Is financial entitlement sneaking into your life? When your income increases, it’s easy to start feeling like you “deserve” certain luxuries—like trips, shopping sprees, or hiring help—without fully considering how those choices impact your finances. In today’s episode, I explore how financial entitlement manifests, often in the form of thinking about what you “should” be able to do with your money rather than focusing on how it’s actually being spent.
I dive into how this mindset can create competing priorities that derail your long-term money goals and leave you feeling overwhelmed or ashamed about your finances. Using real-life client examples, I share actionable strategies to overcome financial entitlement, regain control of your spending, and craft a budget that supports the life you truly want to build. Tune in to learn how to align your spending with your financial goals and avoid the pitfalls of entitlement.
Learn more about financial entitlement and how to shift your mindset to regain control of your finances…
- [02:52] Signs financial entitlement are creeping into your life
- [06:40] Balancing your desires with your financial vision
- [10:25] Why your income level doesn’t matter when it comes to financial entitlement
- [20:30] Steps to overcome financial entitlement
- [20:45] Writing out goals
- [21:37] Changing self talk
- [25:18] Celebrating wins
Tune into this episode of Money Files for a fresh perspective on financial entitlement and how this mindset negatively impacts how you manage your money.
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 about When Desires Overwhelm Your Budget: Navigating the Pitfalls of Financial Entitlement, check out my episode How Financial Patterns Can Help Shape Your Budget!
Transcript for “When Desires Overwhelm Your Budget: Navigating the Pitfalls of Financial Entitlement”
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. I just want you to know, thank you so much for listening to my podcast and I would ask that if you will take a moment, leave a review, wherever you listen to podcasts, you listen on Spotify, listen on Apple. I go and check the reviews. I love hearing from you and it just encourages other people to know what they are going to listen to as they embark on listening to my money file series. So if you’ll take some time and do that, I would appreciate it. And once again, just thank you so much for tuning in and listening. I know that some of you are listening on a walk, some of you are listening at the gym, some of you are listening as you get up in the morning and you’re just getting dressed for work.
So thank you, thank you. Thank you so much for letting me be a part of your day. So today I actually want to talk to you about something I have been seeing with my clients and I am calling it financial entitlement. I want to start off by saying that I don’t think any of my clients or anyone, because it could also be you too, is choosing to be financially entitled. I think that it can happen over time, especially as you move from one income level to the next. And if you haven’t actually built financial habits and skills and investigated those things, then you are generally taking a sense of lack and scarcity with you as you go from one financial bracket to the other.
So I would say especially if you have been in a place in your life where you are making $30,000 a year or $40,000 a year, $50,000 a year, something that definitely made you feel like Keina, no, no, no, I was like for real living paycheck to paycheck. I had to count everything and see where it went and I didn’t have enough money to sometimes even pay for groceries. So you experience this point of lack and as you’ve made more money, you have given yourself permission to say yes. And you’ve given yourself permission to say yes to the things that make you feel like you have arrived. And they don’t even have to be buying a Birkin bag, like that doesn’t have to be your arrival point.
Your arrival point could be as simple as, I don’t want to budget or I want to be able to go on a trip whenever I want to be able to go on a trip. I want to go shopping. But the way that I know financial entitlement is creeping into someone’s life is that they talk about what they should be able to do. And especially with my clients, when they’re in a place where they’re aware of how money is going out, how money is coming in, they can start telling me like, but Keina, I should be able to hire a housekeeper. Keina, I should be able to travel. Keina, I should be able to buy another house. And they tell me about the things that they should be able to do. And what I want to say back to this should, is like show me through your actions that you should be able to do that and when I say through your actions, I mean with how you manage your money.
So financial entitlement creeps in because there’s a gap in between the money that you make, the belief about what you think you should be able to do with that money and then there being a lack of structure with your money. And so what happens is that when you’re in this place of financial entitlement is that you end up having a lot of competing priorities and you just don’t realize it. Like financial entitlement is really about a lack of awareness. Like when I am talking about competing priorities, I am talking about clients, probably even you, if we think about what your money is going towards, you’ve adopted an expensive lifestyle because you should be able to do all these things. So if I think about you traveling, you take annual trips, you take quarterly trips, you are taking weekend trips, but that’s not the only thing you’re doing.
You’re also shopping seasonally. Maybe that’s for clothes or it’s for decor, or you’re shopping for things for your yard. And then you also, because you are outside all the time, you also want to make sure that you can alleviate some of the pressure of feeling overwhelmed. So some of your money is also going towards things that allow you to have more time. You have a housekeeper, you have people that are doing all of your landscaping, they’re cutting their yard. And then on top of that you also have aesthetic routines that you’re keeping up. You get your nails done, you’re getting your hair done, you have facials, you have massages, you have Botox scheduled to do twice a year. And then on top of that you’re also a socialite. You are at the brunch, you’re at dinner, you’re at the wineries.
And so when I talk about competing priorities, I mean that you want to live a life that really is about how you think you should be able to spend money. And so that’s why you’re spending on the travel, the shopping, the timings, your aesthetics, being a socialite. But you also want to be in a place where you want to have money in the bank saved. You also want to know that you can retire. But when I think about how you’re spending your money, you aren’t preparing, there’s no proof in your action, there’s a lack of preparation. And when we really, really drill down to the bottom of it, the way that you spend money, it just lacks balance. And it’s purely driven by your desires. It is not really driven by a clear financial vision. You are driven by your desires, which is not the same as having a financial vision. Your desires cause you to just spend money on whatever you want, whatever next available opportunity there is based off of like whatever former habits you have.
I was actually talking to a client and we were talking about her birthday and she’s like, but Keina, I always go on a trip. I was talking to her about like, but in this season, let’s think about what you actually want to create because what we have to actually think about is, is you going on a trip, is that in alignment with where you desire to be financially and what you desire to be doing in this moment, it doesn’t mean you can’t ever go on another trip. But how do you want to tailor you thinking about going on a trip in this season and in this moment? And so when you’re in this space of financial entitlement, I think that what often happens is there’s this underlying belief that you should be able to do X, Y, and Z because you make X, Y, and Z, or you should be able to do X, Y, and Z.
So you fill in whatever it is. I should be able to go on the trip to Tuloom because I’ve worked really hard all year and you carry the sense of entitlement, this like I’ve arrived.
And so at this arrival point that you have in your life, there are no money rules, there are no boundaries. And because there are no money rules and there are no boundaries, then you are not going to reach your financial goals because you’re not actually willing to actually think about what are the unintended consequences and what are the intended consequences of my financial decisions. And that is the work that you have to be willing to do when you realize that I actually want to change something with my finances, I want to change my lifestyle. I have a client right now, she actually found me listening through my podcast and she was telling me, she’s like, Keina, I can’t believe that I was like potentially spending over, like I was spending in excess about $3,000 a month before I came to work with you.
And she’s been able to shift how financial entitlement has shown up in her spending because we’ve actually gone and we’ve captured like what are all the ways in which money is leaving your account and how do we put you in the driver’s seat of how you want money to leave your account? And so we’ve done that through budgeting where she’s actually been able to get really, really clear on what are her bills, what are her expenses? And she’s cut a lot of things, a lot of subscriptions, and she’s like, okay, I don’t need this anymore. I don’t need that anymore. But do you know what she does at night? She sleeps really, really well at night, versus when we first started working together, she was like chasing her own tail trying to figure out, what is it that she was going to do to make sure that she could get control of her debt, get control of her spending.
And since we’ve been working together, like she’s still doing the things, like she’s been able to go out to eat with her friends and she’s doing different things, but she’s really thinking through like what are the intended and unintended consequences of my financial decisions? And I wrote down two examples and we’ll see if these land with you. But you have to know and I want you to know that making more money is not a silver bullet. And you may be in a position where you think like I can just out earn my spending habits and I can out earn my habits, but you can’t. I literally work with million dollar earners and they have the same issues that you have making a hundred thousand dollars a year. And it’s because they never actually sat down to think about what is my financial vision?
They’ve just given themselves, like they’ve had this entitlement, I’ve arrived. And at their arrival point, there are no money rules, there are no boundaries. And so that’s how financial entitlement creeps up into your life. And so it could be something as big as when I’m working with families, we haven’t necessarily thought, that maybe the family hasn’t thought about they’ve had another child. They haven’t necessarily thought about what does having another child mean for our family? Or maybe they are thinking about we’re sending our kids to private school because we value education, which those are both like adding family members to your family is amazing and being able to send your kids to private school, if you value that, that’s amazing. I want you to be able to do those things. But I also need you to think about, if we’re adding another child to the family, how are we going to be paying for daycare?
In what ways has our spending maybe shifted since we had our first child to our second child and where would we be pulling $2,000 a month to be able to pay for daycare or $3,000 a month to pay for daycare? But often what ends up happening is that family that adds the child is they still are like, okay, well we’re still going to Disney every single year and we are not going to shift anything about how we’re spending. So they’re not thinking about some of the unintended consequences or intended consequences of their financial decisions. Once again, I want you to have that child, I want you to be able to send your kids to private school, but you can’t just keep adding things and talking about what you should be able to do without also understanding the financial impact in your life.
You might decide to have another child or you might decide to send your kids to private school, but if you know and actually are able to take stock of your numbers, you say, okay, I know we always spend $10,000 to go to Disney, but for the next couple of years we’re actually going to scale back because we want to repurpose that money into another area of our life. Like that shows a level of financial awareness and financial maturity to know that there are trade-offs. You can’t keep just adding to the things that you do. At some point you’re going to run into friction and it’s going to leave you financially stressed. A small thing. So some of you listening are like, Keina I have no kids, nobody’s going to private school. But another small thing that I see is like, let’s say that you decide to buy a new car and you just know, I just want a new car and you want a luxury car.
And you have now taken on a $700 car payment, but what I need you to do before you take on that car payment. If we’re thinking about the unintended and intended consequences, is we have to think about like what am my lifestyle might change because I am taking on a $700 car payment. You can’t just take on a $700 car payment because you’re getting a pay raise at work. Because you haven’t necessarily, maybe you haven’t thought about my insurance is going to go up or what’s going to be the cost of maintenance or maybe you actually don’t have the full $700 to make the payment, like you could go from not having a car payment to having a car payment. But maybe that $700 is really just barely the amount of money you were saving each month. And so you have to be able to look through these things because if you don’t ask yourself these questions, you are going to continue to always be in this financial pickle if you’re not willing to actually stop and pause before you actually make decisions.
When you actually recognize that you’re in a place. And so some of you listening might recognize like, oh wow, okay, I’m in a place where I realize I need to make some changes because maybe I have been living this really entitled life. One of the things, and this is some of the stuff that I coach on, is like I want to show clients. Like I just want you to know that you might need to say out loud that one of your trade-offs is like, I actually don’t want to make progress towards the goal of saving $10,000 and when I say that you need to say that out loud, it’s because you’re not willing to change your habits. And if you’re not willing to change your habits, you’re not going to be able to move the needle. And when you find yourself just thinking about like, oh my goodness, it’s going to take so long and like I don’t want to say no to going on a trip or I don’t want to have to not spend money on clothes, like if that’s the only thing that you can think about, then you’re not going to be able to move the needle forward on where you want to go financially.
And so being able to move the needle with your financial goals, like it does take, you have to be willing to let go of some things. Now do not hear me saying like, oh my goodness, you have to live in a restricted lifestyle. That’s not what I’m saying. But you may not be able to go get your nails done every week. You may have to get them done once a month. Like that might be a trade-off that you make because there’s another financial goal that’s more important to you. Instead of taking a $5,000 birthday trip, you might take a thousand dollars birthday trip because it’s more in alignment with where you desire to be financially once you understand your financial goals and you are able to prioritize your financial goals. But if you are not willing to make those decisions, I would say that are signing and you are telling me I am financially entitled.
I do not mean that in a rude way, but I just want you to know that once you recognize it. And if you’re not willing to change, then you are comfortable with not making changes that are required for you to actually see the result that you desire. And that’s why I think like, I think coaching is really, really powerful, especially if you know that you’re kind of like that oppositional defiant financial person. Because a coach can help you see a different version of your life. You maybe, like just going back to the nail situation, you may only hear like, oh my goodness, I can’t get my nails done, I can’t get my nails done and maybe that’s the only thing you can hear. And you may not be able to see the impact of like, well what if you only got your nails done three times in a month or you got your nails done every other week and a coach can help you see how that can actually make a difference for you because it’s going to be in alignment with other habits that you desire to build. And it’s also going to be in alignment with other financial goals that you’re working on.
So although you might move from getting your nails done every single week to twice a month, what you’re also going to see is within your financial plan, you’re going to see your savings account go up or you’re going to see your debt go down, or you’re going to see your travel fund go up. And that’s all as a result because you were willing to say, I’m actually going to shift a habit. I can have something else that I desire, a little bit more than getting my nails than every single week. So if you are in a place where you recognize like, Keina, I actually, I can say that I do have, and I experienced some of this financial entitlement and I can see where it’s showing up with how I think about my money, I want to help you think about how you can actually shift.
I really don’t think anybody wants to stay in a place where they’re financially entitled. I recognize that change is actually really hard. Change is really, really scary, especially if you set out to do this work on your own before and you’re like, yeah, I did it for like three months and then it didn’t work or I try the no spend challenge and now I’m right back in the same place. And that’s another reason that I think it’s really important that you work with a coach and why I do five months with my clients is because we are working on the behavioral change and we are massaging and building a new muscle for you to develop new habits because I don’t want you to quit on yourself, especially like when something’s unfamiliar or something feels hard because those are the reasons that we quit when our brain is like, oh my goodness, I have no idea what to do.
And I think that’s my magic with clients is being able to help them see what they can do besides quitting. Like, okay, here are three or four other options. What can you do besides quit and give up on yourself? So if you are wanting to shift your financial entitlement, I would say the first thing you need to do is actually prioritize your financial goals. So really sitting down and thinking about, okay, what are the things that I want to prioritize financially? What am I actually saying is important to me this year? Am I saying that paying off debt is important to me? Am I saying that I want to save $10,000? Like what is important to me? And by actually sitting down and putting your goals on paper, it’s going to help you see and connect with your why. You need to develop a why.
You can’t just have the goals that you talk about in your head and expect to achieve them. That’s just not how it looks. So prioritize your goals first. And then the next thing that I want you to do is I actually want you to change the way that you talk to yourself about the process. I hear clients all the time that I always call them out on like, I don’t want you to talk about the situation as a place of lack. And you talk about what you can’t do. I want you to think about, I am shifting the way that I’m spending in this season because it’s preparing me for the next season that I’m going into, like some of my clients in the first like 30 days, I might be like, Hey, do you think you cannot get your hair done or do you think you cannot not get your nails done?
And they’ll say like, okay, I think so. And that 30 day shift when I ask them that can help get them out the paycheck to paycheck cycle by literally not going to get a haircut or getting their nails done. But then because we’ve gotten out the paycheck cycle and we’ve built their budget, we’re now on the other side where they now start to get to go do those things and they don’t have to think about how they’re going to pay for it. And so that’s like a 30 day shift that can happen where you might have to cut back on something, but it’s going to accelerate another goal. It’s going to accelerate your goal of getting out of the paycheck to paycheck cycle or being able to put all your bills on auto pay because you were willing and able to reframe why you were going to shift your spending habits for a 30 day period.
Similarly, you might decide to cancel some subscriptions that you have and your canceling of subscriptions might be in service of you building your first emergency fund that has a thousand dollars in it or $3,000 in it. And so you want to talk to yourself about how letting go of your Hulu subscription or letting go of your Costco subscription that you never use is allowing you to actually create financial security for yourself. So you want to really state out loud, why are you making these changes. And the only way that you can articulate why you’re making these changes is you have to be able to come back to the goals that you’re prioritizing. And why is it important for you? Maybe this is the year that you’re actually not going to travel as much, but you’re not just not traveling because you can’t afford it. You’re not traveling because you’re actually saving for a down payment on a home.
And that is a bigger goal for you than maybe taking two international trips this year. It would be nice to do the two international trips, but home ownership is something that you want to have to create and build a legacy for yourself. So when I’m saying that you have to change the way that you talk to yourself about the process, it’s being able to connect the shift in your behavioral habits and your spending habits. Why are you shifting those things? What is that in connection with? What goal is that in connection with? Being able to talk to yourself about the fact that this is not a permanent thing, this is a shift in a season. Maybe I’m doing it for three months, maybe I’m doing it for six months, maybe I am doing it for a year. But really being able to be clear on that timeline for your brain can also help you be more willing to shift the financial entitlement that might be showing up for you.
And lastly, I think it is so important to celebrate. The number one thing I open up every single call with my clients is tell me your wins. And the reason that I start there is because I want you to pause and think about what’s going well. Our brains are so inclined to go to automatic negative thoughts and talk about all the things that aren’t going well. And so we have to sit down and we have to write out what’s going well. And so if I were to tell you to adopt a practice is to really sit down on a weekly basis and ask yourself, what behaviors are shifting with my money? What mindset shifts have I actually had with my money? What actual money shifts have I had, like if you were tracking how much money you had before payday because maybe that’s something that’s really stressful for you, like that could be a money shift.
You might start saying like, I always have a thousand dollars before my payday and I never would’ve had that 90 days ago or a mindset shift like I am starting to think about the fact that I actually want to earn more money. Like that is something that I’m thinking about. I’m able to talk about it with other people. And then a behavioral shift could be like, I am making sure that I put things in a cart for 24 hours before I actually buy it and I’m stopping to think and pause before I click and say like, yes, Amazon, ship this to me or whoever you’re shopping with. So those are things for you to capture to help you celebrate the progress that you’re making as you’re going through getting yourself out of the financial entitlement.
I think that you’ll know that you’re out of financial entitlement when you’re no longer talking about what you should be able to do with your money. And your actions, there will be proof of what you actually can do with your money based on your actions. You will have a budget, you will have a system to be able to save for the things that you actually want to spend on. You’ll be comfortable making trade-offs for the things that you want to spend money on. There might be some months where you’re like, I do have someone come and deep clean my house, but I don’t do that all that time because I also want to make sure that I have more money to go travel annually. But you’ll be able to talk about the things you discretionary spending in the way that you invest in your life outside of bills. You’ll be able to talk about that with clarity and you’ll feel really comfortable about it. You won’t just be doing things in a whimsical way, but you’ll be really clear about why you would say yes to three brunches in a month, or why you would say no to three brunches in a month.
It won’t be tied back to this thought that, like, you should be able to do this because you make X amount of money. So I feel like I’ve talked really, really fast this entire time, but I hope that something resonated with you as we just are talking about this financial entitlement. And the last thing I’ll say and I didn’t actually, I should have probably put this somewhere back a couple minutes ago in this podcast, is I want you to sit down and really know your numbers because I want you to know what you’re actually entitled to. And when I say what you’re actually entitled to, it’s like I want you to craft how you want to spend your money. That is what your budget is for. Your budget is a list of decisions. And you have all of these thoughts and all of these hopes and all of these dreams.
Let’s align them with how you’re doing financially. So you’ll know when you can confidently say yes. And you’ll know how to accelerate your yeses or you’ll know when you’ll say, nope, I’m actually going to sit this one out and here’s why. So your budget is positioning for you to be in a place where you feel more confident and you feel more clear with how you manage your money. And then when you’re in that place as you earn more money, you are just going to feel like, wow, like I can actually feel the money that I’m earning and I feel so much freer and I’m clearer and I just have all of this joy that I never knew I could have with having a budget and I don’t feel restricted. I actually feel really powerful. I feel really clear and I feel really confident.
So thank you so much for tuning in and if you want to take this work deeper, I would invite you to go to my show notes and apply to work with me, especially as 2024 is coming to an end. We are going into 2025, and I mean, I don’t think there’s any magic in the new year, but it’s always a great place to be able to feel like you have a fresh start and to just feel like I’m going to be going into 2025 setting some very clear intentions. So get on my calendar, apply to work with me, and let’s hang out for five months and change the way you think and feel about money. And until next time, I’ll talk to you later. 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.
