My five-month coaching container isn’t about achieving perfection. Some clients treat financial growth like a checklist, trying to rush through it. However, if you approach your relationship with money with the intention to get it done as quickly as possible, you’re missing out on developing lasting money habits that will serve you in the long run.
In today’s episode, I dive into the concept of a money pause. A money pause is an opportunity to ask yourself why you are making a financial decision. Every choice has both intended and unintended consequences. When you’re overwhelmed by fear and anxiety about money, you act impulsively and don’t consider the broader financial impact of a quick purchase on Amazon or using your entire bonus to pay off credit card debt.
As a financial coach, my goal is to help you shift your habits. By pausing to think about why you are making a decision, you can regain control of your finances and achieve goals faster. Ready to start making intentional decisions about your finances? Tune in to learn how to implement a money pause the next time you feel pressured to make a financial decision.
I explain what a money pause is and how to use one effectively, hitting on these key topics…
- [05:50] Power of a money pause: paying the wrong credit card
- [10:18] Intended vs. unintended consequences of financial decisions
- [14:23] Disrupting the “I’ll figure it out” mentality
- [20:02] Power of a money pause: leveraging bonuses effectively
Tune into this episode of Money Files to learn the power of a money pause and how to navigate financial decisions intentionally.
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 the power of a money pause, check out my episode How Chelsea Changed Her Money Mindset and Embraced Her Value!
Transcript for “Stop, Think, Spend: Implementing a Money Pause for Better Financial Decisions”
Intro: Hi and welcome to Money Files. I’m Keina Newell from Wealth Over Now. I work everyday with professional women and solopreneurs to help them get out of financial overwhelm and shame so they can experience more flexibility and ease with their finances. Are you ready to gain confidence and learn to manage your finances intentionally? Tune in and grab financial tips that will help you master the way you think about and manage your finances.
Keina: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Money Files. I am excited to talk to you as always and I actually want to talk to you about something that I’m actually seeing with clients. And I’ve been talking to clients a lot about pausing. Like I just need you to pause to make a decision. I want to talk to you guys about the power of a money pause and what I see with clients that come to me. They’re like, Keina, I’ve been thinking about my money. I’m ready to make a change. And sometimes they feel, to be honest with you, they feel like I need to get everything right in this five months. Then my time is going to be done with Keina and I like need to get things right. And guys, I can tell you that the process of getting better with money, it is a continuum.
It is a journey and I want all of my clients to know that, even after the five months, that’s not a finish line. My goal is for you to evolve. If you listen to the interview that I did with my client Lyne, we worked together, we actually worked together for more than five months, but she’s had an evolution in how she thinks about and manages money. And that’s true for a lot of my clients. Actually, I did another client episode just like checking in with people because I think it’s fun to check in with people with my client Muhawo, and we talked about like where she is after she’s gone through money coaching. And I think that these clients have learned the power of a money pause.
I would encourage you to listen to either of those episodes or any of my client episodes because they can just tell you the realness of working with a money coach, whether you’re in my container right now or you’re thinking about working with me. I think it’s important for you to hear from people who are similar to you and they would tell you like, oh my goodness, I just felt like money was something that I couldn’t ever manage or figure out. So I would say listen to those Money Files episodes. And guys I’ve worked with everybody, I’ve worked with the client that’s like Keina, I have surely never been good at managing my money to Keina I’m just trying to go from good to better. And I’m actually, like one of my favorite clients that I worked with very, very early on. I feel like she had a come to Jesus moment in like our second-to-last call together. But now she is thriving, she’s flourishing, she has some Turkish towels in her possession, but she changed everything about how she thinks about money.
And she wasn’t perfect, if you will in my container. She definitely was door dashing and doing all the things. But I say that because my five-month coaching container is about helping you shift your habits, it is not about perfection because there just is no such thing about being perfect, even I’m not perfect with my money. So my goal is that when you’re working with me, I want to help you build belief in yourself and I want you to know the why behind your decision making. And I don’t just want you to be getting check marks. Like this isn’t school, we’re not going for the A, we’re not going for a five out of five. But because of the clients I work with who are type A, they’re like but Keina, did I get a five out of five? Am I doing well? Can you give me a grade?
They want that satisfaction. But that’s a lot of why I start my coaching calls with asking clients to reflect on their own process. Like what are wins that you’ve had since we last talked? How do you notice your own financial habits changing? Like we have those conversations because I as their coach want to be a mirror and reflect back to them how they’re different from when they started with me. And oftentimes I will tell people, I’m like, do you remember where you were when we had a consult? Do you remember the things that you were saying? Like you don’t say those things anymore. Like you have shifted, you have changed. And so I want to reflect those things back to my client because I want them to get out of, like am I doing this right mentality and I don’t want to mess up mentality because my goal is not, like I said, for you to get a check mark.
My goal is for you to build that belief in yourself specifically because if I can get you to build the belief in yourself as we’re in the container, I know that I can help you create sustainable money habits, I can help you create sustainable change. And that is one of the biggest fears is like, is this time going to be different? Like am I actually going to have a different result? And I always tell people when they’re on a consult with me, I’m like, we’re shifting who you are. We’re shifting your being. And so like yes, this time is going to be different. I am not an app. I am a person and we are reflecting on the things that actually are happening in your life. And I am going to help you develop a new way of thinking about money. And by developing a new way of thinking about money, you are going to create different results.
So when I was thinking about this, like the power of a money pause with one of my clients recently, who I can’t remember how far along we are, but we were actually, on one coaching call we had talked about that she needed to make a credit card payment and it was a reflection of some things that she had put on her credit card. And so we were paying like the things that she had put on her credit card in the last week. So the payment was about $400 that she knew she needed to pay towards her credit card. Well she has multiple credit cards. And so what she did on accident was she paid $400 to the incorrect credit card. And so when we got on our call, she’s like, Keina, I made a $400 credit card payment to the incorrect credit card. She basically was like, because I didn’t want to mess up and I wanted to do the right thing, I made another payment of $400 to the correct credit card.
And so I ask her, I’m just curious what would’ve happened had you pressed pause? Like if you could think of in your brain or in front of you, you know how the pause has those like two parallel lines. If you could like press that pause button on your money decision in the moment, what would’ve happened? What other questions could you ask yourself before you made that dual payment? And like a couple of the things that I was exploring is like, you made the wrong payment, but what are you making that mean about you and where you are in the process? So that’s an internal question that you would have to ask yourself and you could potentially be thinking, oh my goodness, I’m a failure. I can’t do this. I knew I couldn’t get this right. And if you can actually stop and pause and think about that, what you’re going to be able to catch is that what you’re really telling yourself is, here I go again, I’m failing at the process.
But if you can notice that your brain is taking you down that loop, what you can also say to yourself is that’s not true. You can also tell yourself, I actually had $400 to make an extra payment, which that’s really cool. I’ve never really been able to do that before. And actually, I’ve never made credit card payments based off of how I’m actually spending week to week. So I am making progress, I just slipped up and I hit, like I signed into the wrong account and I made the payment to the wrong card. So you could make it not be about you failing if you were able to press the pause. Also, if you were able to press the pause button long enough before you made the money decision, you could ask yourself like, would it be okay if I could just accept the fact that I made the payment to the wrong card? Yeah, I could do that. That stinks.
I still made a payment but I made it to the wrong card. But also if you could pause long enough to do that, your brain might also say like, oh, I wonder if I could call and actually talk to the credit card company and tell them, Hey, I made a payment last night on accident. Can you actually refund me? Because when you’re in good financial standing, you can do those types of things. I know that one time I think I paid off my entire credit card balance, but I didn’t mean to. And what happened was that I called and I was like, excuse me, can you give me my money back? I didn’t mean to pay off that whole credit card. And surely they did. They gave me my money back because I didn’t mean to pay the whole credit card.
But if you can’t take a pause, a money pause, you can’t ask yourself that question if you are going from your thoughts about not wanting to mess up, wanting to be perfect, like that perfection is going to get in the way of you being able to find different solutions and to be able to figure out different things about yourself and to be able to figure out, like I said, what other options do I have available? The other question that we talked about as I was like, I also want you just to stop and think because we want to think of like money in real time. I always tell my nephew, I’m like, tell me about the consequences. I want you to tell me about the positive consequences and the negative consequences or sometimes I’ll say the intended consequences and the unintended consequences when we’re talking about decisions that he makes.
But it’s the same for my clients. Sometimes I’m like, Hey, let’s think about like what are my intended consequences and what are the unintended consequences of a decision? And once again, not placing shame or blame or any of those things on yourself, but just being able to mentally walk yourself through a decision when nothing is on the line because you haven’t made the decision. If you’re in a pause, you haven’t made the decision and you’re making calculations here. And so in this case, I was asking her like what would the extra payment mean for your account? So if you want to make a $400 payment but then you make an extra $400 payment, that means that $800 is going to be drawn from your account. But have you planned for that? Do you have the flexibility to actually make an $800 payment versus a $400 payment?
And so if you are on a money pause, you can ask yourself what are the intended, what are the unintended consequences? So if you are going through this, it’s like, oh well the unintended consequence here is that I would have to pull like $400 for my savings but I just got to a thousand dollars. Do I really want to pull that down? Or you might say like, I actually don’t have any extra wiggle room to make an extra $400 payment. So I don’t want to put myself in a financial bind where I’ve been getting ahead with my other expenses. I don’t want to change that so I’m actually not going to make the extra payment and I feel good with the fact that I made the $400 to the wrong card and I’m just going to live with that decision. But doing that money pause, like I said, is going to allow you to ask questions.
And even if the result is the same, even if she still hadn’t decided, Hey, I’m making this other payment to the correct card, she would have different reasons for making that decision besides just the reason of I don’t want to mess up, like I don’t want to mess up is not a good enough reason to make a decision because I don’t want to mess up is not building trust with you. And financial trust is one of the cornerstones of what you need to create financial change. And the way you build trust with yourself is to be able to institute something like a money pause. And then after you’ve gone through your decision and you like the reasons that you’ve gone through the decisions, you can see how the decision plays out and you can be like, oh, I actually like how that played out for me or I didn’t like how that played out for me.
Here’s what I would do differently. But it creates a reflection cycle for you that you don’t currently have and that you don’t possess because you operate out of like fear or you operate out of anxiousness, you operate out of shame and just wanting to do the right thing. And so I want to unravel and undo that. So like I said, you can make financial decisions that you actually feel confident about and not making decisions just based off of your fear. Like one of the things I recognize with my clients, so if you’re a client, I recognize this about you. If you are thinking about being a client, I also recognize this about you, that right now with your money you do things really quickly and you don’t necessarily sit with your thoughts, you don’t sit with your feelings about money, you just kind of hope things don’t blow up in your face.
Or you just have, you’re like really, really comfortable with the “I’ll figure it out mentality” and I want to disrupt that for you. I want you to be comfortable engaging with yourself about your thoughts and engaging with yourself about your feelings about money. And I want you to build that comfort so you know like oh I can actually start to trust how I’m feeling. And when you’re actually working with me, the beautiful thing here and I was telling her, I was like, you didn’t have to make the extra payment because you know you had a call on the calendar, you could have gone through and pressed pause. You could have messaged me in Trello which is something that clients can use in between coaching calls to be like, Hey Keina, this happened. This is what I’m thinking.
So you literally have me as a sounding board once again being able to build that trust with yourself. And so a money pause isn’t just for when you’re making it, trying to decide if, oh my goodness I made an extra payment on a credit card or I made it on the wrong credit card. It’s not just for that. You can use a money pause before you click checkout on Amazon, before you click checkout on Nordstrom.com. Just being able to pause yourself before you make a decision and you can ask yourself, especially when it comes to shopping, one of the questions I love to ask myself is, how did you get here? Literally how did you get here? And I say that because with social media and so many things like inundating us throughout the day, whether it’s our feelings or things that we’ve been scrolling, is that I think subconsciously there are things that come into our brain that we think we need.
And if we are just shopping out of emotion, we don’t activate like a Hey let me actually stop and pause before I actually make a purchase. And so a money pause is a great, great thing to use when we’re looking at the checkout card. How did you get in your Amazon account? How did you get at Nordstrom? Like you could literally be in your kitchen, I’m giving you an example where I’m like in my kitchen, I’m like, oh, I need like a lemon zester and like I could be in my target app in a heartbeat and I recognize honestly, I’m like, do I need a lemon zester? And so I can ask myself like, how did I get here? Keina, how’d you get here? And I still don’t have a lemon zester. I don’t really think I need a lemon zester because I may be use two recipes out of the year that ask me to zest some lemon and I think I can figure it out with a really sharp knife.
I got sharp knives, I’m good. But like I said, just being able to recognize how I got there because things are so accessible, like in 10, 20 years ago I wouldn’t have been able to be immediately in my target cart. What I would’ve had to do is write it down on a list with a pencil and with the next time I go to the grocery store or I went to the mall, I would’ve had to like physically picked it up, but it would’ve made me have an instituted pause. And so I think we have to institute pauses for ourself because there are too many things that we can get quick. We can do anything in 60 seconds. And so being able to institute that pause is also going to help you be more intentional about your spending and help you be spending on things that you actually value.
I was talking to a client recently on a call and we were just talking about like her personal spending philosophy. I was like her personal like investment philosophy and just thinking about like what have you learned about yourself in terms of what do you actually like to spend money on? And she’s like, Keina, since working with you, I realize that there are a lot of things that I say that I want to do, but I have been spending money in ways because like, I had FOMO and I didn’t want to miss out and I feel a lot more confident being able to say no to things even though I have the money for it. And it’s literally because she’s been more intentional and she’s been pausing about her decisions. And so I’m telling you, a money pause will put more money in your account and it will help you feel less anxious about your finances.
It’s also going to help you get rid of that. Like, oh my goodness, I feel like having a budget, it’s so restrictive. Budgeting isn’t restrictive guys like your thoughts about money is restrictive, but budgeting actually helps you spend on the things that you actually want to spend money on. Going back to the lemon zester, like I could get the lemon zester, but then when I’m thinking about like how much am I actually using it, I would actually rather, spend my money in a different way. I’ve just avoided spending $10 for an appliance that’s going to sit in the drawer and I’m never really going to use, it’s a simple thing. But when I think about like how many things are like that in our lives where we acquire things simply because we can’t allow ourself to stop and think, stop and pause before we engage, they have unintended consequences for us.
Another reason you might want to institute a money pause, just to give you another example is like before you use your bonus to pay off your credit card and I know this is bonus season for a lot of my clients because as we get towards the end of the year, this is a great place to be like, alright, I’m going to pause. Okay, let me actually think about what’s going to happen if I pay off my credit card fully. What are the unintended consequences of that? And what are the intended consequences? Well, the intended consequences, the things that I want to happen is that I want to pay off my credit card debt. Okay, that’s clear. I want to like make sure that I’m not making a monthly credit card payment towards this specific card.
Some unintended consequences of paying off my credit card might be like, I haven’t really made a plan to make sure I cannot use my credit card again. So potentially I could go back into debt because I haven’t thought about my upcoming expenses. I haven’t stopped to think about what’s coming up for me in the next 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. And these are things like if you’re working with me, we talk about and if we haven’t talked about them, I’m telling you right now because my philosophy as a coach, especially when it comes to paying off debt, is I also want to make sure you have safety funds. If we pay off all of your debt and you don’t have safety funds when something happens like you needing to get your car fixed, or you’re telling me, Keina, I have a $1,500 trip that I’m taking in the next month.
If we haven’t actually set that money aside, so you have safety funds, you are going to be really bummed when you have to use your credit card again. Now you’re like, oh my goodness, I’m back in debt. See, I told you I couldn’t get out of debt. And so it’s going to fuel that fear that you have about money and things not changing for you and you not being able to actually make financial progress. So with a money pause, a money pause is really an opportunity for you to be curious with yourself about why you’re making a decision and to be able to talk to yourself about like, are there other decisions that I can make in this moment? If there are other decisions that I can make in this moment, what are they? What results do they create for me? And you may never have thought about your money like that before and that’s okay, but I want you to start building that habit.
Once again it’s not about you being right or you always having the right answer, but by you doing that, you are going to be able to build sustainable habits for how you want to manage your money. You’re also going to be able to change your relationship with money where everything isn’t like adversarial, where you’re just like, I’m never good at managing money and I’ve never had money saved. Do I start saving money? Just like, think about all the narratives that come up for you when you think about your finances. So for my clients, I want you to start instituting a money pause. For those of you who are thinking about working with me first, I need you to go book the call because you’ve been thinking long enough and you’ve been lurking because y’all tell me you lurk.
And I want you to start working towards instituting, like I said these money pauses in your day-to-day decision making because it’s going to help you start thinking about, the next $500 decision that you have to make. But it’s also going to help you start thinking about like, how do all these things get into my grocery cart? Am I actually going to use what I have here in my cart? So you can use a money pause for something like at the grocery store, or you could use the money pause for something bigger. Like, I’m really thinking about paying off all of my credit card debt since I have my bonus in my account. So these are just great things for you to actually be able to practice on this concept. So thank you so much for tuning into the episode this week and I look forward to chatting with you soon. 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.
