As a financial coach, my goal is for my clients to have choices. I want you to be able to spend money however you want. Consistently saving money allows you to engage in drama-free spending. But a lot of people find it challenging to save money. They set a goal to save a certain amount every month, and when they can’t do that, they decide to give up altogether.
In today’s episode, I share my journey of saving money. I explain how my confidence in saving money has grown exponentially over the years, but I also highlight some challenges I experienced. Everyone’s path to financial freedom might look slightly different, but the importance of budgeting and saving money never changes. It’s time to release the shame and insecurity around money and start building wealth and the future you desire.
If one of your goals for 2024 is to save money consistently, this episode is for you! Stay tuned to hear insights on these critical topics during this episode:
[08:00] Keina’s backstory on saving
[14:25] How earning more money and building savings are related
[20:24] Challenges and learnings
[27:00] Confidence managing money vs. making money
[29:10] Savings goals
Tune into this episode of Money Files to learn how saving money consistently helps to build wealth.
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, WHAT I’VE LEARNED ABOUT SAVING MONEY AS A FINANCIAL COACH CHECK OUT MY EPISODE ON A STRESS-FREE WAY TO SAVE $10,000!
Transcript for “What I’ve Learned About Saving Money As A Financial Coach”
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 a part of the framework that I shared with you at the beginning of the year where I told you I’m teaching you five steps to build wealth. I also want you to think about these are the five steps to be able to engage in drama-free spending. These are the only five things you need in order to have money to spend on the things that you want. And so a couple weeks ago I went over investing and I went over what it looks like in order for me to budget. Today I actually want to talk about saving and as I’m talking to you guys right now, I’m like, oh my goodness, I don’t think I wrote an outline for earning more. So I’ll be sure to to fit that in because I actually have planned out my podcast for the next few weeks and I didn’t really talk about earning more, but I can talk about that as well.
So I’ll have to make sure that I circle back to that so you guys are getting in the moment real time thoughts where I’m like, oh, I probably didn’t do that. So it’s my little squirrel comment for you. But yeah, today I want to talk to you a little bit more about saving and I’m going to give you, I thought it’d be really nice to give you a reflection if you will, because I realized my thoughts about saving money may not match your thoughts about saving money. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the challenges and how those challenges have presented opportunities for me to learn. And then I can tell you a little bit about some of my goals but what I want you to understand in this is that everything that I am talking about when it comes to money, whether I’m talking with a client or whether I am telling you my own personal story, my goal for you is to be able to have choice.
I want you to be able to spend money however you choose and right now there’s something that’s keeping you from being able to spend money in a way that feels good to you. You might be the person that you’ve always talked to yourself about how you’ve always been in debt. So if you’re talking to yourself about how you’ve always been in debt, you probably have a lot of thoughts about how you spend money and you’ve made yourself wrong for how you spend money because of financial gurus honestly that you hear that tell you, “you shouldn’t be in debt, you should have money saved.” And then if you couple that with the fact that you’re like everyday I go to work and I work really hard and I have a six figure job and here I am in debt and I can’t find myself getting out of debt or you could be on the flip side of that where you’re like, oh my goodness, I’m so good at saving money but it maybe feels challenging to even let go of money because you want to be prepared for whatever the world presents.
And no matter where you are on this side, whether you’re like, Keina, I have money saved or I have debt, or Keina, I don’t have any money saved and I have no debt, I’m right in the middle but when I get my paycheck, I’m rich. Whatever that is for you, I want you to know that as a coach, my goal is to make sure that you feel like you have choices, especially as someone who has the ability to earn more money, as someone who has the ability to earn a six figure salary. And so I just want to underscore that, especially in this new year as you’re thinking about like, I don’t know how your January is going and how you feel like your spending is going, especially if that was one of your goals this year. And so sometimes we can tell ourselves like, oh my goodness, we’re not doing as well as we should or you feel really restricted and whatever it is, I just want to let you know to keep on going, you are not flawed.
There is nothing wrong with you and it may just be time honestly to apply to work with me. I get a lot of people that come and literally in their application they’re like oh my goodness, like I have been wanting to work with you for a year or I have been wanting to work with you for two years. Literally guys, it’d take some people two years. They’ll tell me, I opened up this application several times and a lot of it was the fact that they had their own shame and you have your own guilt about where you should be financially. But I just want to let you know and I want to encourage you, y’all I promise you I’m not going to judge you. If you’ve listened to any of my client interviews, you’ve probably heard us laughing together but I want to be your cheerleader.
I actually was just posting and sharing on Instagram stories that I used to be a vice principal and I was a teacher and the only thing I ever wanted to do and the reason that I ended up going into education even though I have a degree in management and finance is because I wanted to help people. And as a teacher and especially as a vice principal, y’all, I had to learn to be really creative. I don’t know if you’ve ever taught 30 little fifth graders in a classroom or 25 eighth graders in the classroom, but it is a really, really hard job and it is about building relationships. And you can’t go in judging kids. If you go in judging kids, they are going to read you your card and you are not going to make it as a teacher.
And so as a teacher, I wanted to see my kids excel and lose their shame. Kids don’t know that’s what it is, is that they’re ashamed but they’re like embarrassed if they can’t do something or if they get the answer wrong. So in my classroom I always tried to create that environment where kids could share what their answer was and they wouldn’t feel really bad if they didn’t get something right. But they learned to be curious, especially as I became a better teacher, they learned to be curious. I actually remember one former student I worked with, she was held back and I remember the second year I taught differently. I actually taught math and I remember her picking up this concept with fractions and I just remember her telling me the answer and y’all, I feel like I was jumping up and down and screaming.
I was like, oh my goodness, Tanaya, you’re doing such a great job. But for me as a teacher it was so cool to watch the shift in the way I was being and for that to have an impact on her and I’m sharing this with you, you’re like “Keina you said you were going to tell us how you’re saving.” I’m sharing this with you because the compassion that I had in the classroom and my reason for entering the classroom has carried over to my coaching business. I want the women who work with me, some men work with me as well, some couples work with me, I want the people working with me to feel like, oh this is a place where I can take my bra off and be comfortable because I know that you’ve had so many experiences, whether it be with yourself because you’ve tried different apps, you’ve tried spreadsheets and you haven’t felt successful or you may have purchased a group program, maybe you even worked with another financial coach.
So you feel embarrassed and you feel ashamed about where you are. And I just want to let you know that the environment that is in my five-month coaching container is about helping you have joy around your finances. It’s about helping you create this dynamic where you can have a drama-free spending account and you know this is the money available for me to be able to spend. So if you decide to work with me, like we are going to help you build 25% more money into your budget that you get to spend drama-free. So don’t sit there and listen to this whole episode and be like, oh, I think I’m going to do it. No girl, do it. This is your sign. You needed a sign, this is your sign. So I’m going to leave that there, go to the link in my bio or you can just go to my website Wealthovernow.com and I will see you on Zoom for our 60 minute consult.
So let me tell you a little bit about saving and my journey with saving. I wrote just a couple bullet points down and I should back up and say, when I told you guys I was a teacher and I was making like $30,000 a year paying $600 in rent, I lived in St. Louis and I want to say at the time I wasn’t paying student loans because Teach for America like deferred or put your loans in forbearance because it was almost like being in school since it was an AmeriCorps program. So I didn’t have to pay back my student loans. And at the time I want to say I was able to save like $300 a month, which felt really, really good for me. And then I transitioned from St. Louis, I moved to Washington DC to earn more money. So see I can talk to you about the earn more money topic, but it was a strategic decision to earn more money and I also wanted to become a better teacher.
So I specifically interviewed in DC at a charter school here and I knew I was going to make more money, which I needed because my student loans were also becoming due. So I knew my numbers enough to know where I was going next. What happened when I moved from St. Louis to DC was that my ability to save went down drastically because of the cost of living. I was paying at the time $1480 for rent. I want to say I was able to save like $50 a month at the time. So it was like $25 a paycheck. I definitely remember having a conversation with my mom because I was like, I can only save $50 a month. And she’s like, Keina you need to be glad that you can save. You’re saving something. My mother is my gut check for most things.
I remember her telling me to be proud of the fact that I was saving something. So one of the, I think the shifts that happened for me in that moment is like, okay Keina, you’re saving. Did I want to save more? Yes. But I think the difference between what I see for some people and it may be true for you, is that if they can’t save a certain dollar amount consistently, then they don’t save. They give up on the savings. So I did not give up on the savings simply for the fact that I couldn’t save a lot of money. I kept saving like my $50 and then from one year to the next I would love to tell you that then I was able to save like $1000 the next year but that is not what happened.
What also happened every year, because I lived in DC is that my rent increased. And so a lot of times the increase in my pay would go towards my rent increasing. I didn’t want to move apartments because for me, like I had a commute to work that I loved. And I also thought about the cost of actually packing up everything and putting a security deposit so it didn’t make sense to me to pack up everything and move. I tell you that story because I haven’t always been someone who’s like, oh, I’m saving $1000 a month or I’m maxing out my retirement completely. There are definitely levels to how I’ve been able to save over time and I remember that transition to DC having to really position myself to rebuild how much I was able to save because Like I said, my student loans also became due, they were like $500 a month.
So I had a lot of money going out and not a lot of money left over, but I was determined to be consistent with my savings. And as I made more money, I know I went from $50,000 a year. I think I was about at $80,000 a year when I bought my house. So I definitely started to make more money and by way of making more money I was also able to save more. My rent did still go up, but for the most part all of my other expenses were stable and I kind of knew that my rent was going to go up every year maybe by a hundred dollars so I was able to kind of mentally plan for that. But if you learn nothing else from me telling you that, it’s no matter where you are in your ability to save, I want you to think about yourself as a saver because if you have started the habit of saving, whenever you have the opportunity to save more, you’ll feed that part of yourself more, like with my clients I’m always like, hey, when you get a raise, make sure you come back to saving money.
I want you to make sure that you’re paying yourself first and then you can go to the next part of like what you want to spend money on. And that’s just simply because I want them to continually, like I said, be feeding themselves because it makes the drama-free spending even better when you know that you’ve taken care of yourself first and you make sure that you’re going to have the money for what you need. So let’s go into some challenges that I’ve had. The other thing that I wanted to share with you before we go there is that y’all, to be really honest with you, I feel like it took me forever to save $10,000.
I feel like I got stuck around like $3,000 for a long time, then I feel like I got stuck at $5,000 for a long time and then I feel like I would get stuck at like $8,000 and then I like finally made it to $10,000. And some of it was by nature of how much I could actually set aside to save every single month. And then also, like stuff happens where you’re like, oh I need to use some of my savings because something has happened to my car, whatever that is and it’s more than I expected and my ability to save and my goals around saving have really been the driver for being able to earn more. I’m just going to go ahead and talk about earning more as well while I’m talking about this. Because the other thing that I did very strategically while I was a teacher in terms of earning more was I tutored.
I took my skill of actually the fact that I was a really phenomenal math teacher and I charged people $70, $80, $100 an hour and I did tutoring when I was a vice principal. I wanted the extra cash, it was money I could use to save, but it was also money that I could use if I needed to pay down debt and money that I could also just use in my day-to-day spending. And then also selfishly, I just really love teaching math. So it gave me a way to like connect back since I was no longer in the classroom. But it’s one of those things that when I knew where I wanted to go, that’s where earning more came in. I didn’t get hard on myself about not being able to save more, I instead looked for where’s the opportunity to help me be able to save more, especially within education.
There’s a pay scale that’s kind of fixed, not kind of fixed. It is very fixed. And with that I had to learn how to navigate. But what I will also say within that is when I went from being a teacher to being a vice principal, y’all, I’m so sorry these numbers are old, but I went from like $80,000 a year and I want to say I went to maybe $90,000 or $95,000 being a vice principal, but we’re earning more fits in here is that when I went from being a teacher to being a vice principal, I remember the initial offer I got was only maybe three to $5,000 more than what I was making in a classroom. I have always felt really comfortable asking for what I need. My boss at the time, I told him, I said, what’s my incentive for leaving a classroom if I’m only making three to $5,000 more than what I’m making right now?
What I learned in that moment is he actually didn’t know how much I made. Our charter school at the time didn’t have a really clear pay scale. So I think for someone who maybe wasn’t making as much as I was in the classroom, I also had a master’s degree. I was making good money, given the number of years and given my position. And so he went actually and he talked to HR for me and he negotiated with HR and they gave me a higher offer. But if I had never said anything and just accepted the status quo, I would’ve put myself in a position where I was underearning. So I knew I was leaving the classroom if it was not worth my while. And he was also asking me to leave the classroom to become a vice principal so for sure you need to make this worth my while but just being able to have the position and the posture where you ask for more money and that’s just something I don’t know, it’s something that I think that when I graduated from college and because I was in the management and finance sector, I actually interviewed for jobs that were with an oil and gas companies and y’all in the business world, they are whining and dining people.
And I’m speaking to my nonprofit folks who don’t know that, but they are whining and dining people, they’re giving people per diems, like they are making sure that they have a red carpet laid out for folks and making sure that they’re giving people bonuses. So I knew about that world so it never, I don’t know, I guess for some reason I was like, yeah, I’m going to be a teacher but do you not know how amazing I am that you need me at your school? So I just had that energy and I had that confidence and so I asked for what I wanted and I’ve done that. I changed schools one time since I’ve been in DC and then I actually had another job while I was building my business where I was coaching leaders. But I’ve always been very, very keen on asking for what I wanted. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten clearer on what I want and what I need. And because, let me wrap this back up to savings, because I had money saved, I was also able to feel really confident about my choices because at the end of the day, if you don’t want to give me what I’m asking for, I don’t need what you’re offering me because I have money in the bank and I don’t have to feel insecure about you giving me a no.
That’s why I want you to have those choices and to know, like I can leave a job that doesn’t satisfy me. I can go in and negotiate and not be worried about needing the money because I have my own back. I am my own security blanket. And when you’re managing your money well and you’re able to set up this drama-free spending lifestyle, that’s what you’re going to create for yourself. That’s what I created for myself to be able to advocate for myself and ask for what I wanted. And when I’m working with clients, it’s what I’m asking them to do. They may not come into me with that type of confidence, but we use, at some time during our relationship, we talk about what does it look like for you to earn more? What do you want to do? I have a client right now and she’s like, oh, I know what you’re going to ask me.
And I’m like, no we’re asking for more money, but right now she’s doing somebody’s position at work and she’s doing her own position. I’m like, yeah, you said somebody mentioned they pay you overtime. I said, what did you say to them? We’re going to go and circle back to that conversation. And so being able to have that confidence can also be strengthened by having numbers and specifically having the savings to know that you can navigate. I hope you guys are bearing with me because I feel like I got real passionate there, but I am really passionate because y’all, I’ve just seen like what is the impact of managing your money well and saving money. And like I told you, I started with $25 at times, $300 to $25 but don’t negate what you are able to do in terms of savings and don’t disqualify it.
Don’t get defeated, don’t be frustrated. It’s like, you’ve had to use some of your savings and I’m going to tell you why here in a minute. Okay, so let’s go to challenges and learnings. So I left my job in 2018. I decided at a school that I was working at, I had applied to be the principal and they told me that they weren’t going to give me the type of support that I wanted to have. And I had written down notes in a church service about Wealth Over Now. I was like, huh, I’m going to start this business. So if you ever wondered where my business came from, it came from someone telling me, no, not giving me what I wanted and my love of budgeting and one of my line sisters telling me to just go ahead and start and create a website. So in 2018 I decided that I was not going to go back to the school that I was at.
I started my business that summer and I had savings. I can’t remember how much I had in my emergency funds, but I feel like I had at least three months of savings. So in my head I’m like, oh, this three months like I can start this business it’s going to be great. Y’all I had no idea that the reality of how fast you can spend that money that you have saved. So here I am, I’m like using my emergency fund to cover my mortgage because at this time I’m like, I have a mortgage and I have grown up expenses. My student loans are paid off so I’m not worried about them, but I learned that leaving my job I needed to actually have more money saved so that was one of my lessons and people ask me often, like how many months do you want in your emergency fund?
And the standard answer is like, you want three to six months of an emergency fund. I also encourage people to think beyond that because maybe you potentially want 6 to 12 months. I think ideally as an entrepreneur I would have 12 to 18 months of an emergency fund because of the fact that money vanishes quickly when you actually need to go and use that emergency fund. And so when you have that emergency fund, what I’ve learned if I save more is that it gives me just more breathing room. And I don’t know why I wasn’t thinking like that, but I wasn’t thinking like that. So I quickly was like, oh no, no, no, I need to find a skill to monetize so I started doing some substitute teaching and then I did some consulting before I actually got another full-time job and built my business by myself because my savings were really important to me and I wasn’t willing to be out here floundering for no reason.
That didn’t make sense to me when I knew I had skills that I could monetize and build my business at the same time. So I made sure that was taken care of. Plus I was like, nope, you need healthcare, you need all these things so you just stepped out a little bit too quickly. Then the second challenge or learning that I have is kind of related to that one, you can have all the right savings, but you may need to spend that money if you aren’t hitting your revenue goals. And so that’s a growth pain that I’ve experienced as an entrepreneur. So I left my full-time job in 2021 that was my first full year in business. I felt really good about that. Not my first full year in business, but my first full year back in business completely detached from a job and I had saved money and built myself a runway and I felt really good, made it through the whole year, made over $200,000 that year.
And then the next year in 2022, I did not make as much money as I had planned for and I had to dip into my savings. I had to dip into my personal savings, I had to dip into my business savings more than I wanted to. And so once again I was like learning about savings. Like I can have all the right “savings” but they spend quickly when you’re not hitting your revenue goals. And it’s also what they’re there for, like your brain logically knows like okay, that’s what it’s there for. But when, I can’t remember what my business expenses are, but let’s say we’re in that time, but let’s say they were like $4,000 a month. And so if you’ve saved, $12,000, $20,000 and it’s 4K, you can use that quickly, especially over the span of the year.
And I was like learning how to sell in a new way that year. So it just made me think a lot about moving forward as I make different decisions in my business, how do I want to financially prepare myself by having savings? So I can tell you one of my goals is to make sure that I am always keeping an eye on what is that 12 month target for me. And it may take me, two years to make that 12 month target, but I’m okay with that. But I know that that’s a goal for myself. And then I would say like those two things made me think about the fact that for some of you, you’re listening to me, you’re like, “oh my goodness, if I had to dip into my savings,” you would have thoughts about it and you would probably go into like a shame cycle.
I’ll tell you I had thoughts about it, but I’ll share that in just a minute what my thoughts were. But what I confidently knew is that I knew how to save money. And if you know how to save money, you’ll always know how to save money even if you have an unexpected challenge. But I use my savings. I don’t have any thoughts about my ability to save. I don’t have any, like this shame cycle that someone may have when they’re like, oh my goodness, I had to dip into my account to auto repairs or whatever because they’re worried about their ability to be able to replace that money. I feel very confident in my ability to manage money. I feel very confident in my ability to save money. I can tell you as an entrepreneur in this space now and even before fully going into this space, I’m very thankful for my comfort with money.
When I say comfort, I feel a 100% confident on how to make or manage money. It is like a no-brainer in my head but where I was going to tell you is that I do have challenges when it comes to money. My challenges may look different than yours, but I actually was talking to my coach, my business coach, and I was telling her one time, I said, you know what? I know how to manage money with my eyes closed. It’s like the making money that I don’t feel like I know how to do. And she was like, they’re the same thing y’all. She said that and I was like, you know what? I don’t even want to talk to you anymore. But in the last six months I’ve really just sat with that feedback for myself and thinking about why do I feel so confident, like making money or managing money and what are my thoughts about managing money.
And I’m like, I think it’s really easy, like I have a system for it. Even if something goes wrong, I know how to bounce back from it. Like those are things that I feel like just come naturally to me because of how I’ve managed my money for the last several decades. So I’ve taken my thoughts about managing money and I’ve tried to translate them, if you will, into making money to create just new thoughts about making money. And it has been like one of the most powerful exercises that I’ve created or not created, I guess like created for myself. It was asked of me by someone else, but it’s been one of the most powerful things because I realized even in my business, it’s like, oh, I can create a formula for making money. I can have the same confidence for making money as I do for managing money and that’s connected to me talking about like I know how to save money, but in my head as the entrepreneur, it’s like, well in order to save money, you need to make money.
And like there are all these different factors that go into it. But being able to have a level of confidence, the same level of confidence about making money as I do about managing money keeps me really calm in my business and it keeps me doing the things that I actually know I need to do in order to make money. So I have a formula now for myself for making money and it’s also something that, at times I still have to massage and I have to say like, hey, wake up. But I could do a whole nother podcast on some things that happened in 2022 that just like made me, I would say lack of a better word, that kind of just shook me in terms of like my ability to create money. And if you are listening and you’ve ever dabbled in having a side hustle or anything, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about.
I mean y’all, I got a whole mortgage, I got a car payment, I got things to pay. And so sometimes I’m like, oh wow, like Keina, you pay yourself. And it’s just this realization that sometimes feels very surreal even though I’ve been doing it for several years. So in 2024, my personal goals around saving and my business goals, I’m actually going to go to the business goals first, is that I want to focus on saving six months of my salary and then six months of my expenses. So that’s my goal on the business side. And so I will do that by making sure that I have a month saved, then I have three months saved and then I have six months saved. So like that’s the goal on my business side.
And then on my personal side, one of my fun goals that I have that I’m saving towards is I started this a couple years ago. One of my friends turned 35 and we went to her birthday party and I decided friends are expensive, but I actually have a 40th birthday party savings account. And basically, since my friend turned 35, $10 every week gets pulled and it goes to that account. So it’s not a ton of money, but I just kind of did it to see what would happen. And it’s been fun to open that account up and be like, oh, if I need to give somebody a gift for their 40th birthday, if I need to buy a plane ticket for the 40th birthday or whatever, I have access to something that like bolsters my other funds.
And then the other thing that I’ve decided for myself is that I’m going to do my own 40th birthday party and I want both of those two funds to then turn into like 50th birthday parties. So I just decided that I’m going to keep those accounts and keep that going because if I do that $10 a week for a decade, I’m going to have a nice little piece of change to do something with and to be able to celebrate friends and that would be something that’s kind of its own thing, but that feels fun for me. That may not feel fun for you but that’s one of the personal goals that I set. And then another, I guess this is fun, I think it’s fun, but my nieces and nephews, I have custodial accounts for them that are invested in the market. And so on their birthdays and around holidays, I put $25 to $50 in for them and I will probably increase that over time, but there’s also like 11 of them so you can do the math, that’s a lot of little kids, but the goal is just for them to have an account that they’ve had money invested instead of me wasting $30 to buy them a toy that $30 can go into an ETF instead. But generally they will also get something from me as well, especially if I know something’s on their list. But that’s just been something fun for me to play with.
And then also on my personal side, still just focused on my emergency fund and rebuilding that from 2022 so that I just have money to spend on whatever I want. So I mainly wanted to just give you the view of what some of my own challenges have been and what I have learned from those challenges, especially when it comes to savings because sometimes we just think that we can get into the all or nothing thinking and maybe don’t know how to support ourselves when we experience a financial setback. A couple weeks ago I recorded a podcast and it was about overcoming financial setbacks. I think that’s the title of it. I’ll make sure my podcast team pulls it and puts the link in the show notes. Because if you are someone who’s like, oh my goodness, I feel like I’m always having to dip into my savings to pay for this or whatever and you’re talking to yourself in that way, it can be a really powerful episode for you to listen to that. You also understand like you don’t lose everything. You still know how to save money. And so how do you stay in that energy that you are someone who is a saver? Alright, well thank you so much for tuning in and I will talk to you guys later. Tune in next week. Bye.
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.
