The Critical Link Between Budgeting and Financial Awareness

Money Files

In today’s episode I discuss common things I see as a coach that keep my clients stuck in basic budgeting. Too many people think of budgeting as paying bills. This mindset paints an incomplete picture of spending habits. It won’t get you out of a paycheck to paycheck cycle. My goal as a coach is to bridge the budgeting gap between paying bills and how you want to spend your money.

I encourage you to track your spending this week and identify what you spend money on that isn’t part of your budget. But track to learn, not to punish. A great budget isn’t about restriction, it’s about knowing your numbers, understanding your spending habits, and identifying what you want to spend money on. 

Building a budget with a financial coach (me!) is a journey we take together. My overall goal is to be able to create a plan that allows you to do what you love and spend money in ways that align with your values. So if you are ready to start on the path to living a life of drama-free spending, I am ready to help.

I hope this episode encourages you to shift your mindset about budgeting in a positive way because…

[00:10:44] When you understand your relationship with your money on a deeper level, you’re going to feel more confident with how you’re spending your money. You’re going to talk to yourself differently with how you want to spend money.

Tune in to this episode of Money Files as I cover common things that keep my clients stuck in basic budgets.

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 ON THE CRITICAL LINK BETWEEN BUDGETING AND FINANCIAL AWARENESS, CHECK OUT MY EPISODE ON HOW TO START BUDGETING WITHOUT RESTRICTION & TRANSFORM YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH MONEY!

Transcript for “The Critical Link Between Budgeting and Financial Awareness”

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.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Money File. So if you are listening to this in April of 2023, tomorrow is April 19th, and on April 19th, I am doing a special money class that is free for you, but my money class is about three keys to drama-free spending. As a six figure earner, whether that’s in your business or in your nine to five, you have arrived at that point where you are making more money than you’ve ever made before and it’s a place that you’ve always desired to be, but yet your money flow, your cash flow doesn’t feel like what you want it to feel like. And I wanna help you create a system that allows you to spend money drama free. Oftentimes, the feelings that a lot of my clients come to me with, they’re talking about their feelings of shame and guilt, feeling really overwhelmed, not knowing where to start, like these are the things that people literally tell me when I get on the phone with them when we’re doing a consult. 

And so by way of working with me in my five month coaching partnership, what happens is people start to talk about how money feels fun. Money feels easy, they know exactly what to do, or they may even have a hypothesis for why something doesn’t make sense when it comes to how they’re managing their finances. But the reason that they’re able to do that is because I help them implement a system that allows them to spend money drama free. It means that they can go to Whole Foods and spend money on the fancy cheese and not be stressed about it. It means that they can buy a plane ticket for their mom to come and visit them, just to spend a week with them and not feel like, oh my goodness, I shouldn’t have spent that money on the plane ticket.

It means being able to have your annual girls’ trip and being able to be on a yacht with your friends. That’s what drama-free spending looks like. And drama-free spending is something that I want you to be able to have in your life. I don’t want every single year that you’re like, I’m going to get my finances in order. I’m going to get my finances in order. No friend. I want you to be able to feel really confident with how you’re managing your finances. So what I want you to do is put me on pause. Make sure that you’ve registered for 3 Keys to Drama Free spending, that’s going to be on Wednesday, April 19th at 12:30 PM Eastern Standard Time. After we go through the 3 keys to drama free spending, you’re going to have an exclusive opportunity to apply to work with me in my one-to-one five month coaching partnership, like that is where the magic happens for my clients, where they learn to shift their money mindset, where they really start to implement the tools and the different resources that they may have heard on my podcast or the being able to get out of budget culture, if you will, and really change the way that they think about money and the way that they manage money.

So if you go to my show notes, you can register for my money class, 3 keys to Drama Free Spending. And if you are listening and you’re like, Keina, where do I go right now? You can go to Wealthovernow.com/masterclass. So I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. So as I was saying earlier, thank you for joining me for another episode of Money Files, and I actually just want to talk to you about some of the common things that I see as a coach that keep my clients stuck in basic budgeting. I don’t believe that budgeting is something that you need to have a master’s degree to be able to do. You don’t need to be good at math in order to budget, but what you do need to be good at is being curious with how you want to spend your money. Oftentimes what I find is that people feel really restricted by the thought of having a budget. 

And so the thing that they focus on the most is the things that they have to pay. And so they think about paying their bills, and that’s the number one focus. It’s like, I need to be focused on paying my bills. And so because they’re focused on paying their bills, they do that really well, but they don’t have money for the other things in their life, or they may even miss things that they want to spend money on or they are spending money on. One of the exercises I always have my clients do is I have them track their spending for me and I have them track their spending, not because I’m worried about where their money is going, like in a negative sense. I have them track their spending because I want to build their financial awareness. 

The difference in between just being able to pay your bills and feeling like you manage your money well and being in control is financial awareness. And so in developing financial awareness, you are going to decide in advance where you want your money to go. You’re going to be curious about where your money is going. And so what’s happening when I ask clients to track their spending is that I want them to learn about where their money is going day to day, week to week. And what that helps, especially in the beginning of our coaching relationship, is that we find expenses that they’ve missed.

Today I actually had a coaching call and I was going through the couple that I’m working with, and we were looking at their expenses. And so as I’m looking at their expenses, I’ve been listening to them talk about their family. I’ve been listening to them talk about their goals. And so I know some of the things just from the beginning parts of our relationship about how they probably like to spend money. And what they know is that they know their bills. They know their bills really well, and so I want to bridge how they want to spend their money with them being able to also know how they need to pay their bills in their life. So as we were going through their expenses, I’m asking them like, oh, well do you have a house cleaning service? They’re like, oh yeah, we do have a house cleaning service.

So we’re literally going through their budget that we make together, like they’ve started it and then I go in and I’m like helping them see where they might have missed some things. And so I’m asking them about like house cleaning because they have kids. I’m asking them, can you tell me more about like what does summer look like? Like we’re in April. And so I know especially because I was in education what summer looks like for parents. Like, you have to start paying for summer camps. You’re paying for your kids to go to take swim lessons. Like there can sometimes be more expenses as a family in the summer than during the school months. Or like your kids may take up sports in the summer. So I’m asking them all these questions out of curiosity so that way we can build a plan that works for them month to month.

So just by way of me questioning them, we found multiple things that they hadn’t included in their plan. We went back and we included home repairs. We went back and included the summer expenses. We talked about what does it look like if you wanted to do like a, his and her allowance. So you know that the money that the husband was spending or the wife was spending doesn’t touch any other part of their budget or part of their goals. And so we were able to expand their spending plan or their budget beyond just paying the bills. And oftentimes when I’m in the coaching container with clients, that feels very different for people because we’re not just talking about, tell me about your bills. And I think that that’s the difference of working with a coach is that me as a coach, I’m going to help you incorporate those things that you love.

When I was inviting you to my money class, like the 3 keys to drama free spending and I was telling you about like I had a client that like her and her girlfriends, they went on a trip to Croatia and they were on a yacht. Like I saw the pictures, I know they were on a yacht. We had a coaching call after that. But we incorporated that into her plan. So that’s something that she gets to enjoy and engage in without feeling stressed by it. But also when we were talking about her trip to Croatia, I’m talking about like, okay, tell me about the things that you do before you go on a trip. Oh, you get your hair done. Oh, you get your nails done. Oh, you have a wax appointment. Oh, you generally buy clothes before you go on this trip. So we’re incorporating all of these things, which sometimes I think of as hidden numbers and hidden figures that we don’t pay attention to because we’re so focused on getting the bills right, that we don’t think about how we love to spend money and how money moves in our life. 

And I don’t want you to be scared of asking yourself that question because it’s a really important question to ask. It’s why you decided to make more money because you want to spend on things that you love and that you enjoy. And when I’m working with clients, I want them to be able to expand in this way because it also, like if you’re someone especially that’s stuck within, I have a lot of clients that we are talking about like how scarcity shows up. It also helps us see like how we’re making the amount of money that we need to make. And it helps us see if we make more money, here are the things we get to do. We get to donate to an organization, we get to make sure that we have more money that’s like philanthropic related or we get to put more money towards our retirement, whatever that may be. 

But I started this dialogue with you talking about why I have my clients track their expenses and I have them track their expenses because the thing that shows up for them is like, oh yeah, I forgot that on Tuesdays the first Tuesday every month I have book club. And so I usually take a bottle of wine. And so sometimes that can throw my grocery budget off. Like it’s little simple tweaks like that that can help people feel better about how they’re managing their money. Tracking your expenses can give you insight on you as a spender. And that’s not a negative thing. That’s a positive thing. So that when you understand your relationship with your money on a deeper level, you’re going to feel more confident with how you’re spending your money. You’re going to talk to yourself differently with how you want to spend money. 

And for me, like when I’m helping clients build out a budget, I want them to know that your budget is this flexible tool. We have it as a guide, but it’s not like set in stone. And maybe at some point, like in the beginning of our coaching relationship, it might feel like a little bit where I’m like, Hey, I need you to do these couple of things, but then next payday, here’s how we’re going to be out of the paycheck to paycheck cycle. Or I need you to do these couple of things in your business finances so that next time you get an invoice, like we have a good flow for you being able to pay yourself or safer taxes or having your business expenses, like building this financial awareness and being able to help you create a budget where you actually feel like you’ve incorporated the parts of your life that you want to incorporate or that you’re able to fund the parts of your business that you desire to fund, really helps you actually fall in love and enjoy the process of knowing your numbers. 

Like that is the goal and that’s the plan. So what I want you to do this week, if I’m giving you a task, I’m giving you homework. First I want you to sign up for the money class, 3 keys to drama free spending. But I also want you to go to the link that’s going to be in the show notes and download my Financial Habit Tracker. And I want you to just track your expenses this week and see what comes up. And I want you to see, like the special question I want you to ask yourself, especially if you have a budget, is which of these expenses aren’t showing up in my budget? And then see where you can actually start to incorporate those things that aren’t showing up in your budget, like maybe this month you’re like, oh, this is the month that I pay my annual Costco membership. 

Well, now you can put that Costco membership into your budget. That is an expense. You don’t pay for it every single month, but you can break that Costco membership. Let’s say you have the $60 Costco membership. You can break that down into setting aside $5 every single month. $5 doesn’t seem like a lot, but next April when Costco wants their $60 and they take it out of your account, you’re not going to feel an impact. You’re not going to be talking about like, okay, well with this paycheck I need to do this and that paycheck, I need to do that. Like that’s how I help my clients, my six figure earners get out of the paycheck to paycheck cycle, is because we’re able to look at their finances beyond just one paycheck, beyond two paychecks. 

We’re looking at it for the year, we’re looking at it for the life that they desire to create, and we’re building that financial awareness around what needs to be included in their numbers. So if you have enjoyed this episode and there is something that resonated with you or any of my episodes, I would appreciate it if you are listening wherever you’re listening and tuning into, I would love for you to leave my show a rating, and I would love for you to provide a comment. I find so much joy in being able to go through and read the comments, hear what’s resonating with you. And I know so many of you have reached out to me on Instagram, or I’ve heard from you on Facebook, I’ve heard from you even via email. But for more people to be able to find this show, I would love if you would go and leave my podcast a rating and also leave a comment. And until next time, have a great week.

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.

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