It was so quick.
Keina: And then secondly, I would say like give yourself a consistent paycheck. That doesn’t mean that you have to use gusto, but just transferring money to your personal account when it gets low is not helpful for you. Like you can actually have the experience of being a nine to five employee by just paying yourself, on the 15th I pay myself $2,000 a month. On the 30th, I pay myself $2,000 a month. And that will help you on the personal side, like actually feel like you can manage your expenses because you won’t just be transferring money whenever you see your bank account get low. And that’s going to give your business an opportunity to be more profitable and you to be more aware on your personal side of like where your money is going month to month. I don’t know if you have anything to say about that. I feel like Lindsay.
Lindsay: I’m giving myself a pat on the back. I’m so excited that you’re saying these things because this is something I say all the time too. Although I approach it not from almost like the opposite standpoint, which is like it’s a real business. It helps you take yourself seriously. I don’t care if you have one client and you pay yourself $100 a month or $100 twice a month or $10 twice a month, maybe it’s more than that, but I don’t care what it is. Like just get used to paying yourself. And like thinking about what that is and how you can increase it as your business grows. Because I think it can be easy to be like two years into business and like making money, but not having ever paid yourself.
Keina: Or you have paid yourself, but can’t quantify it because it’s haphazardly.
Lindsay: Yes.
Keina: You just, you need to take a trip so you’re like, oh, I have money in my business accounts and so you transfer the money.
Lindsay: Yes. One thing that I’ll just add for anyone that is interested in this, I also have a bookkeeper who I work with in specifically my business finances. And one thing that she really helped me with too, I’m curious what your thoughts are about this is what I noticed, is that let’s say I had a month or a few months where I wasn’t making as much money, the first place I wanted to take that money from was paying myself. And I realized it was really feeling, which isn’t necessarily a problem, but the way I was thinking about it was very much like a punishment.
Lindsay: You didn’t meet the mark. So like, we’re going to dock your pay. Like that’s almost what it was if I was thinking about if I was my employee, like that was the mindset I was approaching it with. And I would just offer that to, if that comes up for anyone else, I just think it’s really important that it’s like the money in your business is never a punishment. Like it’s not, like, oh, you did a bad job, so like let’s just take your pay away, that’s not how businesses run.
Keina: And if you’re, I was going to say like, if you’re managing your money in your business where like let’s say you have a $10,000 month and then you have an $8,000 month and a $7,000 month, if you can figure out how to do the same thing with your business income every single month it’ll help account for like those lows. So you’ll actually have some reserves so you can continue paying yourself. And not just like deciding what to pay yourself based off of how much you made that month.
Lindsay: Totally. And that’s where I was in the place where I had the reserves. I had, like I’ve been working with her for a while and really my money felt so managed and it was always, that was the first place that I would always go to of like, oh, okay, well I’m just not going to pay myself this month or I’m not going to pay myself as much or whatever. And it was just really interesting to like unwind that and see like why I was doing that. Okay. Anything else?
Keina: I think your business also needs to have a budget. You need to know your expenses as a business owner. And you’re not allowed to use the excuse that like, well not all of my expenses are monthly, but you can break down any expense, if it’s an annual expense. Like Lindsay and I have paid for masterminds that are, $25,000 a year or not a year for six months.
Lindsay: $50,000 a year.
Keina: And if you are investing at that level, you can divide that expense by 12, $50,000 by 12 and that become a part of how you think about what your business needs in order to operate from one month to the next. I think like that, having a budget in your business can clarify so much for you when you’re like, oh, like this is what I’m spending my money on, here’s my regular expenses, here’s my investments that I want to be able to make but yes, have a budget and a budget is not a punishment. You have a budget because you are someone who has financial goals and that’s helping you drive the vision forward for where you want to be financially.
Lindsay: Yeah. Love it. It is funny how I have no resistance to a budget in my business. It feels so fun and clear where all my money is all the time. So I’ll get there. Don’t worry.
Keina: I’m not worried about it. It’s fine. We’re doing backwards planning.
Lindsay: That’s fine.
Keina: With Lindsay’s and then the last thing I would say is like, have a system for your taxes. One thing I do is every invoice that I get, I want to say I’m like, somewhere in between like 15 to 20% of it I just put into a tax account. So my brain automatically knows that I only get like 85% basically, or 80% of whatever invoices come in that I then manage in terms of expenses, paying myself and saving money. So that’s been something that’s made taxes feel really easy for me and not something that I like need to stress about because my brain just doesn’t even see that that’s my money anyways.
Lindsay: Yep. I think that’s so good. That actually reminds me that that’s one, I forgot that this was a thing, but it’s one of the reasons, a bookkeeper was one of the first contractors I hired in my business because of this, because I had a tax bill that I was like, what? Like I thought that I knew how much I was going to owe. It was much higher than that. And it threw me a little bit. I was like, what am I going to do? Like where am I going to get this money? And I had the money. It wasn’t like a huge issue. It was just such a surprise that I was like, I just never want that to be a surprise ever. I really want to understand. Like, I want to have that money sitting there so that when I have to pay my taxes, it’s just there, it doesn’t feel like a problem.
Keina: It just feels easy. Ease is like the best thing when it comes to money.
Lindsay: When it just never feels like, some people get very bent out of shape about taxes because ugh, I have to pay this. It’s like, feels the way they describe, it’s like someone’s taking something from them. But if it’s like not there to begin with, then it just doesn’t feel that way.
Keina: And if you have to pay taxes, you should be thankful. That means you made money.
Lindsay: I’m always like, I love paying taxes because that just means I’m making money. I’m doing great.
Keina: Yep. If you start with doing the math early on in your business to pay taxes, even if you made a thousand dollars and you put away $200 of it, like that’ll just become a habit. Just like you were talking about paying yourself and that being a habit, I feel like whatever practices you start, financial practices you start, even if you feel like well it’s not that much money or whatever it is. As you make more money, you’re going to feed those practices more, which I think the only other thing that I would add to it is like, one of the things I did in my business is I factored in like what percentage I wanted to out of the amount of money I pay myself, did I want to contribute to my retirement. Because I didn’t want to lose that from when I was working my nine to five job, I was contributing to my, 403B at the time or 401k. And so in my business, I’ve been like, okay look, ooh, I get to put in $100 into my like step IRA. But that’s been something that was really important to me, is to also be thinking about the retirement side of things because I don’t want to be a million dollar earner and then realize that I never thought about what I wanted to contribute to my retirement.
Lindsay: Right. And you just have to keep working to be making the money. And I think that can be true for anything. I know in my business, I’ve set it up so that there are certain things like tax money obviously, and then I also, there’s like a certain percentage that just goes into a charity fund that’s like, I get to disperse that either quarterly or at the end of the year. And it feels so fun. That was something that I was like, oh I can’t wait until I can do that. And then my bookkeeper was like, well why do we have to wait? It can just be a percentage. And then even if it’s, for example, like $200, it’s been a lot more than that which is really fun because then I just get to decide and we do it as a family actually, the kids help decide where the money goes.
Keina: Oh, that’s fun.
Lindsay: They pick things that I love so much. One of them always picks something that has to do with animals. And then my older daughter she’s really into girls who code or things like that that are very like girl stem oriented, which makes a lot of sense because that’s totally her. It just as become, it’s just so different when that money is just there versus like, where do I find it? Or oh, it’s December and I was hoping to donate to this thing and now I have to take the money from somewhere instead of like, no, I plan for it the whole time.
Keina: Yeah. I do giving in my business too. It’s felt really good. I like to talk about values and things that are important. And so I feel good when I’m like, look, I’m not teaching but I get to donate to these organizations that impact issues that impact the kids that I used to teach.
Lindsay: That’s so fun.
Keina: See, budgeting is fun. Lindsay just said it.
Lindsay: It’s so fun. Yeah. This is interesting. I’ll explore later what I think the difference is, like why it doesn’t feel that way for my personal money. It’s starting to feel that way. Let’s be clear. We are working on it. It just has been a little different. I don’t know why. Actually I’ll just say it. I think maybe this is one reason for sure. Just in case anyone relates to it. I’ll just share. I think one reason is because in my business, the money feels so clear. This is the amount of money coming in and that might vary, but I don’t have as many expenses or they aren’t as maybe sporadic. I just feel like with kids, you and I have talked about this. I’m like groceries, I don’t know. Like how do you pick a number of just like, this is what I’m spending on groceries or soccer cleats or just all of those little things just feel, it just feels like chaos. There’s too much chaos happening over here for it to be in a budget.
Keina: And Lindsay brought this up recently. So the thing that I always hear Lindsay talk about is that she wants to know that her and her husband can make decisions about what they want to be able to do with just ease, like not being worried about it. And early on we started an emergency fund for you. It wasn’t that you didn’t have money in your accounts. It’s like just being able to have the clarity of like, oh yeah, there’s this money over there that I have intention behind it. I’m intentionally saving. And so in our last couple of coaching sessions, I feel like we’ve been talking a lot. I’m like flipping my hand. I am imagining an upside-down triangle. I feel like we’ve been talking about the end in terms of where do you want to be?
And Lindsay is like, yeah because then that’ll just shape what I do day to day, which I do. I think that it will in the sense that making some intentional decisions about where do you and Nate want to be in terms of retirement. If your husband did want to quit his job, how much money would you want to in the bank? Or when you want to be able to say yes to a vacation, what does that look like? And so I think it will help drill down how you want to spend money day to day. Once again, not saying you can’t spend the money, but you’re framing everything else. And also if you start a budget now and start setting financial goals the beautiful thing is like with Lindsay, I know I’m like you’re going to make more money. So if you already have the systems in place, then that means you just get to put more towards these buckets. And you’ll have more disposable income too because you’re going to be making more money. I see it as like, look, you make this decision one time and then it’s automated and now it’s just what you do.
Lindsay: For anyone listening that relates to me, I would describe myself. I forget what the other one is. There’s like a visionary and whatever the other thing is, I always think in my business for example, I feel like I’m the visionary Akila my business manager is like the day-to-day, like keep me on task, do the spreadsheets, give me the checklist that I can be sure that I’m getting everything done. And I think when I think about money like that, so for anyone that relates to my brain that’s like, I can see the big picture. I can go to this other place or see, I want this thing. And once I’m connected to that goal, then I can reverse engineer it, which is a little bit of what we’re doing. But I just want to tell you I feel like there’s hope, it’s okay if you don’t like a spreadsheet, you can still do it.
Keina: And the other thing you said in a recent call, which I think people will resonate with and I feel like we’ve kind of talked about is the tendency to wait for the right time and I’ll do this when and I think all of us can say, we’ve said, oh I’ll do this when we’re waiting for these perfect conditions. But if we look at our lives right now where they are, they’re better than the last time we said we’d do it. And so it’s not actually about the conditions. It’s just about doing it.
Lindsay: Well for me there’s never a specific then. It’s like I’ll do it when, sometime down the road. Yeah it would make a lot of sense to increase what we’re putting in our 401K for example. But there wasn’t an actual measurement of okay, when? When we’re making X amount of money or next January or what’s the when? And so those things would always just get pushed off instead of what you’re saying, which is how do you just start now however you can, whatever it looks. That has been definitely a game changer for me. Anything else as far as specific tips?
Keina: I don’t think so.
Lindsay: I have a couple of things I learned from you that I thought might be helpful for people to hear. They’re kind of small simple things, but one thing that just blew my mind, you’re going to laugh about this, when we first started working together, is just the, I don’t even know what’s it called, the high-yield savings account?
Keina: Oh yeah. Yeah.
Lindsay: If you don’t have one, get one today. Everybody, like push pause, go start one, just go on the computer, get a high-yield savings account. Because I always had the one that was just connected to our bank account, our joint account where most of our money is. It just comes with a savings account and sometimes I would get interest and it’d be 2 cents a year or whatever. But the very first thing you had me do on maybe our first call or second call I don’t know, very early, is to start an emergency fund in a savings account that was first separate from my regular bank account, which is very useful. And that it’s a high yield. I actually make money on my money. It’s so wild. I didn’t even know, nobody told me.
Keina: It’s also one of those things, let me asterisk this in case the economy doesn’t look like it looks right now. It’s a benefit of the economy. There are a lot of other interest rates that are not great right now, like mortgages and stuff. Yeah. But because of where we are, the high-yield savings accounts are at really high rates. And so they’re maybe four to 5%. So it’s a great place to put your emergency fund or any other sinking funds you’ve created.
Lindsay: And I think the bigger lesson, so for example, if you’re listening in the future and the rates don’t look that right now, I think the bigger lesson is it’s possible to make money on your money without, like in my mind I thought I have to have hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest, that was the when, when we get there, then we’ll start investing or we’ll start I don’t even know. It was so arbitrary. It was like we’ll start these other things where we can actually make interest and make money on the money that we have. And so just that it was so simple and it was just what?
Keina: And you’re going to make some good money on it.
Lindsay: Yeah. And then the second trick was to set up just automatic deposits into it. So twice a month, money just goes every time. I think we have it linked to maybe when my husband gets paid because he has a corporate job and gets regular paychecks and so the day after X amount is just transferred into the emergency fund and it’s like it was never there. It’s amazing.
Keina: And Lindsay didn’t even miss it. So it’s crazy.
Lindsay: I told you once I’m committed to a goal and I’m like oh, I actually now love looking at it. I’m like oh money just keeps going in there. It’s magic. It’s so funny. It’s so simple and so funny. So that’s why I wanted to share. People are probably laughing about at me right now and it’s fine. I’m here for that. And then the second thing, so that was something that happened when we first started working together and then I think it was on our very last call. So maybe two calls ago I got just a little emotional talking about why I thought I was bad at budgeting and just all these kind of thoughts I had about myself and money. And then on the last call we were talking about, I don’t even remember exactly what it was, but I said, I just made an offhanded comment like someday I’ll be good at this or something like that. And you were whoa, hold on. I just want you to acknowledge because you’re good at managing your money.
And because I’ve always heard how terrible I am at managing money and that was just like it really hit me. I’ve been thinking about it ever since and it’s like oh, this is why coaching is just so powerful. Because it just flipped something in my mind that I notice now when I’m thinking about things I’m like oh wait, no I’m actually, I’m good at managing my money and it influences the way, even in the last couple days, the way I might make a decision about something, which is fascinating.
Keina: Well it goes back, earlier you were saying budgeting is restrictive and the other, I think it was yesterday, I had to stop in the shower and then I went and talked about it on social media, but it’s people that make good money and generally speaking I would say making $100,000, $200,000, whatever it is, they see budgeting as a consequence because I think budgeting as associated with I don’t make enough to live. People that budget are because they don’t have enough and so budgeting is seen as this punitive thing. And I’m like no, budgeting isn’t punitive, it’s not a punishment. You are doing it because you actually have a vision for your life. And all you’re doing is writing out the decisions that you want to make and it’s going to help you actually have more money because you’re going to have this awareness. And so anytime I can switch, this is because I’m in trouble, it’s like no, you don’t have a budget because you’re in trouble.
Lindsay: It felt so powerful. I think it’s so important for people to hear, especially I think if they maybe people that is similar to me. Maybe similar to you, people that grew up just not having money and not being taught to have money. It’s something I’ve already really started thinking about for my kids, how do I teach them not just to make money, which they’re very inspired when they see me do that? And I think that’s amazing. But I think it’s almost the having of the money, knowing what to do with it and how to manage it and all of that is the more important thing. Because I don’t care if you’re a teacher, like you said earlier or you’re making millions of dollars as a coach, the having of the money is the skill that keeps you going and gives you what you want and gives you the options and the life that you want to have with that.
Keina: And the budget can help you have the container that shows you how you want to have it. I think it can make it safe because what I see when people also make lots of money is sometimes they get rid of it and they spend it because they don’t know if they’re going to have that opportunity again or if anything remotely happens that reminds them of their past, I mean it can cause crazy things into an account. And so I think budgets help you actually have something to look at to be okay, no, I’m intentionally doing this because I’m good at managing my money. And so you have a plan and it also allows you to be flexible. There might be sometimes where you’re like nope, I’m not saving the thousand dollars, but I know exactly why versus the thousand dollars just missing because you didn’t make a plan for it.
Lindsay: Yes. Definitely. So good. Let’s see, those were my two main things. I mean I’ve learned so much from you. Those were just the two top of mind that I thought people just might really to hear, just take away from this podcast just believing that they’re good at managing their money, like how different would it be if that was the thought? If that’s something that they struggle with.
Keina: Oh, I know what I was going to ask you, what do you think you want to teach your kids about managing money?
Lindsay: I was actually thinking about this this morning and I was going to ask you after we recorded, I was going to ask you a question about this, but maybe I’ll just ask it now.
Keina: That’s so intuitive.
Lindsay: Yeah, it’s funny. I go back and forth because it’s tricky. I love that my older daughter especially just loves to make money. So she has a little business. She sells bracelets and she loves it. She’s so motivated by it and she also loves to save it and then spend it on big things. So she bought herself an iPad. She saved up all the money to buy herself an iPad. And there’s a piece of me that’s like oh and I should be teaching her not just how to spend it, which is great, but also how to save it and like how much do we save and like do we create a rule around it. And so I was actually thinking about this morning, I was like wait, do they need high-yield savings accounts? Can you do that for kids? I don’t know because right now their money is in just a savings account. It’s all together versus teaching them oh when you make X amount we take this amount and put it over here and that’s saving for the future. I’m curious what your thoughts are about that.
Keina: I’ve seen a lot of stuff on the internet about keep, save, give for kids. And I wish that I had that knowledge. I knew about, I feel like I knew keep, save, give. I think I wish that my mom had to put more pressure on me to save. I was saving for a FUBU jersey, baby blue, really had to have it because I babysat. And so I think that there’s a lot of opportunity to teach kids in those buckets of here’s the money that you’re going to keep and you can spend and here’s what you’re going to save. And I think as a household you guys can, I feel like people have different opinions on, are we buying our kids a car or not buying our kids a car, but actually having them. There’s the time value of money and I think there are a lot of opportunities to do custodial IRAs, Roth IRAs, things that I don’t actually remember hearing about. But if I had known that I had an opportunity to be like oh I could put $200 a month into this vehicle that when I’m 65 it would benefit me. And then when you’re a kid, you’re rich when you have $300 a month.
Lindsay: For sure. I think my question around it is what I’m kind of just contemplating for my kids because they’re so different, very different. And one of them is like I’m going to make all the money. I’m going to save all the money. I like to buy very specific things. Like pick a thing like an iPad and then buy it and feel so proud of myself. The other one is a little more maybe like me. Actually I’m in the middle somewhere, but she’s wild. She is like, I have $5. What costs $5? Let me get on Amazon and look and I’m no, no, no, okay, hold on. And so I think that there’s a question for me that’s how to teach it. Like is it a requirement, like they have to save 20% or whatever or is there more autonomy around it or at what age, is it just like their money? Questions like that, that are like how do you handle the two very different kids in a way that makes sense maybe for both of them.
Keina: Yeah. I feel there’s going to be a parenting coach on here that’s like we don’t agree.
Lindsay: Shaking their head like oh no, here we are.
Keina: I feel like there’s, I don’t want to say rules around it, but I think you could as a family decide and talk to them because this is how mom and dad do it and being able to kind of take the lesson a little bit deeper, even sharing some of your goals. If we want to buy a new car, we’re thinking about saving money or we know that when we turn 65, we want you guys not to have to worry about if mommy and daddy have a house. And so we’re contributing to our retirement. And so this is a teacher in me, is like what are some of the things that if your girls were allowed to brainstorm that they would want to save money for that. It may not be right now, but if they can imagine themselves in five years, like I’m imagining one of your daughters being like I’m going to buy a thoroughbred horse.
Lindsay: This is true.
Keina: Being able to know that this is my delayed gratification bucket. And that’s just as important as me being able to spend money today.
Lindsay: Okay. This is amazing. That totally cleared it up for me because even with my younger one, who is the one who would want to buy the horse and she does, she talks about it all the time. But another tangible example that’s really funny is she’s obsessed with Jeeps. And my husband and I laugh about it and we’re like but we wouldn’t buy her a Jeep, right? We haven’t really had the conversation about it. And I know it’s not in the budget right now. Don’t worry. I know it’s the conversation you and I can have. But I think it’s even interesting to what you’re saying is like frame it for each of them. And so for her it might look like, let’s say when you’re in high school, we’re going to give you X amount of money for a car per month. Like that’s the payment. I’m not saying we’re going to do this. It’s just the thought that came up for me, but then you have this money that’s like if you wanted to, you could add a hundred dollars a month and now get like a different type of car or whatever. Now you get the Jeep. I think that type of thing would be like oh, like that would make sense to her.
Keina: And she could see it grow. If you did open up a high-yield savings account for them, there’s something about that transaction of oh, I see that money growing and she’s going to get pockets of joy as well where she gets to spend the $5 at five below or wherever she’s going. But then also to know two years from now for instance, like I have a thousand dollars that I saved because I made the decision to, is extremely powerful.
Lindsay: Yes. Totally agree. Alright. That feels actually, we’re just doing some live coaching, that’s what’s happening. But I think this is probably really useful for everyone, whether it’s your kids or even just yourself, thinking how to think about it and how to reframe it in a way that really works for you.
Keina: Because I think she can talk, I mean back on your daughter, like thinking about what are the opportunities that they have to make money or when do they receive money. I feel like I remember my parents. My parents weren’t really big on Christmas gifts, but there were times in which it’d be like oh we’re just going to give you guys $500 or $200. But for you to know the impact of if I spend it all today or if I add to this account, she’s going to get to a point where she’s going to be able to see that. The benefits of those things.
Lindsay: Yeah, definitely. I love it. Ironically she’s also the one that’s like, when someone asks her what are you going to be when you grow up. She’s like oh, I’m going to own horses. Well how are you going to make money? How are you going to pay for the horses and buy the horses? And she’s like ah, that part is just not.
Keina: She’s going to have land and people are going to store their horses on her land.
Lindsay: She’s very picky. She already told me because we’ve talked extensively about the options of how you make money owning horses. It’s like fun conversations. But she’s like well but I’d have to be really picky because you know you can’t put a Friesian with whatever type of horse, blah blah blah. And what is happening? How do you know all this? It’s so good.
Keina: Oh my goodness. She sounds like my neighbor child who’s telling me, he’s like Auntie Keina, I need this kind of reel. And I’m like how do about that reel? He’s like well YouTube. I’m like alright okay Maddox.
Lindsay: YouTube teaching the kids these days. Okay. I think I have one more question for you. But before I ask, is there anything else that you were hoping we’d talk about or hoping we’d get to?
Keina: No, I think I feel pretty complete. I mean I’m really excited because your girls are going to start saving money. So my work here is done.
Lindsay: I love it. Each of us are going to hire you. We’re all going to pay you. You can be our personal finance coach. We just convince everyone to love budgets. It’s going to be so fun. Oh we should maybe address Costco because we laughed about it. Let’s just talk about what the joke was, which was when we, so I’ve already kind of shared, I’ve had the thought for most of my life that I’m really bad at budgeting, at spending. I spend too much money, like all the thoughts. And one thing that we discovered when we were going through, when I first hired you, we were going through all the numbers. You were this is a lot of Costco, what is happening?
And it was actually just really helpful for me because my husband is the one who does all of the Costco shopping. I have been there twice. It is my nightmare. And it was just really fascinating seeing like what is he spending all of this money on? And it really opened up good conversations with him and I around like maybe we don’t need a new appliance or big thing just because it’s on sale at Costco or we don’t need like 20 bags of the chips that we haven’t even tried yet that we don’t know if we them or not. Maybe we chill on some of this. Is there anything you want to add to that? It was just a really funny kind of discovery that we have. We now joke about all the time.
Keina: You were saying Nate doesn’t spend that much money.
Lindsay: Yes. That’s where it started. He didn’t spend any money. I spend all of the money.
Keina: Yes. And you were the spender in the family. Nate’s like the saver basically was kind of the narrative you had. And then we were looking at the credit card that Nate mainly uses. And it’s like oh, there’s a lot of stuff happening and it wasn’t even, I don’t care if you go to Costco, I live across the street from Costco. I know it’s a very dangerous place. But it was more so just the awareness because you and Nate are the people, like if I’m thinking about my profile of people, where they’re we pay our credit cards off at the end of each month, which is great, but how do you know if you’ve overspent or if you’re within, not overspent, like is yes the word I want to use but not used? Because I think if we’re looking just at bank account balances, you’re like no we didn’t overspend because we have money in the account. Just being able to have your own kind of like guardrails for what would we want to see on our credit cards from week to week, month to month, if we knew that, we kind of were oh, we’ve been to Costco a lot or we’ve been to too many steak houses this month, whatever that is. So like go sit down. But yeah that was the Costco joke is Nate does all the spending there.
Lindsay: Yeah. I thought it was worth addressing just throw him under the bus. Just the teensiest bit just because.
Keina: If you see Nate ask him about Costco.
Lindsay: That’s right. But the biggest thing in my mind, even just hearing you say that is it truly showed me that was, sometimes in coaching people get mad about this when you’re it’s just a thought. But it was like really just a thought that I had that I’m the spender and I think I even said saver, which is so interesting because I’m the one who manages all of our money. I don’t even know what I thought he was saving.
Keina: I think, you see, like from my perspective, Nate seems a little bit more conservative than you. You are much more open to spending money and he’s more conservative.
Lindsay: Yes, he grew up definitely very differently than I did in a house where his parents both have advanced degrees, they both worked in science fields and just did everything by the book. Retirement, save X amount. Don’t have any fun ever, just save all money for retirement, which isn’t true that’s just how I see it sometimes.
Keina: That just made me think about, I think the most fun that I’ve had with you in like your ahas is hearing you talk about how you and Nate are talking about money and you were telling me like you guys went on a walk recently and your default would literally just kind of be like oh yeah, I listened to my husband, but I feel more assertive in your financial conversations with him.
Lindsay: Which I’ve always been, it’s an interesting dichotomy I think because I’m always an assertive person. I wasn’t just, oh let him tell me whatever. No, I have lots of opinions.
Keina: Assertive sort of may not have been the right word, but yes.
Lindsay: I think maybe it’s like confident. He said something that in the past I would’ve just, I wish I could remember what it was, but he said something that in the past I would’ve been like right, that’s just fact. Instead I was like wait, no that’s not true. What you just said isn’t actually true at all and here’s why. And here’s what we’re doing about that. And I was able to just kind of walk him through it and he really was like oh yeah, you’re totally right. But it was just a big realization for me of things, like ways that I would just hear him say things and be like, oh right, that’s just the way the world works. We should be doing that. You’re right.
Keina: I think it was about paying student loans versus retirement.
Lindsay: Yeah. And he was well obviously we need to just pay them off as soon as possible because full disclosure, he still has some student loans from his MBA. So he and I talked about that and like whatever, tried to decide like how much am I paying on that a month, all of that? But it was just something that he said that I was like okay wait, hold on, let’s actually think about this and talk about it. And I just felt much more confident, saying like actually I think you’re wrong. I don’t think that is where all the money should go.
Keina: Well I’m proud, I’m excited. I love when I, sometimes I work with both people, the entire couple. And then sometimes I’ll just work with one partner. But I like it when I hear shifts in language when people are talking about money and sometimes when I’m working with a couple, they go from my money to our money or even the fact that they’re like oh we don’t just bring up money when we want to buy something. Now we’re talking about money just more regularly. And it’s just a conversation we have.
Lindsay: And we have definitely shifted into that, like we just talk about it in different ways versus are we going to go on this vacation? Or how much would that cost? Or are we going to do the landscaping in the yard or those types of things versus now it’s like well where’s the money going? What’s the emergency fund for? Just different types of conversation that feel maybe even just a lot more open, where before sometimes I might, because I manage all of our money, I might be stressed about something, like oh should we pay this or should we pay this? But it was like I just didn’t want to talk about it. I’ll just figure it out. And so I would just kind of take it all on versus just having really open conversations about it. It feels very different.
Okay. So this is my last question. We can edit this out if you’re like ah, I don’t want to answer this or I don’t know, but I’ve been thinking about this. I think I’m going to start asking it to all my coaches who come on because I think it’s important to talk about. One thing that I have been hearing, that I’ve heard for a long time, but I just have noticed it a lot recently is coaches thinking they come to me a lot to get coached on this, thinking like, well I’m still working on this thing sometimes, so how could I possibly coach someone on this? So I just want to normalize that we’re always still doing our own work. So I’m curious when you think about what you coach on and think about money and your own money, is there an area right now that you’re like, this is the thing I’m personally working on? Or here’s where I always get caught up or have a hard time following my own rules or anything like that that comes up for you?
Keina: Yeah. A couple of things come up. One thing that comes up is that I was working on my business and I was getting coaching from a peer and she’s like your business name is Wealth Over Now. That should be somewhere in your results. You should be telling people that you can help them build wealth. And I was listening to her and then I realized, one of my thoughts was LIKE but I don’t feel I have built wealth. it was interesting to watch my brain be like, if you were wealthy, you would’ve already reached the amount that you want in your retirement accounts and you would be on track. So I was like you can’t possibly tell someone that you can help them build wealth because it wouldn’t be an integrity. I mean I did a quick thought download and even just reframing what wealth is, it was the coaching that I needed in the moment. It was like well what are the ways that you have built wealth? And so you know who she is, Kimmy. She was coaching me.
Lindsay: Love Kimmy.
Keina: And so she pointed out to me, she’s like, all the things that you’ve achieved, you are somebody else’s 10. But I was like oh, because in my head I’m like I could not be telling people that I can help them build wealth.
Lindsay: Yeah. That’s so good.
Keina: It felt really weighty because when I think about building wealth, good, bad, whatever, I’m like, no I need to be telling people like what stocks they’d be picking and this is the exact amount. There was a lot of pressure there that I don’t realize was there, but when she was poking holes and how I should be talking about what I do it brought some stuff up for me that I’m like no, I have to have this cleaned up. And even I would say to even thinking about like in my coaching business, last year was one of the hardest years in my coaching business in terms of selling. And I had a lot of thoughts about like I’m really good at managing money but I’m not good at making money.
Lindsay: This is why we’re a great team.
Keina: Oh my goodness. It’s crazy in terms of how that can impact and showing up to a coaching call with a client. And you’re telling them to do something but you’re like can I even do that myself? So definitely have to clean up some thoughts about that.
Lindsay: Yeah. I think that’s so good. Thank you for sharing that because I know, literally I think this happens to almost every single coach, but every coach is like we can’t talk about it because people can’t know that I don’t know. When I’m especially coaching for example, like business coaches, they’ll have a bad month and then of course what I focus on is the coaching aspect of it and it just shows up in so many ways and how they coach their clients and how they interact with their clients and those little tiny thoughts that get in play in the back of their mind even just during coaching sessions.
Keina: I mean, well it gets into like what’s your role as a coach? I think that’s where I have to coach myself on and I don’t have to have all the answers even though I love having answers. And so if I can see that I’m supposed to be like a guide and that my client, like I can trust in the fact that they can fully figure it out. But I can even get sticky there because I’m like no I need to help them with the numbers of it. So yeah, definitely I’m in and out of it a lot.
Lindsay: What I notice a lot is that when, like exactly what you just said, it seems more common that coaches really get in their head about it and get in that mindset of, like I have to be able to tell them what to do. I have to be able to give them strategy. It seems to happen more often in this exact scenario when they’re having drama about it. It’s like their mind goes straight to like, but I have to be able to tell them versus when they’re coaching on something that maybe doesn’t bring up any thoughts for them or drama for them at all. It’s much more clean coaching. It’s really interesting as someone who watches people coach a lot. It’s just really interesting when I see that happen, it’s like oh, you’re like good with it in every area except this one thing that you are struggling with yourself. And yeah, I just think we should normalize it. It’s like this happens.
Keina: Definitely. And I would say for anyone, I think all of us struggling with this, I think the thing that makes it, that I remind myself because I have a group of friends that are also coaches, like DL or Kimmy or Brigg, you too, you’re my friend.
Lindsay: Thank you.
Keina: But when we’re able to have real conversations where people are being vulnerable and being able to watch some of my friends coach themselves through different situations, I’m like dang, you showed up like that and I also know what’s going on underneath. That helps me, I feel, be a better coach in the sense of I don’t need to be worried about some of those things that my brain wants to be worried about.
Lindsay: Yeah. So good. I love that. Well thank you so much. I think this is going to be so useful for everyone that is listening. So thank you for agreeing to do this. Thanks for coming on and just throwing me under the bus, just airing all the dirty laundry. It’s perfect. And yeah, that’s it. Thank you.
Keina: Well thank you for having me. I appreciate it. And if you listen this far into the episode, thank you so much for listening.
Lindsay: I know, we’ve gone over what usually my plan is. The one question I forgot to ask you before we started, is do you have a hard cutoff time? I didn’t ask so hopefully you’re fine. But I just wanted to keep going because I just think this is going to be really useful for people.
Keina: If you are listening, I hope that you took something away. So thank you for having me.
Lindsay: Listen again, take notes, do whatever you need to do. Learn all the things. Go hire Keina if you need to do that. She’s amazing. Now tell them where they can find you. Tell them all the things. Share anything you want about where they can see you.
Keina: So I’m on Instagram at Wealth Over Now and then I also have a podcast, it’s called Money Files. So if you want to have me in your ears every Tuesday, you can download it and listen.
Lindsay: We will link all of that in the show notes. So if you’re driving, don’t worry. It’s linked in the show notes, you can get it. As soon as you get home, click the link, you’ll find Keina. Thank you, thank you, thank you. This has been amazing and I’m so grateful that you agreed to do this today.
Keina: Thank you.
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.
