Paying your bills on time isn’t the same as being in control of your money.
In this episode of Money Files, I walk you through The Money Edit, the second step in my coaching framework that helps clients create 25% more choice with their money without earning more or cutting out everything fun.
The Money Edit is where we stop the leaks and clean up financial clutter. Instead of restrictive “no-spend challenges” or quick fixes, this process helps you decide what to keep, revisit, or cancel so your money reflects the life you actually want. From subscriptions you’ve forgotten to household expenses that no longer serve you, the Money Edit gives you back control and clarity.
You’ll hear client stories that show how one decision, like changing a cleaning schedule or canceling overlapping subscriptions, freed up thousands of dollars each year to redirect toward savings, debt payoff, and lifestyle goals that matter.
Listen in to learn:
[02:30] Why no-spend challenges don’t fix long-term habits
[06:45] How to identify leaks and financial clutter in your budget
[11:15] Client story: saving $9,600 a year by shifting one expense
[17:20] How canceling overlapping subscriptions saved $380 instantly
[22:40] How small edits uncovered over $3,200 in annuals savings in one call
[28:15] Why The Money Edit gives you freedom to reallocate, not restrict, your money
Tune into this episode of Money Files to learn how The Money Edit can help you keep more of what you earn and finally create a plan that feels good and works.
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 hearing about the Money Edit, check out Episode 195: It’s the perfect first step to help you gain financial clarity and start making intentional decisions with your money.
Transcript for “The Money Edit: Stop the Leaks and Create More Choice With Your Money”
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 this week I am continuing my podcast conversation about a four step process that I walk my clients through. So they have 25% more choice with their money. And I want you to be honest with me because I know I can be honest with you about this, that you’ve had a subscription that you’ve signed up for and you told yourself, oh, like it’s not that much money. And you realized I have been paying for this thing for years. Like that’s been your reflection. And I think all of us have something like that, especially in my business. That is one of the things I have to watch. I’m like, Ooh, it’s Canva, it’s only $9, right? But that $9 is $108 a year and I have to be honest, like could I be using that $108 somewhere else?
Like is that how I actually want to use my money?
But the point is that we all have leaks like this in our finances that most times we don’t know about because we don’t really take the time to actually look at how we’ve been spending money and reflect on is this actually how I want to spend money? And so this is where the money edit, which is the second step in my process comes in because we want you to take time to actually think about where is my money going and is that how I actually want my money to go out? So if you’ve tried like budgeting apps or spreadsheets, cash envelopes, any of those things, those systems only track what went out but they don’t show you how to keep more of what you earn. And they definitely don’t give you like the 25% more choice with your money that I help my clients create without needing to make more money or cut everything fun out of your life.
So today I’m actually going to walk you through the second step, which is the money edit. And this is where like for my clients, we’re really looking at stopping the leaks. We are going to clean out what we’ll call financial clutter and overall create more choice in their budget. So I’m just going to tell you something really quick before I actually go into how the money edit works. But my dad, the other day there was like a family newsletter that went out and somebody was talking about a no spend challenge and he was like, Keina, did you read the newsletter? Like basically I need to tell you guys about doing a no spend challenge, that’s what he was trying to get to. And I told him, I said, dad, I actually don’t agree with no spend challenges.
He said, why? I said, well, because I don’t think it actually changes the behavior. It’s kind of like when you diet and you tell yourself you’re not going to eat chocolate, but because you’ve restricted yourself when after the 30 days or whatever it is, you go right back to the behavior that you had before. And the same thing is true with spending, after you have allowed yourself not to spend for 30 days, then you go back and you resume some of the same spending habits. You haven’t actually shifted the behavior so you can actually have the result that you want over and over again, which is to be more mindful of your spending or to actually know where your money goes. And so those things are great for like a temporary success, but they’re not the long-term success that you need.
And the reason that I’m telling you that is because when I do this money edit process with my clients, we’re actually observing what’s going on. I don’t want to resort to extreme measures for you to be able to keep more of your money. You also make six figures. We don’t have to resort to extreme measures. We actually just need to know what’s going on. And that’s where the money table, if you listen to that podcast episode, I talked to you about how we put it all out there and we put out your invisible numbers, we put out the goals that you want to achieve, we put out the quiet goals, we put out the list of your bills. And so when we actually build your spending plan for how you actually want to spend the money, now we can come in and do the money edit to actually figure out, what do we want to keep? What do we want to revisit? What do we want to cancel?
And so when we’re going through this money editing process, we are asking ourselves as we go through the expenses, what do I want to keep because it serves me, what expenses do I want to keep? There are some things that we have to keep, like we have to keep your mortgage right? We might be able to revisit some of the things that you’re doing with your mortgage, like if you have escrow, could we lower your home insurance? Like those are things, but overall, we have to keep your mortgage or you might have children and you’re like, Keina, no, I really want to keep them in extracurricular activities because maybe this is an opportunity I never had as a kid. And so I want my kids to have the opportunity to participate in dance. And so that’s okay, we get to talk about what the things are that you value when we’re at the money edit and going through the money edit. So the other question we will talk about is what do I want to revisit? So that might look like maybe shifting how often you use something or it might mean downgrading like a subscription that you have.
That’s when we would tag an expense to the revisit bucket if it’s something that we’re like, okay, let’s come back around to this. We’re not actually sure that it’s serving the purpose that we want it to serve, but we’re going to come back and revisit. And then we’ll also ask ourselves like, what can I cancel? And we’re canceling it because we realize that it actually doesn’t serve us. I don’t want to use this, I’m not using it. And so when we take this approach to editing your finances, it’s not about deprivation. The point is to stop paying for things that don’t matter to you so you can actually redirect those dollars into the savings goals that you have, into your debt payoff goals or even into your lifestyle choices that actually do matter. Years ago I was working with a client, his name’s Jason, and we actually realized when we were going through the money edit process with him that he’d been paying weekly for a housekeeper ever since the pandemic.
And at the time it made sense, but when we were looking at like his current life, he didn’t need his housekeeper every week. And so when we looked at like and ran the numbers, his weekly cleanings were costing him $9,600 a year. And so we talked about, what if you switch that to biweekly, so then that’s going to cost you $4,800 a year. What if you to monthly, that would cost you $3,300 a year. So that’s money back in his pocket just by taking one of his expenses and thinking about what happens if I revisit this, if I use it in a different way? And it’s not saying like, Hey, you can’t get your house cleaned, but it’s like, does this actually, the purpose that you bought it for or started paying for it in the beginning, does it still serve this purpose in your life?
And he ended up switching how he was using his cleaner. So he still had the support, but it better served his life right now. And also the goals that he had, like he was able to turn around and put money into savings. He was able to turn around and start paying down some student loan debt that he wanted to pay off. But ultimately, when I’m talking about having more choice with your money, we want to make sure that we are looking at how you’re currently spending money and does it serve you for the season of life that you’re in. Another client of mine actually had three overlapping storage subscriptions. So they had signed up for Google, Apple, like iCloud and Dropbox. And so each of these subscriptions, like one of them was annual, one of them was monthly or two of them were monthly. Apple and Google were both like $10 and Dropbox was about $240 a year.
And so she only needed one of them. She didn’t need all three of them, but at different points in time, like because of her Google email address, telling her that she’d ran out of storage, she’d signed up for that. Same thing like with her Apple phone and then also with Dropbox. And so she’s paying $480 a year for storage, but she doesn’t want to be paying $480 for storage. It’s things that she doesn’t even realize that she’s spending money on, but it is just how life happens. You guys know this, everything is a cost, right? It’s like, oh by the way, in order to do this, you need more storage. Oh by the way, in order to do this, you need to sign up for this program or sign up for this app. So I think that those things happen very naturally for us.
The thing that we’re not building into our lives is going back to revisit, is this how we want to actually spend money? So by editing her storage, we were able to save $380 a year and she ended up keeping storage that was only $120 a year. But like those are the types of shifts that we’re making in the money edit that don’t require you to not spend money for 30 days. We don’t need a restrictive process. And then the other example that I’ll give you is I have a client that I’m working with right now and on our very first call, she canceled or like reduced one of her TV packages. She saved $70 a month, that’s $840 a year. She lowered her auto insurance by about $200 a month. So that’s $2,400 a year. That’s $3,240 a year in savings that we uncovered in one conversation.
I’m going to say that again, $3,240 a year that we uncovered in one conversation. And so like that decision alone can pay for working with me. And if you’re listening to me right now and you’re like, Keina, you keep talking about a year. In my spending plan, I have everything where it shows, if you spend $10 a month on Google, it’s $120 a year because I want you to see the cost of any decision. If you decide to save $300 a month and maybe it doesn’t sound that much to you, yeah, but that’s $3,600 a year that you’re saving and you’re going from $0 right now. So like I want to play with those numbers so your brain can see the impact of that on your life. And so you can see the changes that one simple decision makes for you, like what is the compound result of that?
So maybe you’re thinking and you’re listening to me right now and you’re like, Keina, I don’t even want to look at my expenses. I’m too ambiguous to find out what will happen? I know a lot of my clients are all really, really nervous when they start working with me and they are worried that I’m going to judge them for what’s in their accounts. Like if I could let you guys in on a call, you would hear my clients like explaining why they stopped at McDonald’s and bought like a $2 soda. I’m like, I don’t care that you bought a $2 soda, I really don’t care. And if anything, I’m probably going to ask you what kind of soda you got, but I want you to know that I am not looking for perfection when I am talking to you about your expenses. And I know that you don’t know everything that’s hitting your account and that’s okay.
I actually don’t need you to know everything that’s hitting your account. What I want you to do is actually like raise your hand to get help and by raising your hand to get help, that’s you applying to work with me. Because my goal as a coach is to provide this like judgment free space for you so that you can stop hiding what’s going on with your money. Because when you stop hiding and you actually say like Keina, I want a place where I can feel safe to actually look at what’s going on because I do want to make some changes this year. I’m 30 and I want to make some changes. I want to date, or I want to get married or I am married and I want to make changes. Like that is the support that you get when you work with me in my five month coaching partnership.
It’s not about you needing to justify every expense. What matters is that we’re actually looking at what’s going on and that when we start looking at what’s going on, that’s where you can start to let go of the stories you have about how you should be further along or how nothing’s ever worked for you. Or why did I spend money in that way? We are just going to look at the numbers for what they are and we are going to make changes together. And those changes that we make together are going to help you keep more money that you get to use and decide where do I want to have more choice in my life? I want to be able to put everything on autopay Keina, I want to feel comfortable spending. Keina I don’t even want to think about it being payday, like I am tired of living in this cycle that comes from you just simply raising your hand. You don’t have to have all the answers.
My client probably wouldn’t have thought about canceling the housekeeper and that’s okay. But together we were able to come up with that as a next step that ends up being a $9,600 decision that is going to positively impact his life. And that’s what we’re able to do together. So if you have been on the fence or you’re thinking about like Keina, I’m just not really sure, maybe I could do this on my own. I want you to know, and I don’t mean this harshly, but if you could do it on your own, you would’ve already done it. And it is costing you more money with you telling yourself that you could do it by yourself. And think about my client that I told you, she was paying an extra $70 a month for her TV, an extra $200 a month on her auto insurance that’s over $3,000 a year.
If we had started working together five years ago, that’s $15,000 more that she would’ve been able to spend without even realizing it, without even trying really hard. That $15,000 could have been her emergency fund, it could have helped her pay off her debt, it could have funded her first five figure savings account. And it’s the cost of right now we want to look at like what’s the cost of you not getting a coach? What’s the real cost of years of money slipping through your hands while you keep telling yourself that you’re going to figure it out? And I’m not saying this in order to shame you, but sometimes we have to be really honest about what could this look like. What could the benefit be for me? So you hear me talking about my clients, but I want you to invite you to think about like what could the benefit be for me if I actually allowed myself to be in a place where I could be honest about my numbers.
The money edit that I walk clients through it’s not about tracking, it’s about keeping more of what you actually earn. It’s not about figuring out like, Keina tell me I can’t ever spend money. It’s about helping you reallocate how you’re thinking about your money and deciding where you actually want your money to go. And that’s where you’re going to start to feel this impact where you’re going to say like, oh my goodness, like I can actually see the benefit of where I’m going to be three months from now when I continue to do this process, where I’m going to be a year from now when I continue to do this process and the money edit is, I would say we’re in this process. It’s an ongoing process, but the bulk of it is done in a 45 minute call where we’re looking for things that we can optimize to help you keep more money.
So in a 45 minute call, my client that I was telling you about, saving basically like $3,000 a year, that was in one call, but the money edit is also just a skill in terms of like keeping, revisiting and canceling that you’re going to take with you. So that’s why I’m also saying that it’s something that’s ongoing. But during this process is where we also start to say, okay, great. Like, so now that we know what expenses, like you’ve reduced what you’re canceling, what you’re revisiting, we can start to put this three money bucket system into place. We can figure out how much you want to put towards bills with every single paycheck. We’re going to figure out how much you want to put towards spending with every paycheck and how much you’re going to put towards saving with every single paycheck.
So we start to operationalize the plan that we’ve created together so you can start actually experiencing the clarity that you want, being able to feel really calm about money going out of your account, money coming into your account, and actually getting that peace of mind that you talked about and getting off that hamster wheel. So I would just invite you that if you were in a space where you’re like, Keina, it sounds, I’ve been listening to you for a while, maybe I just found you, I think that you could help me, I really would invite you to apply to work with me today. And on our first call we are going to go through the numbers. I’m going to walk you through that money table and we might even start to do some of this money edit process, but we’re going to be able to uncover how money is leaving your account and we’re going to be able to help create a plan so you can have 25% more choice without the need to earn more money or to make extreme cuts. So if that’s something you’re interested in, go to Wealthovernow.com. You can apply to work with me there, or you can also go to my show notes. And until next week, 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.
