Last week I introduced the say do gap the space between what you say you want financially and what your actions are actually supporting.
This week I want to give you a framework for understanding why that gap exists and what it actually looks like in your day to day relationship with money. Because the gap does not look the same for everyone, and understanding your specific pattern is what makes it possible to actually close it.
In this episode, I’ll introduce the Four A’s of Money Alignment so you can better understand the gap you need to close to reach your financial goals this year.
The Four A’s are not a personality test. They’re a tool to help you illuminate why you might feel financially stuck in this season so you can respond with appropriate action.
We’ll explore what it means to be Avoidant, Aspirational, Accidental, or Aligned with your money and how recognizing your current pattern can help you move toward a financial life that actually supports what you say you want.
Because the goal isn’t to be perfect with your money. It’s to understand what you’re building and make decisions that help you build it.
In this episode you’ll learn…
[00:05:10] Why the aspirational money pattern is so common among my clients
[00:10:30] What avoidance actually looks like for a high earner, why a six-figure income can make it easier to put off dealing with your money
[00:15:45] Why the accidental money pattern can look really good from the outside while still leaving you without ownership of your financial success
[00:20:20] What aligned money management actually means and why it has nothing to do with being perfect, never overspending, or having a car that never breaks down.
[00:25:40] How to use the Four A’s as a tool for identifying your current money pattern in different areas of your financial life, so you can stop judging yourself for where you are and start making decisions about where you actually want to go.
Tune in to this episode of Money Files to learn the four A’s of money alignment and identify which pattern is showing up in your financial life right now so you can finally close the gap between what you say you want and the actions that will actually get you there.
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 episode on the four A’s of money alignment and finally understanding your money patterns, check out Episode193 | Why Even High Earners Are Living Paycheck to Paycheck.
Transcript for “The 4 Money Alignment Types: Why Your Money Goals Aren’t Working“
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. If you listened to last week’s episode, then you already know that last week I talked about something called the say-do gap. And the say-do gap is simply the space between what you say you want and what you actually do. So for example, you might say, I want to save $20,000. But then when we look at your bank account, your credit cards, and your actual spending, you might see that your money is being used in ways that don’t really support you saving $20,000. You might say that you want to pay off debt, but every month you’re making a payment towards your credit card. And then you end up turning right back around and putting more money on your credit card. So you might say that you want to start investing.
You might say that you want to buy a home. You might say that you want to have three months of expenses in the bank. But when we actually look at what’s happening with your money day to day, and we look at your actions, they might not support the thing that you say that you want. And that is essentially the say-do gap. And in last week’s episode, I asked you, I said, look back at your last 30 days of spending. I didn’t want you to judge yourself. It wasn’t about shaming yourself, but I just wanted you to simply observe what are the things that I am actually doing? Like if someone else knew absolutely nothing about me, except what they could see in my bank account and on my credit card, what would they assume that I want? Like that’s a tough question, right?
Even for me, I’m like, Ooh, what would you say? What would you say that I want? And where your money goes, it says more about you than the things that you say that you want. And once again, don’t shame yourself in that moment, but it could tell you about your mood. Like I love looking at people’s bank accounts because there are patterns there that gives me insight on who you are. And I never want to avoid who you are. I want to work with who you are so you can actually get what you say that you want, especially as a six figure and a multiple six figure earner. That’s really, really important.
So if you didn’t listen to last week episode, go back and think about, not just think, look through your credit card, look through your bank account. And what does your bank account in the last 30 days say that you want. It’s going to be sobering. And I want you to be in that sober place because if you set intentions at the beginning of this year, and you said like, I finally want to get serious about my money, it is going to sober you up to think about like, okay, if I want to do that, I also have to face who I am. And if that feels hard, if that feels difficult, that’s why I love being a financial coach. You can work with me and we, in my five month coaching partnership, get to partner together to actually see like, what does your money say about you? How you spend your money? What does it say about you?
And then how do we create a plan to honor who you are, but also move towards who you desire to be, and the goals that you say that you have. Because once you can see what you’ve been doing, then you can actually do something about what you’ve been doing. And you can move in the direction that you desire to move in. I’ve worked with over, probably close to 200 people in the years that I’ve been in business, far more than 200. I’m just thinking about like individual one-to-one clients that I’ve worked with. And there are patterns that I notice in terms of what people say that they want, and then what people actually do.
And I have developed basically a framework that I’ve been sharing with clients to help them see where they are in terms of money alignment. And what I call this is the four A’s of money alignment. And the four A’s are avoidance, aspirational, accidental, and align. Now I know that we all love a good like Myers-Briggs and a Colby test, but this isn’t like for you to be like, Oh, I’m an Enneagram three that’s avoided. This is not what this is. But I feel like I needed to help clients understand why they weren’t making progress or to understand why they were making progress. And I always want to find a way to give you more ownership over what’s actually happening, because I want you to rewire the way that you think. I want you to be able to be honest. I want you to see what’s going on. Like I love to be able to help clients turn the lights on and say, Oh, I see, I see what’s going on here.
So these four A’s, I’ll say them again. The four A’s are avoidance, aspirational, accidental, and aligned. They only have titles because I want to help you identify the patterns. And I want you to know that you can change any pattern that you see. Any pattern that you like, you can change it. Any pattern that you don’t like, you can change that too. So if you see yourself in one of these patterns right now, you may see yourself in different patterns in different areas of your financial life. And you might be incredibly aligned when it comes with your retirement savings and completely aspirational when it comes to paying off your credit card debt. You might be accidental with your savings and avoidance when it comes to actually looking at your credit card statement.
So this is simply, like I said, a tool for you to think about your money patterns. So please don’t listen to this episode to judge yourself. I want you to listen to this episode and think like, where am I right now? Because that is always where change starts. And I don’t want you saying I need to change everything today because it’s not about changing everything today. It’s about having awareness because awareness allows us to change who we are in any area of our life. So let’s talk about the four A’s. The easiest way to understand them is to think about two things. The first thing is, what do I want my money to do? And the second thing is, what are my actions currently supporting? Sometimes these two things aren’t actually working together for us. And then sometimes they are.
So let’s start with the one that I think a lot of my clients actually would recognize themselves in immediately. And you might be there too. And that is aspirational. So aspirational means you have a vision for your future, but your current behavior hasn’t caught up to that vision yet. So somebody who’s under aspirational money alignment, they are able to articulate what they want. I want $30,000 in savings. I want to pay off all my credit cards. I want to stop living paycheck to paycheck. I want to be able to go on vacation without putting it on my credit card.
And you are able to say, these are the things that I want. And you probably think about them all the time. But when we actually look at your day-to-day behavior, your money is still primarily being used to support present versions of yourself. So the reason that’s true is because your current money system hasn’t caught up with this future version of yourself. In my last episode last week, I was telling you about the client that I’m calling Maya, who she wants a $12,000 emergency fund. And this is what I would call a long-term desire. But if Maya creates a budget that says, I’m going to save $1,000 every single month. And she ignores the fact that she takes her dog to the vet. If she ignores the fact that she likes to actually be able to support her family.
If she ignores the fact that she wants to take trips with her husband, that her car actually requires maintenance, or the simple fact that she likes to go to Sephora. What’s going to happen is she’s going to get to the end of the month. Life is going to have lifed. And now look what happens. She can’t actually save the $1,000. And this is where we actually have to pay attention. Because the problem isn’t that Maya wants to save a thousand dollars. It’s not that that’s the wrong goal for her or the wrong desire for her. The problem is that she is creating a plan or she might be creating a strategy that is created for the most perfect version of herself.
We could call it the perfect budget for Maya. And perfect budget Maya is saying like, Oh, I don’t buy gifts. I never take my dog to the vet. I don’t get my car repaired. We’re not going on any trips. I have no interest in skincare or cosmetics. And then we have real life Maya who’s showing up. And real life Maya, she’s spending money. Then Maya thinks, Oh, my goodness, like I’m failing. But she’s not failing because she spent the money. She’s going to have failed because her plan didn’t actually account for the way that she actually likes to live. Like she’s ignoring all of the things. She may have been going off of just managing like a list of bills. And she’s just purely looking at the math of things.
This is where people get stuck budgeting because they’re looking at the math and they’re not actually considering their patterns. On paper, she has enough money and the math works. And so if we do the math to hit her $12,000 emergency fund, she should be able to save a thousand dollars a month. But does that math work with the way that you actually live your life? Are you considering the things that you enjoy doing? Are you considering the things that have come up in the last six months in the last year that were going on your credit card that actually caused you to get into debt? The things that caused you not to be able to save.
And so that’s why she’s aspirational, is that she has this beautiful vision of where she wants to go, but her current behavior and hear this, her current systems wouldn’t be supporting the journey. And that’s where the say-do-gap shows up. You say you want something long-term, but your actions are still primarily supporting what you want to do today. So that’s aspirational.
Then let’s talk about the avoidant person, the person that is under avoidance. So avoidance is different. Avoidance is when both your focus and your actions are primarily short term. So I would say these people say things like, I’ll figure it out later. Life is too short. I’ll start next month. I don’t even want to look. And again, I don’t want to make this sound like you’re sitting in your house talking about, like, I don’t care about the future. I generally think that the person who is avoidant, you probably feel really overwhelmed. And this could look like you making $150,000 a year, even $250,000 a year. And knowing deep down inside, I need to look at my money, but feeling so many things in your body, whether it’s your shoulders or your stomach, and not being able to actually get yourself to a place to where you can look at your money. And this is really, really common.
This is one of the reasons in my five-month coaching partnership that we actually look at the numbers together. It doesn’t allow you to be avoidant. And you can have that real-time support where we’re going through. And I’m going to point out things that you would never actually see. And when I say that, like good things that you would never actually see, and things that you can actually take action on. But when you’re under avoidance, you probably know that there’s a credit card balance.
You know your savings account isn’t where you want it to be. And you know every time you get paid that the money feels like it disappears. How is it that you make over $200,000, but you still fear overdraft fees? Or maybe you are actually overdrafting. So instead of looking at your money, you hustle to earn more money. You make sure or you try to make sure that you’re paying your bills. And you are really in this place where you’re thinking about, I’m just going to deal with these things later. But you never really get to the point where later comes. It’s a very stop and go relationship with your money.
And the thing about avoidance is that sometimes the immediate discomfort of looking at your money feels worse than the long-term discomfort of not dealing with it. So you don’t actually look at your money. And your income can actually make this easier. Because when you make six figures, you can sometimes avoid the things. Because you do, and I say this in air quotes, “make enough.” So your income can clean up some of your mistakes. If you overdraft your account, like you know that next paycheck is coming, you could put $4,000 on your credit card. You could overspend a little bit. And so the consequences don’t always hit immediately. But eventually you start looking around and you’re going to talk to yourself about how is it that I’ve made $200,000 and I got a $50,000 bonus, but I feel like I have nothing to show for it. And that’s often where avoidance finally becomes impossible. And you decide you want to do something about your money.
The next A that we’re going to talk about is accidental. Accidental is interesting because it can actually look really good from the outside. So accidental is good things are happening with your money, but you’re not completely sure why. So you have money in your savings account. Your retirement is increasing. You’ve paid all your bills. You have decent credit. But if I were to ask you, what are you working towards financially? You don’t have an answer. You might tell me like, I guess I’m working towards retirement. Or if I ask you, how much do you want in savings? And you tell me, I don’t know. I think I need more, but I’m not really sure.
Or if I ask you, what are you doing with your raise? And you would tell me you haven’t really thought about it. Again, this is where you being a high income earner, making six figures, multiple six figures can camouflage and hide this pattern. Because when you make good money, you can make a lot of decisions without immediately experiencing the consequences. So you can have a financial life that looks really stable because your income is high enough, but being stable is not necessarily the same thing as intentional. And I think the question for the person that has accidental money alignment is how much of your financial success has been intentional and how much of it is simply that you make enough money to recover from your decisions.
And that might actually sting a little bit, but it’s a really important question for you to ask because with the accidental money alignment, I find that people are oftentimes scared to spend money. I know that I have achieved some of these things. I have savings, I have retirement, but they’re scared to ask other questions such as what would happen if I needed to take six months off? Or I don’t actually know how to plan to have a child or I don’t know how to plan for a wedding. I have this money in savings, but I’m also scared to spend this money in savings.
What happens if I want to change careers? There’s a lot of what ifs with the accidental person that they don’t feel like they have ownership of their financial success. I would say that that’s the main characteristic of this money pattern is that there is limited ownership of their success. So if the money were to go away, their money in savings, their money in retirement, their good credit score, they would not be sure whether or not they could replicate that success.
And then the last money type that I would offer you is aligned. And I want to be very clear about what aligned means. Aligned doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re perfect. It doesn’t mean that you never overspend or that your car never breaks down or that you’re not even impulsive sometimes. But aligned means you actually know what you’re working towards and your day-to-day decisions support it. So you know what your money is for and you know how to respond when life happens and how to adjust. So if we go back to my client, Maya, an aligned Maya is not saying I have to save $1,000 every month no matter what happens. That’s not true.
An aligned Maya might say, I want $12,000 in my emergency fund. I also know that my dog goes to the vet. I like to give to my family. I have a car that needs maintenance and I want to be able to go on a trip with my husband. So instead of pretending like those things aren’t going to happen, she makes space for them. And when something unexpected happens, she doesn’t throw away the whole plan. She adjusts. That’s alignment. Because alignment is about being in a space where you are able to think about past versions of yourself, make space for that. But also knowing that you can’t predict every single thing that’s going to happen, but you don’t make it mean something about you when something you couldn’t have predicted happens.
Instead you say, okay, well, I didn’t know that my breaks were going to cost me $500, but how can I adjust to still stay on plan? Where do I need to shift my numbers now that I have this new information? It’s about knowing what you’re building and being able to make decisions in support of that. So when I think about the four A’s, I want you to think about them like this. Avoidance is saying I’m mostly making decisions for today and I don’t really think about what comes next. Aspirational is saying I know what I want for the future, but my current behavior hasn’t caught up. Accidental is saying things are mostly fine, but I haven’t been intentional about where I’m actually going or even maybe what I’ve actually built. And aligned says, I know what I’m building and my actions are helping me build it.
So remember this framework is not meant to judge you. The goal here is to give you language to better understand what are some of your patterns? Where are you maybe stuck right now as a six figure earner? And if you’re listening to this and you’re saying, Keina, I feel like I fall aspirational. Like that’s really good. I’m excited for you. If you say like, Keina, I actually feel like I am maybe somebody who’s been avoiding my money. I think that that’s good that you know that as well, because then we can say, what do you want to do next? What are the next steps you want to take? Even if you’re aspirational, how do we get you to continue to stay in this aspirational bucket?
And remember your financial life could go in between the graphic that I’ve shown my clients, it’s four different quadrants, but like your life could go in any one of these quadrants. And at any different times, there have been times in my life where I’ve been more avoidant and haven’t wanted to look at things because I’m like, oh my goodness, I just like, don’t have it in me right now when I think about trying to work towards a financial goal. So I might be more short sighted, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t switch over to being aligned. Or I might even be aspirational at times where it’s like, I have a goal, but then what are my actions?
My actions don’t align with the goal that says, I want to save $30,000 a year in retirement. Like, what do I need to actually change? And what do I need to actually shift? So this is why I like this framework is because you could be within any four of these quadrants. You could identify the pattern that’s happening for you. And then you get to use your income to be, like, the goal is to be in this aligned quadrant. And to see that you have your desires and your actions are actually aligned with what you say that you want. Again, that doesn’t mean that you are perfect.
Perfection is never the thing that I’m striving for, for clients. It is getting you to be flexible in how you think about your money. It is to be flexible with how things might change and to be responsive to how things might change in your life, because that’s the thing that keeps you in the game of being someone who is intentional with your finances. So if this episode resonated with you and you’re like, Keina, I heard myself in one of these quadrants. I’m going to go deeper into them in my next episodes. I just wanted to be able to connect the say-do-gap with what that means about your money patterns.
And if you are making six figures, multiple six figures, and you’re like, Keina, I know I need help. I feel really stressed. Whatever that looks like. If you feel really overwhelmed, if you’ve been listening to my podcast and you know you need to change some things, I would invite you to apply to work with me. You can go to my show notes, or you can go to my website directly, just wealthovernow.com. At the top, it says apply here. You can book a call with me and I would love to support you in paying off debt, saving money and reaching whatever you are working towards next financially. So thank you so much for tuning in until next week. 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.
