If you’re earning a six-figure income but still wondering where your money goes at the end of each month, you’re not alone. Many high earners feel like their spending is out of control, their savings are inconsistent, and like they are reacting instead of managing their money intentionally.
In this episode, I introduce my Three Bucket Money System, a core framework that I teach to every client. This system helps you regain control, create financial safety, and feel confident about your finances. It’s a simple, repeatable approach that works regardless of how often you’re paid or how complex your financial situation may seem. This method removes the guesswork, eliminates emotional math, and puts you in charge of your cash flow—all without the need for tedious spreadsheets or financial overwhelm.
If you’re tired of feeling afraid to check your bank account and want to become organized, empowered, and in charge of your finances, this episode is for you. Tune in to discover my Three Bucket Money System, which has helped my clients achieve their financial goals and spend drama-free.
Learn my Three Bucket Money System…
- [03:11] Defining my Three Bucket Money System
- [04:10] Bills account
- [05:48] Spending account
- [06:31] Savings account
- [08:10] Why my Three Bucket Money System works
Tune into this episode of Money Files to start implementing my Three Bucket Money System and regain control of your finances.
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 the discussion about my Three Bucket Money System, check out my episode, How Fake Math Is Killing Your Budget!
Transcript for “The Smart Way to Budget as a Six-Figure Earner: My Three Bucket Money System”
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 an episode of Money Files. So today I actually want to talk about a system that I’ve been teaching my clients, which is a three money bucket system. And I think it’s one of the simplest systems you can use with your finances. I love being able to pair it with a spending plan. So a spending plan is another word for budget, But this budget, I help my clients get really, really clear on how much money do they have coming in each month, how much money do they have coming out and helping them see what they want to be able to plan for outside of their list of bills. Because my number one goal as a coach is to help my clients make a system that allows their money to feel simple and predictable, regardless of if you get paid once a month, if you get paid every two weeks, if your pay is fluctuating, whatever those things are that you tell me like, but, that won’t work for me because. Keina, I only get paid once a month or because Keina, my paychecks are never the same.
Even if all of that is true, this three money bucket system will help you manage your cash flow in a way that it feels predictable and that when life starts lifeing, you don’t feel like you can’t handle it or you don’t feel like you have to go back to square one with how you’re managing your money. And even with this three bucket money system, it can work if you’re single, it can work if you’re married and you share finances, it can work if you’re married and you don’t share finances, like I’ve used it for so many of my clients to help them visually start seeing how much money they actually have to spend, which I think is a question that comes up a lot like, but Keina, how much money do I actually have to spend?
And also this system helps clients become savers. A lot of people that I work with, they don’t see themselves as savers. And so because they don’t see themselves as savers because they’ve had to dip into savings in the past, they have developed an identity that it’s not worth saving. And so this three money bucket system is my simple system to debunk those things for people because I want you to be someone who feels confident about your finances. One of the things that I always joke about is that when a client says to me that they love checking their bank account, then I know that my job is done. Like we don’t need to have any more coaching calls after this because you have said the magic words that I need to hear. And I kid you not, I hear this all the time with clients where they really do get to a point where they’re like, Keina, like I really like budgeting and I like to look at my numbers.
I want you to have that relationship with your money. So with the Three Money Bucket system, it is very simple. It is, you have a bucket or a bank account for bills, you have another bank account or bucket for spending and you have another bank account or bucket. So you’ll hear me back and forth in between those terms for savings. And so it’s a simple way, like I said, to just split your money across these three different priorities. We all know that we have bills, there are also things that we need to save for outside of Rainy Day Fund. So when I say rainy day fund, I think about the emergency fund that you all have read about, you’ve heard about, you’ve seen a TikTok about, but also I want to help people save for things like holidays. I want you to save for vacation, so savings is another bucket.
And then the next bucket is your spending money. And so you can think of your spending money, I often joke that those are your Chuck E Cheese tokens, but you have those three accounts, bills, spending and savings. So your bills account is a separate account that I tell my clients to use for recurring payments, your mortgage or subscriptions or utilities. And this account is really there to keep you grounded and it creates financial safety. The number one thing that people want to be able to do is put their bills on autopay. They want to know that they always have the money to pay their bills. They don’t want to be negotiating when their paycheck comes in and be thinking like, oh, is this paycheck? Do I need to use it to pay this or do I need to use it to pay that?
With this system, your paycheck does the same thing every single time, and that bills account supports you in being able to pay all of your bills. It is generally for most of my clients a four figure account at all times, even when bills are coming out, including your mortgage. So my clients just get used to having a bills account that has multiple thousands of dollars in it. It could be anywhere from $3,000 to $15,000 that’s in a bills account. And generally what’s happening is they are building reserves in this account. So when they’re having reserves in this account, and that just means that they have more than one month of expenses, I can’t speak today, in that account, that they would start to see, like I said, that $8,000, $9,000, $10,000 because of the fact that we do the same thing with their paycheck every single time.
And that consistency is actually helping them build reserves and build safety. So that’s the bills account. Then we have the spending account and your spending account, those are your Chuck E Cheese tokens. Your Chuck E Cheese tokens are the money that you can spend drama free. And in that account you fund it every single payday and you know that the money in that account, it doesn’t interfere with any of your bills, it doesn’t interfere with your savings. Clients use this account to pay for gas. They use it to pay for groceries, they use it to eat out. Any of the things that you want to be able to spend money on, your nails, your hair, it goes into that account. It’s your spending account, you decide how you want to use it.
And then the third account is your savings account. And it’s the when, not if bucket, if you will. So when we think about things that we want to put into that savings bucket, we’re really thinking about what are the things that I need to plan for that I might overlook? So if I think about when, not if, like when the car breaks down, when Christmas comes, like none of these things are unexpected. However, Christmas every single year causes people to go into debt because it’s simply not planned for. And it’s something that my clients learn how to plan for and it goes into their savings account. So the goal with your savings account is that you are able to proactively plan for things like birthdays, unexpected travel, maybe even you have a kid that, like I have a client who her son is going to do some infant swim lessons so we’ve been saving for that because that’s something that she wants to do this summer in that savings account.
As well as like even some of the school fees that she has to pay in summer camps, like that money is in the savings account. So this system helps give every single dollar that you make a job. I want all of my clients to know, I want you to know if I make $4,000 net, I want to assign every one of those dollars a job and I want it to have the same job every single time I got paid or every single time you get paid. If you decide to give it a new job, that’s fine, but it still goes within this overall plan. And so the reason that this Three Bucket Money System works is because it removes the guesswork and like that emotional math from your finances. So most people manage their money from one really big pot, like you have one account, I call it a gumbo account, and you just make decisions based on your bank account balance.
And because of that, you end up feeling guilty for spending. You don’t actually account for annual bills, you hope that you have money when it comes out, but you’re not actually planning for it intentionally. And then it’s also the reason because they have this money on this one account that you end up using credit cards even when you don’t mean to, because you are never able to manage the inconsistency that you fill with your finances, like the annual bills feel like they came out of nowhere because you don’t have a plan. And so this three bucket money system, it actually builds that consistency with your money. So you’re no longer reacting, you’re actually planning with purpose. So you’re being intentional and you’re creating like a sustainable process for how you want to manage your finances.
So my clients, they really go from a place of like being able, hoping that they can cover something to knowing that it’s already planned for and just being able to swipe their card, pay off their card, or put in their routing number and their account number, and they know that they can pay it in full. And over time what happens because after you implement this is that you’re going to stop checking your bank account and you’re just going to feel safe. And when you do check your bank account, you’re not going to be checking it out of fear, you’re going to be checking it because you’re really proud of the work that you’ve done. You’re proud that when you look at your accounts, you have money. Like I have $5,000 spread across all of these accounts and this feels really good. Yes, it’s assigned, but I love knowing that like my vacation plans are handled, that I’m going to be able to buy Christmas gifts and I’m going to be able to make sure my child has a birthday party. Like that’s what the system creates.
So if you are someone who you’re making six figures and you’re thinking about like, oh, okay Keina, I hear you, but like how would this system help me? Like I said, it’s going to help you do the same thing with your money all the time. It’s going to create predictability. So if you are in a place where you are really scared about, oh my goodness, like I’m not trying to be in the same place as I was last year, or maybe you just got your tax refund and you have no idea where it went, the three money bucket system will help you because it’s going to help you stop using your credit card to float expenses in your life. It’s going to help you stop spending and feeling guilty for it, or like second guessing on your spending. It’s going to help you actually build savings that becomes true savings. And last, and finally, you’re going to feel like your money is actually working for you and that you have something to show for the fact that you are a six figure earner.
And you might be listening to me right now and think like, Keina, I’ve tried multiple bank accounts before, which I see as well all the time. And you’re like, but I have all these accounts. I actually had an account where I was putting my mortgage payment and my car payment. So I know that you’ve tried something similar. The missing piece of that is that you also have to have this spending plan. So you actually want to be able to consistently put the right amount of money into bills, to consistently put the right amount of money into spending, consistently put the right amount of money into savings, because then you don’t have to actually pass money back and forth. And the way that we get to the right amount is making sure that we are thinking about what is the real math for our life? What are we actually spending on?
We don’t just want to live off of the hope that we’re going to DoorDash a little bit less and we’re going to cancel Netflix and now our life is going to feel different because when people do that, then they tell me like, oh yeah, I did these things so I have more money, but can you prove that you have more money? What system do you have in place that is supporting you and not just feeling like you have more money, but also showing you that you have more money? So that’s where this Three Bucket Money system comes in with also layering it with the spending plan that I give my clients when we work together. It helps them think through their financial expenses so they feel like everything is covered and then we separate it into three buckets and every single time they get paid, they do the same thing and that consistency creates safety.
So if you’re listening to this or you’ve been listening to a series of my podcast, I would definitely, if I’ve said something that resonates with you and you want that accountability and support, I would invite you to apply to work with me in my five month coaching partnership. So you’ll learn this system in my partnership, but you’ll also get the opportunity to work with it with me. So in the first call, I set this up for people. I tell you exactly how much money to put into bills, how much money to put into savings, how much money to put into your spending account. So we set that all up and I know clients look at me when they’re like, okay, and that’s it. I’m like, yes, that’s it. But what also is a beautiful part because you’re working with me is yes, that’s it and we have a call next week to see how it went.
So we actually monitor the implementation of the system. You have my accountability, you have my support to also come back and say like, Hey Keina, I know we talked about this but here let me tell you what really happened or I didn’t realize that I actually go out to eat more than the number that we planned. And so we’re able to actually what I call, like do life together for those five months. And we are refining and massaging that system for you so that you feel confident being able to manage your finances on your own, and you build this level of trust. So by the time we come back that second week, you are able to tell me the things that felt good for you because of the fact that you have a new system and you are starting to see how, okay, so this next paycheck my bills account is going to increase even more.
Oh, I get to give myself some more spending money. Oh, I’m going to put more money into savings. So we start to build this momentum around what’s going to happen with your finances. So like I said, if you’re in this place and you’re thinking like, Keina, you have been speaking to me, but I haven’t reached out and booked a call yet, today is your day, go ahead and book that call. Go to Wealthovernow.com, and if you go up to the top, you will see that it says book a call. So thank you so much and I look forward to talking to you next 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.
