This may feel familiar. You have financial goals, you can talk about them, you’ve written them down somewhere. You’ve explored building your emergency fund, retiring early, buying a home, paying off your debt. Your list has all of the “right” moves you think someone responsible should do with their money.
But if you’re being honest with yourself, there’s still a gap in between what you say you want and what you actually do with your money.
In today’s episode, I’m talking about what I call aspirational money patterns. This money pattern is common for six figure and multiple six figure earners. You make decisions based on what you can afford instead of asking what that money could actually create for you.
I am breaking down what the aspirational money pattern actually looks like for a high earner, why your relationship with money tends to shift as your income grows, and how to start making opportunity-based decisions instead of affordability-based ones.
I also share three things to do this week to start closing the gap between the financial life you keep describing and the one your money is actually building.
In this episode you’ll learn…
[00:05:15] What the aspirational money pattern actually looks like and why you can have a 401(k), a savings account, and real financial goals while still having a significant gap between what you say you want and what your money is doing.
[00:10:30] Why your relationship with money tends to loosen as your income grows, and how the precision you had when you were making less money can quietly disappear when you start making more and give yourself permission to say yes to more things.
[00:16:45] Why the question isn’t simply whether you can afford something and what to ask instead, including how thinking about opportunity rather than affordability changes the way you make spending decisions.
[00:21:20] How lifestyle creep shows up in the small, unintentional purchases, subscriptions, social media impulse buys, and car upgrades—and why none of it feels like a problem until you look back and realize your goals haven’t moved in years.
[00:26:40] The three things to do this week to start shifting out of the aspirational pattern, including how to identify what your spending has been delaying and how moving even $100 toward one goal before your next round of discretionary spending changes what you are able to see about yourself.
Tune in to this episode of Money Files to understand the aspirational money pattern and how shifting from asking what you can afford to asking what your money could create can help you close the gap between the financial life you keep talking about and the one you are actually building.
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 aspirational money pattern and finally understanding why your money is not catching up to your goals, check out 243 | How to Identify the Say-Do Gap That Is Keeping You From Your Financial Goals.
Transcript for “The Aspirational Money Pattern: What Lifestyle Creep Actually Looks Like at Six Figures ”
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 last week, we talked or not even last week, I think it was like two weeks ago, because I took a little break in the series to talk about identity because that was the last week. But the week before, we talked about avoidance as one of the four A’s of money alignment. And avoidance is when you might just have the narrative like, I’ll deal with it later. And that slowly becomes how you manage your money.
And today we’re talking about aspirational. And I think this one is especially important because if you make six figures, or you make multiple six figures, you can look like you’re doing all of the right things. You have goals, maybe you think about your future, you have a 401k, you might have a savings account, you may have some debt, you may have paid off your debt, you may have paid off your debt before, maybe be back in debt. And there can still be a gap between what you say you want and what your money is actually doing. The simplest way I would describe aspirational is this, you know what you want, you’re just not funding it first.
I’m going to say that again. You know what you want, you’re just not funding it first. And I think it’s important to note that because that is literally aspirational, because you have really good intentions. And you still might spend years wondering why you’re not making progress. When I think about the person who is aspirational, if you are talking to them, or you are having this conversation with yourself, for me, I’m usually talking to the person. But if you are the person, then you might be able to articulate that you want to pay off your debt, or you want $50,000 in savings, you would love to be able to retire early, you want to buy a house, you want to be financially independent.
So you are able to talk about the vision of where you desire to be, like you have future language, if you will. And maybe you’ve even over the years, like to give you some credit, you’ve changed some things about how you manage your money, because of the goals that you’ve stated to yourself that you’ve put in a notebook that you wrote down in January. And so you’ve changed some of the things that you’re doing. You’re like, alright, I am trying to pay my credit card off every week, or I’ve opened that high yield savings account, I’ve increased my retirement contribution.
So you haven’t even started to make some of the forward progress that you think is going to help you get to your goals. But despite all of those things, there’s still a gap between what you say you want and the results that you’re actually getting. And I see this a lot with clients of mine who have increased their income. So let’s say you were making $120,000 a year, and then you have done all of the right things. And you’ve landed a new job and you are making $230,000 a year. You were very strategic about that. You’ve almost doubled your income, you’ve developed skills, you’ve network, you’ve put yourself in the right rooms. And so you’ve made decisions that have helped increase your earning power.
So as your income has increased, what’s also happened is that your lifestyle has started to increase as well. So maybe you’ve gotten a nicer apartment, or you’ve bought a newer car, you’ve hired a housekeeper, you are using your bonus to plan annual trips. So there’s things that you’re doing that align with the income that you’re making, that annual income amount that you’re making. And so how you’re thinking about your lifestyle, it’s not necessarily bad. But you’re asking yourself, basically, what do I want to reward myself with? Or how do I want to treat myself? And let me be clear, that might not be the direct question that you’re asking yourself, but it is how you’re thinking.
Like, hey, I’m making $230,000 a year, I should be able to do this, like I should be able to have a nicer car. I should, like you have to be really mindful of where you tell yourself that you should be able to do certain things. And the question really is, so let’s take the car, for example, where you’re like, I should be able to drive a BMW, like I should be able to have a luxury vehicle, because I make $230,000 a year. But the real question is, what else could that $600 or $800 a month payment, what could it be doing for you in relation to the goals that you said that you have set for yourself? Do you see the gap? Because you are more so thinking about what you should be able to do versus looking for the opportunity.
And that is the shift that I’ll talk more about in this episode is like, for this aspirational person, we have to be thinking about opportunities that are available for us. And how are we capitalizing on the opportunities? So if you are already feeling called out at this moment, I just want to let you know that you are not alone. I think one of the reasons that we start to think about what we should be able to do is because I think part of it is that your relationship with money changes as your income changes. When you weren’t making as much money, you probably had to be pretty precise. Like I know when I was making $30,000 a year, we need to make sure the dollars and cents, they add up.
So you knew what your paycheck needed to cover, you knew what bills were coming out, and you knew what you could and you couldn’t afford because you had to. It was by necessity of you making sure that you weren’t getting evicted from your apartment. And then as your income has increased, suddenly you start to think about like, oh my goodness, I have so much more breathing room. Like I’m not holding on to $10 after I’ve paid all of my bills or a couple hundred dollars after I’ve paid all of my bills. So you give yourself some space to breathe, you give yourself some space to play. So you did spend time having to be, like I said, precise about your numbers.
Like I hear this all the time, when people are like, when I made less money, I also feel like I had more money because I was like on top of it. But as you make more money, you start to give yourself more opportunities. You start to give yourself more yeses. And it’s in the little things, it’s the trip, it’s the nice car. It’s like, oh, I’m going to go every single week and get a manicure because I don’t have to just get a manicure once a month because I am making more money or I should be able to help my family because I’m making $230,000. Like that is something I should be able to do.
And all of this makes sense because you are no longer in a place of like survival, you’re in a place where it’s like, I’m making multiple six figures. I feel like I should be thriving and I should be able to do whatever I want. But you stopped managing your money because the way that you associated managing your money was with restriction. And so as you’ve made more money, you’ve stopped managing it because the consequences or what your perceived consequences aren’t there, like nothing isn’t going to not get paid. So you’re living in this space where you’re like, okay, I should be able to cover everything because I make enough. Even if that means a couple of days before my paycheck, like I’m waiting on my paycheck or my credit card is having to cover a balance for a little bit, but then I should be able to pay it off with my next check.
So you put yourself in a different cycle. So what happens with this thinking and as you make more money is that you are not thinking about trade-offs. Maybe at $30,000, you were like, I know my trade-off. You wouldn’t call it a trade-off, but it’s like, I can’t spend this $100 because I actually need that for rent. But now that you are making seemingly more than enough money, you aren’t necessarily viewing what your trade-offs are. You are more inclined to say yes. And let’s say that you had a paid off car. You’ve been driving it for 10 years. It’s not your dream car, but it works. And then you decide it’s time for a new car. And so we’re just going to go with $600 being the car payment. You feel like you can afford it because you make good money.
Your bills are paid and you feel like you have some money left over. So you go ahead and buy the car, but you don’t ask yourself what else could this $600 actually do for me? Like if I redirected this $600 a month towards a financial goal, that’s $7,200 a year because the aspirational person, they’re not necessarily already saving that money. That money is going out in some way, but they don’t know how to account for how that money is going out. They just know I can buy, I can add on a $600 car payment, and then I’ll figure things out. They’re like, we’ll see where the chips fall after I add in this car payment.
And so once again, the question isn’t whether you can afford the car. The question is what are you choosing instead? And that’s a different way that I want you to think about your money because I don’t want you walking around asking yourself, can I afford this every time you buy something? I want you asking yourself basically, what are all of my options? What am I choosing instead? What are my trade-offs here? Because that’s the opportunity we want to be able to see. So just to give you a little story, I had a 2002 Honda Civic and I can’t remember, I think I had that car for like 12 years.
And then I started being like, ooh, I got the itch to be like, oh, I should get a new car because my car is 12 years old. But I didn’t immediately go and get a new car. I slowed myself down for a little bit to make the decision. And in my head, I had the number of like, I’m okay with a $500 car payment at the time. And I had also set up some non-negotiables for myself before I made that investment. And one of my non-negotiables was that at my job, I wanted to be maxing out my retirement. And my other non-negotiable was that I wanted to be saving at least a thousand dollars a month because those attached to like my long-term goals, my long-term desires, that I wanted to feel confident that I was saving enough for retirement.
And I also wanted to make sure that I had an emergency fund that could help pay my rent or help pay my mortgage if I was ever without a job. So I had to be maxing out my contributions and I had to be saving at least a thousand dollars a month. And if those two things weren’t being met, then I told myself I couldn’t take on a new car payment. Once again, it wasn’t about affordability because I could have gone down to saving $500 a month and then added to the car payment. But for me, it was like, Keina you don’t actually need a car. You want a car. And that was like just a way of checking myself. But the whole reason that I got there with myself is because I had been in the place before where it was like, where you find yourself just saying yes to lifestyle creep over time.
In the end, you don’t really have anything to show for it. Or you decide that it’s not something that you value. And I knew for myself, if I can set up my retirement contributions, if I can save a thousand dollars a month, if I can make those decisions right now, I think I was probably making like $110,000 at the time. If I can do those things, making $110,000, assuming that I start making more money, that when I make more money, that money is going to be my money. And I won’t ever have to think about saving for retirement or saving a thousand dollars a month again, because I’ve already made that decision once. And that’s what shifted for me to get me out of that like aspirational place of saying, Oh, like I would like to know that I had enough for retirement one day, or I want to have money in my emergency fund, is I’ve had to go about thinking about trade-offs when it came to adding new things to my life.
So when you are in this aspirational space, we don’t want to think about affordability. We want to be thinking about opportunity. So you might be making decisions based on whether or not you can afford something instead of what could that money help me create. There’s a difference there. And it’s a very important distinction to think about what could this money help me create versus can I afford this? Like, yes, you can afford the dinner. Yes, you can afford the trip. Yes, you can afford the new furniture or the new car. Maybe you can afford the $200 random order that you just bought. But what else could that money do for me? What else could that money do for you?
And those are the things that I want you to confront. And even now, when I’m thinking about looking at my own spending habits, especially with social media, social media is like, I feel like I analyze it not to any like degree where somebody would hire me to analyze social media, but I think so much about how it influences buying patterns and now they have ads. So like when you’re flipping through stories and you see some influencer that’s like, oh my goodness, here’s the best Walmart finds. Or here are the dresses, the eight dresses you need for fall. And I definitely have found myself being like, oh, I think I need these dresses for fall. I wasn’t thinking about those dresses before I got on the app, but it is very easy to find yourself having spent $200, $300 without thinking about it.
So that’s the money that’s coming out of your account that you’re not necessarily thinking about. It may not be taking you in the negative. It might be adding to your debt in some ways. Like when I look at people’s expenses is that when you go back through and see how am I actually spending money, you’re like, dang, I’ve spent a lot of money without really thinking about it. It was unintentional. Once again, you’ve given yourself that permission because as you’ve made more money, you’re like, I should be able to do this. Once again, you should, you also should be able to save for retirement. You should be able to pay off your debt. You should be able to save five figures. And the way that you should be able to do it, is that you have to look for opportunities to set those things in motion and to trade some of the habits that you have right now.
I want you to create desire and tell yourself, why do you deserve to retire? Why do you deserve to pay off your debt? Why do you deserve to hit your 12 month emergency fund goal or your six month emergency fund goal? Like you are constantly going to have to make those things sexy because to be honest, they’re not as instant as getting a box and a package at your door. They’re not as instant as going to a car dealership and driving away in a car where you’re like, Oh, look at this like sunroof. It’s a moonroof. It’s got the front seat and the back seat. But if you can make these trade-offs for the next year, the next 24 months, the next two years, and you are thinking about your experience of spending money through opportunity versus affordability, it will reshape everything.
And it will actually give you more opportunities to say yes, because you won’t be chasing the same goals year after year. You’re going to say, Oh, I’ve paid off all of my debt. I actually just talked to a client that I worked with. I want to say three years ago now, maybe three or four years ago. And she was telling me like, Oh my goodness, Keina, it’s so good to talk to you. But she’s like, just so you know, I am married now. I’ve moved and I’ve paid off all of my consumer debt. But had she not made this decision to work with me and made the decision to look for opportunity to pay off her debt, she wouldn’t have had that result. So like, you got to think about your trade-offs. And what am I currently doing as an aspirational person when it comes to my money? And how do I look for those opportunities?
So if you’re listening and you’re like, Keina, I already have some notes. Yes, this is me. I’m not really trying to raise my hand, but yes, it’s me. I want you to do three things. First, I want you to look at your spending over the last 30 days, and it’s not a good or bad reflection. We’re just looking at a spending. Where did your money go? What spending was actually intentional? So look at the purchases that you made on purpose. And then what spending happened because maybe you saw something, you wanted something, maybe you felt a certain way, and that spending was more unintentional. And then secondly, I want you to ask yourself, what did my spending delay? What goals have I been talking about? And I can see how I’ve delayed some of my goals.
I’ve been telling you the $200 that you spend on Amazon. I’d like to know what influencers got you at Walmart, trying to buy up the hottest fall dress. And so you spent $200 that you didn’t even plan to spend that day. But what could that money have done for you? Could it have gone to your emergency fund? Could it have stayed in your emergency fund? Could it have gone towards your credit card? Could it have funded maybe your next trip without putting it on your credit card? So maybe you could have started a travel savings. But just really thinking about, like what opportunity did I not think about that this money could have helped me?
So in my five-month coaching partnership, that’s the whole… When we’re doing a deep expense audit, we’re looking for opportunities. We’re like, oh, and sometimes it could be as simple as like, you know you have a Dropbox subscription, or you have Dropbox, you have Google Cloud, or Google Storage, and you got Apple Cloud. You got all the storage things. So sometimes it’s in the day-to-day subscriptions, but we go through together to look for those things because we want to funnel them, those expenses towards the long-term desires that you say that you want in your life. And third thing that I want you to do is I want you to just pick one goal, not 12, but just one. Maybe it’s your emergency fund.
Maybe it’s your debt. Maybe you want to increase your retirement, or you want to build a travel fund. And before your next round of discretionary spending decisions, move $100 or $200 towards that goal. You would be surprised if you’re like, oh, if I just kind of redirect my money how it changes what I’m able to do. And I want you to experience what it feels like to actually move towards the goal that you’re talking about. In true, for real, for real, what I want is that you work with me. And I want you to work with me, not just simply for the sake of working with me, because I want you to build all of these opportunity decisions around a budget.
It is a much clearer picture of what you can do when you have a budget. I can give you the tip to say like, hey, transfer $100, transfer $200. But I love to be able to go through your bank accounts and dig through and say like, here’s an opportunity. Here’s another opportunity. Here’s yet another opportunity. I am working with one of my clients right now, and she wants to be able to have money to send her dad and her aunt. So one of the opportunities we’ve been able to find is how she can use, she’s bringing in now, she just got a raise, she’s bringing in $10,000 a month. One, I’ve been able to help her manage her raise. And then two, she’s like using her raise to actually start funding like her family fund. So she can say yes to the opportunities. She’s saying yes to contributing to her joint account.
Like she’s doing all of these things that she never thought she would actually have the opportunity to do it. Because we’re not thinking about affordability, we’re thinking about opportunity. And how are we aligning what you say you want to do with what you’re actually doing? And so we have it all mapped out. And she’s making those decisions every single week that we’re meeting together, as well as doing the fun things that she wants to do, because she is a human. And so that’s included since we’ve been working together, she’s gone to Hawaii, she hasn’t stopped those things. I mean, we’ve gotten tighter on some of her expenses around her pets and just making sure that we have numbers there.
But she’s truly being able to do more with what she has, versus feeling like, dang, I’m always having to catch up and make credit card payments on things that I thought I could afford. And maybe it doesn’t really fit into the plan. So being aspirational isn’t about giving up your life. I want you to hear that. But I want you to be able to enjoy it. But I also want you to be able to look at your bank account and know that your money is helping you build the things that you say matter. You don’t need to stop wanting nice things. I want you to become more intentional about what gets funded first. I want you to fund your future lifestyle as much as you fund your current lifestyle. But I want your future lifestyle to come first.
I want your future lifestyle to be the thing that we’re making and filtering decisions with. If you tell me, hey, Keina, I want to retire with $5 million in retirement. Okay, like, what do we need to do now to make that happen? What decisions can we put on autopilot? I mean, that’s the work that I do in my five-month coaching partnership, is really helping you make these behavioral shifts, so that you can become someone who manages their money well and it feels sustainable. So you can see yourself pay off debt. You can see yourself building towards your retirement. So you can see yourself becoming a saver while you have more money to put towards the things that you desire. I want to buy a house. I want to have a baby. I want to get married. I want you to have a both and lifestyle when it comes to your finances.
If this resonated with you, you know a friend that needs to hear it, definitely send that podcast episode. But also if you’re like, Keina, I need to work with you, go to my show notes. You can apply to work with me there, or you can go to my website, wealthovernow.com and you can book a call with me as well there. 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.
