Social media makes it too easy to compare ourselves to others, leading many to spend beyond their means and pile up debt.
As a financial coach, my mission is to help you intentionally spend money in ways that align with your future goals. Today’s episode is all about living a fake rich lifestyle and what you can do to stop overspending and start taking control of your finances.
Living a fake-rich lifestyle causes financial hangovers—that feeling of dread, guilt, and shame that keeps you up at night wondering how you’re ever going to pay off your credit card. I share what traps six-figure earners in a fake-rich lifestyle and offer tips to help you align your spending, budget, and financial goals.
Budgeting isn’t about restriction; it’s about making intentional choices that won’t leave you feeling shame or guilt every time you make a purchase. Tune in to learn how to stop living a fake rich lifestyle and start leveraging financial tools that support your immediate desires and long-term goals.
Listen for key points in the discussion about living a fake rich lifestyle…
- [02:04] Defining a fake rich lifestyle
- [03:45] Examples of how a fake rich lifestyle leads to financial hangovers
- [07:08] The pitfalls of letting your offer letter dictate your spending
- [10:42] The importance of reflecting where you are versus where you want to be financially
- [14:36] Learn how to spend now while also securing your financial future
- [14:45] Forgiveness & gratitude
- [18:20] Writing down all your expenses in one place
Tune into this episode of Money Files to learn the pitfalls of living a fake rich lifestyle and how to regain control of your finances so you can spend money drama-free.
Are you ready to start asking for help with your finances? Apply to work with me, and let’s start working towards your financial goals.
If you loved this conversation about living a fake rich lifestyle, check out my episodes, How To Take Control Of Your Spending and Financial Self-Trust: How to Cultivate and Break Negative Thought Cycles.
Transcript for “Stop Living a Fake Rich Lifestyle: Practical Tips for Managing Your Money Intentionally”
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. I want to talk to you today about having a fake rich lifestyle. Oftentimes with clients and even like looking through social media and just because I’m in numbers all day, I think about like what can people actually afford? I know what things cost, whether it’s a new car, a new home, and then I think about how much money people are making and generally speaking, people are what I call overworking their dollars. Their dollars are stressed out and they’ve created a lifestyle that they simply can’t afford. But they’ve created this lifestyle and they feel like they need to maintain it. I think in the society that we’re in right now, this is more prevalent than not because of social media. I even reflect on this for myself. When I’m on social media, I can start comparing. Like, Ooh, such and such is taking a trip, let me take a trip.
Such and such is buying this, let me buy this, where you probably just used to have that in pockets. Like if you go back to high school and you think about the things that your friends had and you wanted, or you go back to college and you only saw those people around you, but now you can compare yourself to the entire world and that comparison causes people maybe even you, I know it’s definitely me to buy things that I don’t necessarily need, but there is a group of people that are living what I am calling a fake rich life. So when you have this fake rich life, it can result in what I call a financial hangover. Your financial hangover is what causes like warm sensation in your chest or a pit in your belly or not being able to sleep at night when you think about your credit card balance, when you think about even the thought of checking your bank statement or logging into your bank account and when you have this rich lifestyle that creates a financial hangover, it’s generally caused by things that you have spent money on that you haven’t really stopped to ask yourself. Like, do I actually value this? Should I be doing this? Is this actually a good financial decision for me right now?
And the way that I see it, like tangibly show up and let me also pause here and say, I am not trying to call you out and make you feel bad, but I do want to call you out in the sense of like, I want you to be spending money in a way that feels good where you don’t have to have the hangover. My clients learn to spend money so they don’t have to have the shame and the guilt, like that’s what comes in the hangover. And then you feel like you were just always on this hamster wheel trying to figure out how to get out of the cycle. But the things that are like rich lifestyle based that can cause this financial hangover is, I’ll give you an example. You buy floor seats to the Beyonce concert. Maybe the floor seats are $2000 a piece and you buy two of them and you put that $4,000 on your credit card knowing that you don’t have the money. And what that actually creates is you are excited about going to see Beyonce, but the things that you’re not talking about is that you can’t sleep at night because your credit card is maxed out and you don’t actually have the money to even really understand how you can begin to pay off those floor seats.
So you are engaging in the rich lifestyle, but you have that financial hangover and that financial hangover is resulting in you not being able to sleep at night being worried about your credit card. Another example might be, you go and you get your hair, your nails and your lashes done, you’ve spent $500 within a week and now you have $9 in your bank account and your payday isn’t for another eight days. And so you have $9 in your bank account. You know you’re going to have to start living off of your credit card and you have engaged in what I’m calling a rich lifestyle. And you got your hair, your nails, your lashes done. But the reality is you have $9 to your name and payday isn’t for another several days. And so you have now this anxiety and this worry that you’ve created that is your financial hangover.
And it could also look like something that you’ve done to yourself where you’re locked into something, you want a luxury car and you end up having a thousand dollars car payment, but you have $0 in savings. And so that luxury car payment, like the hangover part of that is that you don’t have any money in savings and you don’t know what you would actually do if something happened. You are just praying that you’ll figure it out. And so when I think about you having this rich lifestyle, it is a fake rich lifestyle. You can’t actually afford the life that you have. But when you think about it and you think about why you are where you are, maybe you think your credit card bill is high just because of the one time you couldn’t pay it off. Or you think like, oh, I would have money in savings, but just a lot of stuff has happened this year and so that’s why I haven’t been able to save money. Or Keina, yeah, I got my hair and nails and lashes done, but I do that every month.
The only reason I only have $9 in my account is because I had to go get my car fixed and that put me behind. But when you are living this lifestyle, you are not actually in control of your finances. And I know that you are being driven by your offer letter at your job. Your job says you make $200,000. And so because you make $200,000, you believe that a $200,000 earner should have a luxury car, have floor seats, get their hair and nails and lashes done every single month. That is your fundamental belief about being a $200,000 earner. You may have that belief because you’re a hundred thousand dollars earner. You may have that belief because you’re $150,000 earner, but because of how much money you make, you’ve allowed your offer letter. And I am using offer letter very intentionally here. You’ve used your offer letter to dictate your lifestyle, but I want you to know that you can’t use your offer letter or that your overall amount of money that you’re making to dictate how you live, you have to actually decide for yourself like what are my financial priorities and what are my goals?
How much money do I want to be spending? You cannot just spend because you believe that you make enough money, it’s gotten you where you are and it’s causing you to be in this place where you feel the shame and you feel the guilt and you’re like, how is it that I’m making more money than I’ve ever made before, but I can’t afford anything? But when other people look at you, they think that you have it made right? They’re like, dang, she got the house, she got the car. She’s like on Instagram, she got her life together, right? But you know deep down inside you are not where you need to be. And it’s simply because you are living a fake lifestyle. You probably bring in, so when we think about like what actually comes into your bank account, you bring in $6,000 a month because that’s net. That’s not what your offer letter said.
But like taxes, healthcare, all those things have come out. And so when we actually look at what you’re netting after taxes and your healthcare and all of those things, you make $6,000 but you’re really out here spending like $12,000 a month if we actually looked at your expenses or you bring home $10,000 after taxes more than you’ve ever brought in before, but you’re really spending $20,000 a month because I guarantee you, when you got the job that helped you start making $10,000 net income, you equally increased all of your expenses to align with the life that you think you deserve. And there’s a difference in between the life that you deserve and intentionally creating the life that you want. You may think that you deserve the luxury car, but I would ask, does the luxury car fit into the life that you intentionally want?
Because you want to be able to spend money on something without waking up in the middle of the night. You want to be able to give generously without worrying did my account just go in the negative? And so when you make it to these points in life where you’re making six figures, you’re making multiple six figures, you do have to take stock of where am I and where do I desire to be? And sometimes those can be really hard questions to ask yourself because I think it’s natural for us all to want to be a little bit further along than where we are. And on your financial journey, you do have to exhibit some patience. You can’t have everything. It’s like with eating. There are a lot of things that you may want to eat, but you know oh, I can’t eat an entire pizza because I’m going to feel really bad.
And so you don’t eat the entire pizza because you don’t want to feel a certain way. The same thing is true with your money. You may actually want the thousand dollars a month car payment and not necessarily the car payment, but you want the car. But you’re like, I don’t want to spend a thousand dollars on a car payment because that actually isn’t going to help me start saving more for my retirement or that isn’t going to help me save on a monthly basis so I have an emergency fund. And so that luxury car might be something that you deprioritize because it doesn’t actually align with where you desire to go and where you desire to be financially. And that takes a different level of financial maturity than what you have right now. But I want to let you know you can get there. And that’s the exciting part of being able to say like, I’m going to sit down and actually have an honest conversation with where I am right now.
I watch my clients all the time go through this level of transformation where they are shifting how they think about how they want to spend money and what they want to be able to invest in. And they become people that have $0 in savings when working with me to having $4,000 in savings after 90 days or $10,000 in savings after a year of working with me. And they have stopped living this fake rich lifestyle, but they’ve been able to spend on the things that they actually enjoy and that they actually value. And that’s where I want you to be, is in a place where you don’t have to keep up with people on social media. You are using yourself as your own north star and you are using your future self as your own North star because I don’t want you to be in somebody’s nursing home because that’s the only place you can afford to be.
And you have to remember like dang, but I lived a good life with all those floor concert tickets and I’m not, let me be really clear, I am not villainizing floor concert tickets, but I do want you to know the impact. If you have four concerts this year and you are buying $2,000 floor tickets and that’s $8,000, but you don’t have any money saved, that’s not a wise financial decision for you. And if that $8,000 is going on a credit card, it’s also you didn’t just pay $8,000 for those floor concert tickets, you are going to end up paying like $16,000 for those floor concert tickets because they’re going on a credit card and it’s going to take you a year, two years, three years, four years to be able to pay it off. And so sometimes you’re going to have to say, no, I’m not going to buy the floor tickets or I’m going to still go to the concert, but I’m going to buy a $200 ticket instead of a $2,000 ticket.
And those are some of the decisions you’re going to make, but it’s going to be for your future self. So as a six figure earner, I want you to be able to build wealth and be able to think about your retirement in a way that allows you to spend money right now, but also allows you to prepare for the person you desire to be when you actually retire. So if you are in this place where you’re like, Keina, I identify that I am living a fake rich lifestyle, there are two things that I want you to do today. The first thing that I want you to do is I actually want you to forgive yourself for where you are. I talk to a lot of clients who have a lot of shame about not having the money saved or worrying about overdrafting or they worry about like, Keina, my credit card debt is almost maxed out.
And the first thing I want you to do is just forgive yourself. The reason I want you to use forgiveness here is because I wanted to alleviate some of the shame so you can actually start doing the work to get your finances in the place that you desire to be. If your goal is to pay down debt, forgiving yourself is going to allow you to pay down the debt, it’s going to allow you to build the trust that you can be the person that pays down debt. If you have $0 in savings, being able to forgive yourself is going to allow you to become a saver. And I want you to be able to trust yourself, like you need trust there as well. And so that’s going to allow you to trust yourself because you’ve forgiven yourself. And the forgiveness can also be layered with like, I’m thankful for this awakening that I’m having.
I want to thank my debt because my debt has taught me what I value spending on and what I don’t value spending on. Maybe my debt has provided shelter for me in times where I was unsure of where I would live. My debt may even, result in, it’s allowed me to have some experiences with my grandmother who maybe isn’t here anymore. Whatever that looks like for you, just being able to forgive yourself but also have that moment of gratitude for where you are because the journey, shame is going to pop up. And I need you to be able to play like whack-a-mole and hit it. I need you to be able to talk to the shame and be like, hey, yeah, that happened, but I’m on a new path and I am committing to a new journey because I want to be in a place where I can actually spend money and be really intentional.
I want to be in a place where I’m paying down debt and I can see my debt go down and I want to be in a place where I’m saving. And so being able to forgive yourself is going to open up that door of trust, financial trust for you so you can move forward. I think I have, I’m going to ask my podcast editor. I think I have a podcast on financial trust and so if I do, she’s going to put it in the show notes I should know, but I don’t actually know off the top of my head and that’s just coming to mind. But definitely financial trust is something that people build with themselves while working with me. And I want you to be able to also build that with yourself. And I think it’s the number one thing that keeps you from getting started because you tried so many times before and you’re not sure if you can actually stick with it.
So you’re forgiving yourself. That’s the first thing we’re doing. And the second thing I want you to do is I need you to put all your expenses in one place. And this might feel really scary because you don’t even want to check your bank account or your credit card statement because you already know it’s bad, whatever that means. But I don’t need you to be in the dark anymore. I need you to flip on the light for your finances and actually see where am I? Being able to answer the question of where you are is going to tell you like, how bad is it really? You in your head might be saying it’s, oh my goodness Keina, it is so bad, but what does that actually mean? Does it mean that you have, $5,000 worth of debt? Does it mean you are overspending by $500 a month?
What does that actually mean? And so by putting all of your expenses in one place, it’s going to allow you to turn the light on and illuminate like how bad it really is. And when we see “how bad it really is,” it’s going to let what do I actually want to address first? You can then take my, I did a podcast on like how to audit your finances and just going through and thinking about like what do I want to keep? What do I want to revisit? What do I want to cancel? You can’t go through that exercise if you don’t know where you are right now and understand what are the things coming out of your bank account. So when I say put all of your expenses in one place in my show notes, I’ll link my spending plan. But you can use that template to put all of your expenses in one place.
You can look at like, here’s how much money I have coming in and here’s how my money’s going out each month. But it will allow you to assess how bad it really is. And then you can actually see. Like I make $6,000 a month, but oh yeah, Keina was right. I am spending more like $12,000, especially when I factor in the lifestyle that I want, which is to be able to travel or buy concert tickets. And so by actually going through and putting your expenses in one place, you can see like maybe I can do two concerts a year, not five, maybe I’m going to take three trips, not six. And you can see what actual numbers actually align with the financial goals that you have that are more long term. But then what financial goals also align with the lifestyle that you want to have when it comes to spending?
That’s really the power of creating a budget is not about the restriction piece, but so you can make the intentional decisions to live the life that you want and not be caught in this place where you have this fake rich lifestyle, but you also have a hangover about everything that you’re spending on. And so you can’t even enjoy those moments because I do it and then I have to think about my guilt and I have to think about my shame and I have to like feel all of that each and every time that I am making financial purchases and making financial decisions. So if you are in this place and you’re like, Keina, I am definitely living like a rich life and I have a financial hangover from it, I want to let you know that you can change and you can have a different life and you still get to spend money.
I am not coach. Hey team, no spend. If you listen to any of my podcast episodes with clients, they will tell you they get to still spend money, but they will also tell you there are things that they no longer want to spend money on because they actually enjoy saving now. And it’s really exciting to see their savings increase, it’s exciting to see their debt go down, and so they are building a healthy relationship with their finances. So if you are living a rich lifestyle that you experience financial hangovers, I would invite you to apply to work with me in my five month coaching partnership. It is an investment that you’ll make one time, but it will pay for itself over and over and over again because you’ll be equipped with the skill of budgeting. And as you make more money, you are going to know exactly how to use that money to actually build wealth.
And wealth, I would say is better than being rich. Wealth is going to be long-term and sustainable, and you’re going to be able to spend money on the things that you actually enjoy and you’re going to be intentional about the things that you’re spending money on. So if you want to apply to work with me, you can also go to the show notes and or you can also go to Wealthovernow.com and apply on my website. So I look forward to meeting you when you decide, hey, this is it, I got to make a change. I’m ready to get my finances together for 2025 and end 2024 strong. And today’s the day that I’m committing. So I look forward to meeting you, and if you are an avid podcast listener, I will talk to you next week. If you’re not, you’re going to become one. And I will talk to you next week. So have a great week.
Outro: Thank you so much for listening to Money Files. If you’re ready to take the next step to reach your financial goals, head to www.wealthovernow.com/appointment and let’s get started.
