You know how to make money. You’ve always made it work. But now, hustling feels like the only plan you’ve got to create more financial space.
In this episode of Money Files, I talk to my high earners, the folks who’ve always made it happen, about why hustle is no longer a sustainable savings plan. I’ll unpack how relying on your ability to earn (and earn again) keeps you in a reactive financial cycle that looks like freedom from the outside but feels exhausting on the inside.
You’ll learn how to shift from hustle to ease by creating an options fund, a pot of money that supports the lifestyle you actually want, not just the one your hustle can cover. I’ll walk you through how my clients are building financial systems that finally reflect their income, values, and future goals.
If you’re tired of making money only to watch it disappear, this episode will help you pause the grind, get off the hustle hamster wheel, and move your money with purpose.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
[01:11] What defines a Hustler Saver
[03:18] Why hustle is not a sustainable savings plan
[06:39] The difference between fake financial freedom and real security
[10:44] How high earners fall into hustle traps, even with 7-figure businesses
[12:10] The Options Fund: your safety net and freedom tool
[15:00] How to build a repeatable, purpose-filled money system
Tune in now and learn how to break free from the Hustler Saver cycle and finally build savings that stick.
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 this episode helped you recognize your Dipper Identity, make sure to check out the following episodes:
Episodes 183:The Dipper Identity: How to Break the Cycle of Dipping into Your Savings
Episode 182: From Leftover to Intentional: Transforming Your Savings Mindset
Episode 181: The Side Eye Fund—Your Path to Financial Freedom.
Together, these episodes form a powerful series to help you shift from hustle-mode to real money clarity with systems that work.
Transcript for “The Hustler Saver: Why Making More Money Still Leaves You Broke”
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. So today I want to dive into one of the last saver identities I’m going to do on my podcast. In the last couple episodes, we have redefined the emergency fund. We were talking about the side-eye fund and we have talked about the Leftover Saver. We’ve talked about the dipper and the truth about why your budgeting keeps breaking. But today’s episode is for my high earners, the ones who always make a way, the ones who always make it happen. And what we’re going to be talking about today is the hustler saver, and this myth that earning more is truly the answer. So I just want to paint the picture for my hustlers out there just in case you’re not sure if you should raise your hand yet, but you’ve always been known to hustle like it is in your bones.
You may have gotten it from your parents, your grandmother, somebody, right? But it’s how you got your first car. It’s how you saved for the down payment on your house. It’s how you’ve covered surprise expenses. But even before you made six figures, you were willing to work the extra job, you were willing to pick up the shift, you were willing to stay up late, you were willing to make the side money and it worked. Hustling got you to where you are right now. But now we can’t rely on hustling to be the savings plan. And that is the trap because for so long you have relied on hustling to be the thing that has your back. And so there’s nothing wrong with hustling, like I admire the ability that you have to pick up an extra shift and make things work and to figure things out.
But when hustle is like the only plan that you have, you are never truly, truly, truly going to feel ahead because your safety net is your work ethic. And that in and of itself is fragile. So the hustler is never stopping to say, what happens when I can’t or I don’t want to hustle? What happens if life changes? What happens if you get sick? What happens if you just want to break? And so your current system that you have with your money right now doesn’t actually account for ease. And if ease isn’t built into your financial plan, then hustle will always feel necessary. It’s not ever going to feel optional. So if we were just taking a minute to like sit down, have some coffee, break bread together and just be real, you do have money coming in and you have a lot of it, but it doesn’t feel like freedom.
And maybe there’s a system, or excuse me, there’s no system, sorry, I’m giving you too much credit right now, but there’s no system, there’s no buckets for how you want to divvy the money up besides paying for bills. And you don’t really have clarity. Your money system or lack thereof means that you’re always reacting to how you’re paying bills. You’re earning money just for it to go out and for you to spend it. You are funding your lifestyle, but you’re never really slowing down long enough to feel the safety inside from making the money that you make. And what you’ve created is what I call fake financial freedom. It looks good on the outside to everyone else and maybe even to yourself. But when we think about what’s happening on the inside, and if you were to be really honest with yourself about what you’ve achieved financially, you are really one emergency away or one canceled contract or one tired weekend away from feeling like everything could fall apart.
And so I want to offer to you that hustling has always worked for you so your brain trust it. But when you think about saving, it feels a little bit slower, it feels restrictive. Maybe it doesn’t even feel purposeful but I want you to think about how could saving money actually help you create expansion because it’s not about you hoarding money. It’s not about you being in a place where you’re thinking like, okay, but you know tomorrow’s not promised, that’s not what saving money is about. For you as a hustler, saving money is about you creating options. And so for you, I want you to have not an emergency fund, but I want you to have an options fund. I want you to have a pot of money that gives you room to breathe, a pot of money that allows you to sit down. If you need to sit down, it’s going to allow you to have rest.
It’s going to allow you to be able to choose because you starting an options fund doesn’t mean you can’t hustle, but it means that you’re going to be able to hustle and move in a different way and your hustle is going to have purpose. So there’s a reason that I know that you’re a hustler. There’s something inside of you that wants to be able to take care of yourself. Maybe you want to be able to take care of other people. You always want to be able to have. And by having an options fund, you are creating a place to always have. And I want you to have that safety of always having and always being able to show up in the ways that you desire. So I just want to say to you that if you’re listening to me right now and you’re thinking like, okay, Keina, you read me like a book, please get out of my head.
This is me. I am a hustler.
It’s not that you have any type of money problem, but it’s really going back to systems and you don’t have to give up your hustle mentality. I just want you to shift how you think about money. So I don’t want you to be thinking about naming the next hustle opportunity for the next thing that you want to buy. This next check is not for the trip. This next check is not for the car. This next check is not for your mother. I want you to be building in how you think about money, to think about how all of the money you have coming in is building towards this lifestyle that creates options. I want us to think about options in a way where if we’re thinking about, what are the things that are important to you, we can talk about what those things are and that’s what your options fund is going to fund for you.
So it may include family, it may include travel, it may include getting a new car. And so we’re going to put things into this option fund so that way you can take care of yourself. So you might be listening to me right now and thinking like, okay, Keina, but if I were making more money or if I had a big month, I would know exactly what to do with it. Like I would save it, I would get ahead and I would finally feel caught up. But I just want to let you know because I’ve coached you before, just not actually you, that if you could already do this, it would already be done. Like if you already could have an options fund, you would’ve already funded it. But you have to actually change something about your system and it’s going to require you to change how you’re thinking about money because making more money doesn’t actually mean that you’re going to have more money, like that is the fundamental myth.
The reason that I’m talking to you right now is because of that myth because you keep telling yourself that once you hit the next income milestone then things will settle for you. But if you are not managing what you have right now, you are not going to manage more better. And this is where understanding your saver identity changes everything for you. As a hustler saver your superpower is your ability to make more money, but you’ve been leaning in so hard to that, that you’ve convinced yourself that it’s the only plan that you have. And we don’t know how long that plan can support you. We don’t know when you won’t be able to hustle. We don’t know when the extra contracts are going to run out, and right now hustling works, but I want you to have something to show 10 years from now, 15 years from now, 20 years from now, when you can no longer hustle.
And so I want to be able to help you create structure, if you want some like real terms of what this looks like. And I want to give you some clients that I’ve actually worked with. But I have one client, she’s a business owner and she runs a seven figure business. She can sell with no problem, she can create money at any time that she wants. Like if we thought of a money faucet, she can turn her on and get out whatever she wants. But the biggest frustration that she has is that she still has to create money to do the things that she wants. So it might be travel, it could be holidays, it could be showing up for her family and she will fall back on hustling because as a business owner, you got to take care of your business. Your business needs to eat, you got to take care of that first, and then you know your business takes care of you.
So your business income is going to feed different pieces. And so even though she’s already done the hard part, and even though the money has already come in and it’s already there, she was still finding herself in a place where she’s hustling because of the fact that she didn’t have an options fund. So one of the things that we shifted for her is we went back to what are the things you want to actually have money for? I used to tell her, I was like, I don’t want you to hoe your business out and by hoeing your business out, I mean like create a surprise offer in order to be able to fund something in your life. At this point in time, like you know yourself, you know the things that you’re going to want money for. You’ve been with yourself for decades at this point in time.
You’ve been in your business for years and you have the same cycle and you have the same pattern. So let’s name the things that you’re going to want money for. And because you have this ability to hustle really well, to sell really well, let’s just include this in the plan for how much you’re paying yourself. Let’s include this in the plan for how much your business needs. And so we created purposeful savings buckets for her for the things that mattered. So she’s no longer just making money to spend the money immediately. She created some level of consistency which is actually creating ease. As a business owner you don’t want to be in your business and feeling like, oh my goodness, I need to sell in order to pay for my tires, especially when you’ve already sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of whatever you’re selling throughout the year and now you need to sell in order to be able to pay something that’s $2,000. You can do that, but that gets really tiring, right?
And it can make you frustrated and not enjoy your business because you feel like you are having to hoe your business out in order to get what you need. So for some of you, maybe you’re like, Keina, I have no idea what it means to be a business owner. That makes no sense. Let’s talk about if you are a W2 person. So I have another client who’s also a high earner in a W2 role and this client is able to pick up extra shifts. So we can pick up an extra shift to pay for summer camps. We can pick up an extra shift for birthday dinners. We can pick an extra shift for an unexpected trip. But up until this client started working with me, my client’s tired. Like every single time I need to do something, something that is essential in my life, like getting my car fixed or something fun that I want to do, like a trip, I’m having to look at my work schedule and negotiate like when can I show up more so that way I can show up in my life how I desire.
And we realized you are hoeing out your ability to make extra money in your life. And so I really want you not to need to pick up a shift. It’s nice if you want to pick up a shift, but I want to make picking up a shift something that feels optional for you. I want your money to feel consistent. And so for you still listening, I want you to hear this, like I want you to stop working extra to make life work. I want you to have an options fund so that can be your new default. When you need something, you can go to your bank account instead of your work schedule. I’m going to say that again. I want you to be able to go to your bank account instead of your work schedule because I know you, I know you like to move on a dime. I know you like to say yes to a trip, a concert, a dinner, a new idea.
And so you’re someone who wants this freedom and flexibility and hustle has given you that in the past. But now it is time to evolve. I want you to be able to have a financial system that actually reflects the lifestyle that you want to live and not just the one that you’ve been able to hustle to have right now. So let’s think about your options fund. I want you to ask yourself in the next six months, what do I want options for? A year from now what do I want options for? Five years from now what do I want options for? And if you don’t know, that’s okay. Sometimes those questions can feel really hard, but I want you to also think backwards. What did you have to hustle for in the past six months?
What would’ve felt better if you had savings for it, right? Like where did you maybe have to sacrifice something in order to get the thing that you were hustling for? Because be honest, going to work, yes, you can go to work, but there are sometimes you don’t want to go to work. You would’ve loved to have said no, but you couldn’t say no because you needed the money. And so like that could be one of the things that you’re thinking of. Okay, I keep going back to cars because cars cause trouble. It would’ve been nice to have an options fund for my car. It would’ve been nice to have an options fund for my holiday travel and so those are the things that we want to start saving for. This is going to give your savings clarity and purpose. And now savings doesn’t feel like something that’s just arbitrary.
We are saving for the things that you actually like to do. And so you can use your life as your own data points and create a blueprint for what you want to do. So this is the work that I do with clients inside of my five month coaching partnership. I have all different types of clients that come to me. Some of them are great at saving, some of them are like, Keina, I don’t know why I should save. Keina I know how to make money. You get to come as you are. And so what I help you with is creating a simple system to create peace of mind. I have a three money bucket system and that three money bucket system, we focus on three simple things. We focus on your bills, we focus on savings and we focus on spending. And so we get really clear on what are your bills, which some of y’all are already really good at that, but what we want to get better at is the saving and we want to get better at the spending.
And so we create a system that is simple and from month to month you are able to rinse and repeat. And you know this is where every dollar, when I get extra, this is how that money is used. So you can actually have this options fund that we’re talking about. So the next time you need to do something, you don’t immediately go to look at your work schedule, you go to look at your bank account. And that bank account allows you to have ease and that bank account allows you to have safety. So if you’re listening and you’re like, Keina, you have nailed me, this is me. Maybe it was in this episode or it was another episode, I would definitely invite you to apply to work with me. We work together, like I said, for five months. If you go to Wealthovernow.com, you can apply to work with me there or you can go to my show notes and apply to work with me through my show notes. So I look forward to getting to talk to you. And 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.
