Are you the kind of saver who says, “I’ll save whatever’s left over after the bills are paid”?
Here’s the spoiler alert. There usually isn’t anything left over.
In this episode, I’m calling out the leftover saver mindset and walking you through what it takes to become someone who saves money with clarity and consistency.
I’ll show you why saving has nothing to do with willpower and everything to do with worth. You’ll hear why $25 saved with intention is more powerful than $250 saved with guilt and how my clients have shifted from not saving at all to confidently setting aside thousands each month.
Inside this episode, I’ll help you:
- [05:00] The biggest mindset blocks keeping you from saving
- [03:40] Why saving is a radical act of self-care, not a luxury
- [12:03] How to start with as little as $25 and still see real results
- [13:58] A practical 4-step strategy to finally become a confident saver
Saving is not a luxury. It’s a necessity. If you’re ready to stop leaving yourself out of your financial plan, this episode is for you.
Tune in now and learn how to stop saving what’s left and start saving on purpose.
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 found this episode helpful, be sure to check out Episode 181: The Side Eye Fund—Your Path to Financial Freedom.
Transcript for “The Leftover Saver: How to Stop Trying To Save”
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 continue with my saver series. Last week I talked about the side eye fund because I know a lot of you have a love hate relationship when it comes to saving. And I’ve heard numerous clients tell me like, well Keina, I don’t even know what emergency I’m saving for or I don’t want to do this. Y’all have all the reasons. If it’s something that’s floating in your head, I’ve heard it. So last week I introduced you to this idea of side eye. If you know me in real life or you’ve even seen me on Instagram, you will know that I naturally roll my eyes. It just happens. It’s a genetic mutation if you will, but that’s also how I kind of navigate life, like I want to do what I want to do.
My last, not even my last boss, but the boss that I had the longest, I remember one year basically we gave out like superlatives and mine said something about rolling my eyes because I do that, like I said a lot and mainly because I don’t like to be told what to do and I like to do what I want to do, I kind of seem to ask for permission later. And it’s just been the way that I’ve always navigated life. Like, hey, let me figure it out. Oh okay, that was it, yep or just figure it out. And so that’s how I want you to think about why it’s important for you to save because it’s going to give you the option to figure it out. And so it’s not about necessarily an emergency, but it’s so you can side eye life. Like that’s why I need you to have money in the bank so you can do what you want because I don’t want you to be tied down in a situation and may not even know the situation. The situation could be 5, 10 years out. But I don’t want you to be tied down in that situation because you didn’t put your oxygen mask on first.
And so through the next couple weeks, I’m going through some different saver identities. And so today is the first day that I am introducing you to one of the most common saver identities that I see in coaching. And that is the leftover saver. And so this person is probably someone you know, it’s the person who wants to save. They may be even try to save, but they only do it if there’s something left. So it’s about what’s left over. And here’s the spoiler alert. There usually isn’t anything left over. So if you’ve ever found yourself saying like, I’ll save whatever’s left after I pay the bills, or I’m going to try and save, like this episode is for you.
And you can just go ahead and say, Keina, I’m raising my hand. Here I am. I am the leftover saver. So my leftover savers, they’re doing their best. They might even feel responsible with their money. You pay your bills, you cover your expenses, and then you hope, hope is the key word here, that there’s something left for you to put in savings. But every single month something happens, there’s a brunch, there’s a birthday, there’s some travel, there’s a family member that needed some money, there’s groceries or gas that got more expensive than you expected. And just like that, there is nothing left over in your account, not the amount that you thought you would have. And so here’s what happens, is this has nothing to do with like your efforts. Like you’re not lazy, you’re not actually bad with money, you just don’t actually put yourself first.
You have a habit of putting yourself last. You might even be the oldest daughter in your family. You might be a first generation American, but there is something in your personality that puts you as someone who puts themself last and you give to everyone else before you give to yourself. You treat saving money as though it’s a luxury instead of a necessity. And I want to tell you friend, that saving money, it is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. I already told you I need you to be able to side eye, roll your eyes at whatever comes your way. And the way for you to do that is you have to put yourself first. You got to put on your oxygen mask first. I need you to breathe before anybody else breathes. I need you to take care of you. And with like this identity of a leftover saver, is you are someone who thinks that like I’ll save once I pay off this credit card debt or I’ll save once I finish this trip.
I’ll save when I finally make more. So you saving money is always a missing, not missing, but a moving target. And it’s put on, like you put a condition on it, you’ll save when. And what happens is you never actually get to the saving because you always have a new target that is going to prompt you to save. And you can go and name all your targets. Like how many times this year have you already told yourself you were going to save when, you were going to save when you got your tax return, when you got your bonus, when you got your new raise, but you haven’t done any of it because I don’t think you understand that saving is a form of selfcare. Just like you go and get a massage, just like you get your nails done, I need you to take care of yourself, like your future self with that same level of intention.
This actually has nothing to do with discipline. It has everything to do with you making a very intentional decision to say like I come first. That’s it. You have to say, like I come first because you pay Uncle Sam, you pay Medicare, you pay social security, you pay everybody before you pay yourself. And you probably say, Keina, I got to pay those people. That’s the same thing I need you to think about yourself. I need you to say, Hey, I got to pay me. You have to pay yourself. You have to pay like you first. You got to put on your oxygen mask first. And the shift for these clients that are my leftover savers is I need my leftover saver to become an intentional saver. And so an intentional saver pays themself first. It doesn’t even matter how much you are starting with, we don’t need to get into like, but Keina I, no, we’re not talking about what you don’t have. I need you to start even if it’s $25 out of every single paycheck, that right there is setting the intention that I’m taking care of myself first.
And I need you to build savings into your plan. It is not an afterthought. So I have a graphic, I probably haven’t put it anywhere in a very long time, but I think of like an upside down triangle. And at the top of that triangle is savings. That is the first thing you need to do. Then you need to pay your bills. And then what’s left over after that? Like that’s your spending money, your chuck-e-cheese tokens. And so the largest piece of the pie, while you have the largest piece of the pie, while you have the largest portion of your paycheck, that’s where I want you to start saving first. If you’ve ever downloaded my spending plan, like at the top of the spending plan says savings, it’s intentional.
It’s intentional because I don’t want you doing that once something is left. I want you to think about that right now. What in my life do I need to fund and do I want to be intentional about? That’s what I need you to think about right now, okay? And know that when you become an intentional saver, you’re also believing in the fact that being consistent is going to lead you to be a more confident saver. It is going to create increased financial confidence within you. So when you see like, oh, I can save $25 a month and I’m not even missing it, you are going to have this belief and start to build this belief that you are a saver. One of my clients, I love to joke and I tell him that I am really good at hiding money from him. And when I say that, it’s because we’ve set up a transfer for a hundred dollars a month that goes into a high yield savings account and he forgets about it.
He absolutely forgets about it. And as he’s forgotten about it, that money is turned into a thousand dollars, $2,000. And it’s something that now he’s really proud of because of the fact that we built this habit of, I said, no, we’re going to pay you first. Like we have to make sure that we pay you before we pay Costco. We got to pay you before we give money to Walmart or Amazon or any of these other places that our money is going to. Similarly, I’m working with another client and we have figured out that she could save $3,000 a month, actually over $3,000 a month, y’all, that’s $36,000 a year. Prior to working with me when she wasn’t an intentional saver, she was leaving $36,000 just out there in the world, no idea where it is. It didn’t manifest anywhere in her life.
And the reason that happens, once again is because if you are only talking about saving after you see what’s left, you are not going to be able to build a five figure savings account. Your savings is a form of self-care. Your savings is going to give you options. And maybe you hear me right now and you’re like, Keina, I don’t have $3,000 a month to save. That’s okay. You might be more like my client that is focused on saving $100 a month and that’s fine. That’s exactly where I need you to start because $100 a month, that’s $1,200 a year. And if you want to discredit that and say like, Keina, that’s not that much money, guess what? It’s $1,200 more than you have right now in a savings account. And so after you’ve done $100 every single month for a year, you can increase that to $200, then you can increase it to $300.
Like you shifting from being a leftover saver to an intentional saver is also going to increase how much money you have in your savings account year after year. Like once you learn the skill of saving, it is just going to compound. So wherever you start, that’s just the beginning. You have to understand this is just my starting point. So I want you to really shift into this identity of I am a saver. Like when my clients work with me, they shift their identity to becoming a saver. I have another client right now. We were actually talking and I was like, so how much did you have saved before working with me? She’s like, $0. And now she is someone who saves money. She’s like, I literally am not thinking about using my credit card. Before working with you I was always using my credit card and like now I actually can go over to Capital One.
I can look at my accounts and I see that I have money saved for the things that I need. And she was the person that was saving money if she had money left over and my friend, you are never going to have money left over. And if you do have money left over, you’re going to take it the next month. You’re going to take it out because you’re going to need to cover something that you forgot to plan for. So listen, I already know you. I know your flavor, I know your kind, I know everything about you. So I want you to become a saver. That’s the shift I want you to focus on. And so if you want to make this shift in your life, here’s what I want you to do. First, I want you to pick a number, like how much money can I save from each paycheck?
And you can start small, you can do $25, you can do $50, you can do $100. This is not about the amount of money that you are saving, it’s actually about creating the identity of becoming a saver. Then what I want you to do is I want you to automate it. I want you to set it up like a bill. I want you to pay yourself when you get paid and make that a non-negotiable. If you want extra credit, I want you to open a high yield savings account and put this money in a high yield savings account, put it somewhere where you can’t see it, and then one day you’re just going to open it up and you’re going to be like, oh, I got money over there. And then I want you to track the shift. So write down each time you save, even if it’s small, I just want you to reinforce the belief like I am someone who saves money.
And I can tell you, I can give so many kudos to my mom for even helping me create this belief when I was in my twenties, because I’m pretty sure I was complaining to her when I moved to DC and I was making $50,000 a year. I was like, mom, I like can’t save. And she’s like, Keina, save $25 a month. And I’m like, that’s not any money because before then I had been saving like $300 a month and definitely had the thought that in order to make savings worth savings, it needs to be a lot of money. So anyways, I took my mother’s advice as I normally do, and I started saving $25 a month. And it wasn’t about the amount, it was about setting the intention for myself because by setting that intention, as I made more money and I went back to my budget and I saw it was $25 that I was saving as I earned more, or I stopped paying on a credit card, I started to increase the amount of money that I was putting towards my savings.
And so that’s why it’s important for you to just start somewhere because what you’re doing right now, you’re going to be doing more of as time passes. And then number four, don’t let it just sit in a generic account. Actually name what the savings is for. Is this a side-eye fund for you? Is this a trip fund for you? Is there a version of you who needs this breathing room? Like give your savings a name. I’ve had clients that have named their savings, just different things, like this is my fun fund. Just anything that is going to get you excited about looking at this. It could be your 40th birthday fund, it could be your 30th birthday fund, whatever it is. I just need you to become a saver. So saving is no longer something you’ll get around to. I needed to be something that you actually lead with and that you are thinking about intentionally.
So I want you think about this, ask yourself and be really honest, ask yourself, am I a leftover saver. And if you can honestly answer yes to that question, I want you to think about what would shift if you paid yourself first. Not because you had extra, not because you finally made more, but just because you finally decided that you are worth putting your oxygen mask on first for. So next week I’m actually going to introduce you to a new savers identity, and I’m going to be talking about the Dipper identity, the one where you do save money, but you’re constantly pulling from your savings to cover surprise expenses. So if that’s you, you don’t want to miss out on that episode because I’m definitely going to be talking about fake math, my favorite topic and outdated budgets that sabotage your savings. And if this episode hit home and you’re ready to stop putting yourself last, I would love for you to apply to work with me because this is the exact shift that we make in coaching.
So moving from these passive habits where we think about savings to actually becoming someone who is a saver. Like I told you, my client, she is going to have $36,000 saved in a real functioning account, y’all. She’s going to be a five figure saver in less than three months in the next 90 days. And then she’s going to have multiple five figures. And that is going to be a skill that she has because of the simple fact that she worked with me and because of the fact that she decided to put her oxygen mask on first. So if you are ready to dive deeper into this work and see what it looks like for you, I would invite you to go to wealthovernow.com, apply to work with me. 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.
