You have money in savings. You contribute to your 401(k). Your bills are on autopay, and your credit card gets paid off every month. From the outside, and honestly from the inside too, things look pretty good.
But if someone sat down with you and asked what your savings is actually for, whether you are on track for retirement, or what you would do if you needed to rebuild your emergency fund from scratch, you might not have a clear answer.
That is what I call the accidental money pattern.
And it is one of the more interesting ones to talk about because it does not feel like a problem. There is no crisis, no overdraft, no credit card balance spiraling out of control.
But there is a difference between your money accidentally ending up in the right places and your money being directed there on purpose. And that difference matters more than most people realize, especially as your income grows and there are fewer immediate consequences for the financial decisions you are not actually making.
In this episode, I am walking you through what accidental money alignment actually looks like, why it is so common for high earners who have automated their finances and never come back to revisit those decisions, and the four things I want you to do to start moving from accidental to aligned so that every dollar you have has a job and you actually know what that job is.
In this episode you’ll learn…
[00:05:20] What the accidental money pattern actually looks like and why you can be saving, contributing to retirement, and paying your bills on time while still having no real clarity on whether any of it is working toward something specific.
[00:10:45] Why accidental money alignment is especially common as income grows, and how automating your finances without revisiting those decisions means your old choices are still making your money decisions today.
[00:16:30] How to give every dollar in your savings account a specific job, and why separating your emergency fund from your travel fund and your car fund creates more peace of mind and less shame around spending money you have saved.
[00:21:15] What to look at when you review your retirement account beyond just the balance, including the questions to ask about contributions, growth, and how much you actually want to spend in retirement.
[00:26:40] How to audit your recurring spending and automatic transfers to make sure the money leaving your account every month is intentional and still reflects the life you are living right now, not a decision you made three years ago.
Tune in to this episode of Money Files to understand the accidental money pattern and learn the four things you can do to move from accidentally saving money to intentionally building a financial life that reflects where you are now and where you want to go.
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 accidental money pattern and finally understanding the difference between accidental and intentional financial progress, check out Episode 68 | Is Retirement an Age or a Number?
Transcript for “The Accidental Money Pattern: When Your Finances Look Fine on Paper“
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. We’re in the middle of a series about the four A’s of money alignment. And we are talking about avoidance, aspirational, accidental, and aligned money types. And I would say, as we’ve been going through this series, I want to make sure that I am not diagnosing you in a way that it’s like you can never get out of this. So I think about these four A’s living on a quadrant, probably because I’m a former math teacher. But I think we can find ourselves in and out of any one of these four money alignment types at any point in our life. Because sometimes you will find that there are new seasons in your life where you’re like, oh my goodness, I used to be so on top of my money. And now I feel like I’m not as on top of it as I want to be.
And so maybe you find yourself being a little bit more avoided. And when you look at what I’ve been calling the say do gap, you’re not actually what you’re saying you want versus what you’re actually doing. Those things aren’t really aligned to like, implied by the name aligned is where we want to be. But we’re not always in that aligned space, even for myself. And today I am talking about being accidental. And accidental, I think is an interesting one, because when you have accidental money alignment, you could be someone who has money in your savings, maybe you contribute to your 401k, you have automatic transfer set up, you pay your bills on time, you even pay your credit card off each month, and you might even have like a decent amount of money sitting in a savings account.
And so when you look at your finances, overall, you’re thinking about the fact that you’re doing okay, and you might be doing okay. But there’s a difference between your money intentionally working for you versus your money just kind of, it accidentally got there. I oftentimes hear this, like when someone’s on a consult with me, it might be expressed as like, you know, Keina, I do have some money in savings. But it came from a bonus that I got, or it came from a life insurance payment, or I won a settlement at a company, like there are just so many different reasons that people can have money in savings. And they don’t necessarily feel like they have control of knowing whether or not like if I spend the money, could I replace the money?
I think sometimes people in this accidental money alignment bucket, they may not have trust in being able to reproduce the results that they have in front of them. I think it’s very, very unique. But if you find yourself in today’s podcast episode, I want to let you know that there’s nothing wrong with you. I think it’s really important to be able to give yourself like, oh, okay, this is interesting context. Like I’m understanding myself a little bit better. And I want you to understand yourself financially. Because when you understand where you are, you can actually do something about where you are, you can change something about where you are. And ultimately, that’s what I want for you. I want you to be someone who can recognize, okay, I’m being avoided, or I do have some thoughts about how I even got this money in my savings account. And whether if I had to dip into my savings account, could I actually put the money back into my savings.
So just to like, give you an example, a little bit more of an example of an accidental person, let’s say that maybe you have $35,000 in your 401k. And you’ve been contributing to this 401k for the last five or 10 years. But you don’t really know what percentage you’re contributing. You can tell me what your employer matches. You don’t know whether you’re on track for retirement, or how much you actually want to even spend in retirement, because you’ve never even really considered those questions. So technically, yes, you are doing a step that someone has told you to do, which is to contribute to your retirement. But you can’t really speak to your retirement beyond the fact that you have money in account, and then it comes out of your paycheck. That’s really all that you might be able to speak to.
I would call that accidental. Or maybe you have $15,000 that’s sitting in your savings account. And at some point in your life, you started saving $500 a month. And you never changed it. So now you have $15,000 sitting in a savings account. But if we were having lunch together, and I’m like, okay, you have $15,000 in your bank account. What’s that money for? Is it for an emergency? Is it for a house? Is it for travel? And you would just tell me, oh, it’s savings. It’s for whatever I need it for. Again, I think it’s great that you’re saving money. But I would say that you are someone who’s accidental because the clarity around why you have the money you have or what you’re going to use the money you have for is not clear. And so that’s what makes you accidental.
And I would say for the accidental person, you’re not necessarily directing the money that you have. So it’s very different than avoidant. You’re not not looking at the numbers. You are doing something, you are making progress. But you’re not necessarily making decisions that may be in alignment with where you are right now in life. So I believe in automating things. I love a good autopilot. I think accidental people also enjoy autopilot. And so they may have automated their savings, they may have automated their retirement. And instead of using this as a tool to avoid decision fatigue, they’ve used this as a tool, but they’ve never actually come back to it.
So you could be in a place where you’re still transferring the same $300 a month, but your income has changed, your rent has changed, your expenses has changed, what you spend on groceries has changed, your life has changed. And so you don’t necessarily go back and revisit the decisions that you’re making. So that’s the action that I’m calling accidental. Your old decision is still making today’s decision. And this might be also happening with your spending, maybe you signed up for a subscription, because you wanted it at some point in time, and it renews every single month. But you don’t necessarily know that it’s renewing because you don’t check your bank account.
And you have things just automated. I think accidental money alignment people, there’s no fire. There’s no crisis. There’s not necessarily you overdrafting your account, you’re able to save, you’re able to pay off your credit card. But the intentionality behind your numbers isn’t there. I think of this accidental person wanting to go like they’re someone who could go from good to great with their money. I actually had a client that I worked with about two years ago, her and her husband. And I would say like her savings felt a little accidental, like she had about $25,000 in savings, sometimes it was 22, just depending on how she was paying off her credit card. And her goal was to hit $30,000. And so she had the same like $500, $500 just seems to be like the magic number, but she had the same $500 contribution going to her savings account.
She wasn’t really making any progress, but she hadn’t taken the time to really look at her expenses. She was able to pay her credit card off every single month. She’s not looking at her account and wondering whether or not she’s going to overdraft. She has things on auto pay, but there wasn’t the intentionality behind how she was spending her money month to month. And really focusing on if I want to grow the savings account that I have from $22,000, $25,000 to $30,000, what does that look like? What might be getting in the way? So the accidental person, they are making progress. And I think as you make more money, as you go from $60,000 to $150,000 to $200,000, you have a lot more financial activity happening.
And so you don’t necessarily feel immediate consequences to anything that you’re doing. So you may just be someone who’s not, you’re not necessarily paying attention to your numbers, not out of avoidance, but because you’re in this space where you’re like, Keina, I’m making some progress. I am doing something right. Like at least I’m saving, at least I’m contributing to my retirement. And that is a great thing. I want you to continue doing that. However, as someone who may be in a space where you have this accidental money alignment, I want you to be aligned with your finances. And so if you are in a space where you’re listening to me right now and you’re like, Keina, I think I might be this person that has like some accidental financial success. And when I think about whether or not I feel confident with whether I can retire, or I feel confident if I can make a big purchase, or I feel confident, like I can rebuild my savings account if it went away.
If you are finding yourself in that space, I want to tell you how to move yourself from accidental money alignment to aligned money alignment. I feel like there’s a lot of words. There’s a lot of words with that. So here’s your action plan and what I want you to do. I want you to take your major financial accounts. And I want you to think about what is the job of every single dollar in that account. So if we were starting with your savings, I want you to be really clear. What is this money for? Maybe you have $30,000. We’ll just take my client. If you have $30,000 in that account, what’s that money for? Is it for an emergency? Is it for if your car breaks down? Is it for travel? Is it if your mom and dad, if you need to buy them a plane ticket?
The reason you want to get crystal clear on that is because you might decide $30,000, that’s actually what I want for a rainy day fund. That’s what I want for my three to six months. So if that’s true, then you might decide, oh, I actually want to be more intentional about saving for travel, saving for if my car breaks down, saving for the holidays. It is going to make you someone who is more financially confident to know that all of your savings isn’t in one place. I think that’s the number one change that I see with a lot of clients that come to me and they have money in savings. They’re someone who I would categorize as accidental.
And when we actually break up their emergency fund and we give it clear purpose, they have so much more peace of mind about spending money that they have saved. And they experience less shame about spending money that they have saved because we put intentionality and we give every single dollar a job that they are putting towards their savings. So we put clarity there.
The next thing I’d want you to do is look at your retirement. I think that is another great place as someone who might fall under this accidental bucket, is when you are looking at your retirement, what are you contributing? What percentage of your paycheck are you contributing? Are you maxing out each year? What’s your company match? When will you be vested at your company? Is the money that you’re putting into your retirement account, is it growing year over year? Is it sitting there in cash or is it actually invested in the market? Those are things that you want to pay attention to.
I have another podcast episode that talks about retirement being a number and not an age. I will link it in the show notes, but those are the questions I want you having with your retirement account. And I know that sounds so funny, but it’s thinking about, okay, it’s not just, am I saving? But it’s like, what is this money going to be for? How much do I want to be able to spend in retirement? And bringing curiosity to that conversation. And I will be the first to say, I think retirement is still one of those things where I’m like, I mean, I kind of understand it. I’m watching my parents go through it. Will I have enough? I don’t know. But right now, I know that one of my retirement numbers is 3 million.
On a different day I might tell you 5 million, but it just depends. But like 3 million is built off of, if I want to be able to pay myself $10,000 a month, which is $120,000 a year. And being able to draw that number down, then I know that I’m going to need about $3 million to be able to retire. And so knowing that number, I’m able to think about, okay, what are the aligned actions that I need to take? What is my say-do gap? What am I saying versus what am I actually doing when it comes to my retirement? And then lastly, I want you to look at your recurring spending. So what is coming out of your accounts automatically each month? What expenses feel intentional to you? What expenses feel unintentional to you?
And look and make sure that your money is going in places that you desire it to go. I’ve had clients before who didn’t know that they were paying $70 for a subscription. Or we have made it through an entire year of budgeting and we find annual expenses throughout the year that they didn’t realize they were still paying for. They don’t realize that they’re still paying for it because they’re not looking at their accounts. It’s not a big impact in terms of their account going to zero or stopping them from paying a bill. But that’s money that’s leaving. And sometimes this is thousands of dollars as you think about it throughout the year. And especially after you think about it year over year.
And you want to recoup that money. You want to think about how do I want to funnel the Costco membership that I’ve been paying for? Yes, it’s a $60 expense, but annually I could be dropping $60 into a Roth IRA if I wasn’t paying this Costco membership that I never use. Or another one is like people have multiple cloud storages. They have Google, they have Apple, and they’re paying for these things that they’ve signed up for in the middle of the night because your phone said, hey, I’m full or Gmail told you, sorry, you can’t send any more emails. And we’re never going back to make sure that we’re unsubscribing, that we’re unlinking our credit card. So that’s the next thing you want to pay attention to.
And make sure that you understand that everything that is coming out of your account is intentional. And finally, look at your automatic transfers. So the automatic transfers that you may have going to separate accounts, asking yourself, am I choosing this number for my current life? Or is it coming from a decision that I made a year ago? Is it coming from a decision I made five years ago? Is it coming from a decision that I made three years ago, even three months ago? But making sure that your automatic transfers are in alignment with what is currently going on with your life. I know with that, with things starting to, like prices starting to shift, maybe your $500 that you’re putting away for travel isn’t enough anymore. And maybe you need to put away $800 a month for travel. So really paying attention to things like that.
So as you’re going through this process, you might find that you want to increase your retirement contributions, or maybe you’ve actually saved enough for one goal and you want to start funding another. But this is what intentional money management is going to push you to look at. It doesn’t mean that you are constantly micromanaging every single transaction. But if you are someone who’s in this space and you find yourself being accidental, just put it on your calendar, even at like your birthday and your half birthday. Put it on your calendar to look at your automatic transfers, to make sure that you still agree with the numbers that you have been contributing on an annual basis. I think it’s a great time to check in, especially with the things that you’re like, they’re kind of set it and forget it. Because I want to make sure that your money reflects the life that you are living, and then also the future that you’re trying to build.
Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. I feel like I’ve kind of been all over the place as I’m communicating my ideas to you. But I really want you to be thinking about these four different money types. And I would even encourage you to, if you’re listening to this series, go back and draw a quadrant, draw that big four square quadrant and think about, where am I? Where in my life am I accidental? Where in my life am I aligned? Where in my life am I aspirational? Where in my life am I avoided? Because it’s going to help you stop feeling overwhelmed and actually giving you a place that you need to start and being able to hone in on, maybe I am more aspirational when it comes to paying off debt. Maybe I’m avoided when it comes to paying off debt, but really being able to look and identify what your stay due gap is. So thank you so much for tuning in until next time, 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.
