Feeling better about your money is not the same thing as building wealth.
For many high earners, things finally feel calm. Bills are paid. Spending feels intentional. You’ve improved your system. Your stress is down. You feel more in control. You might even know what’s going in and out of your account. You’re proud of yourself because you’re so much better than you once were.
In this episode, I break down what I call the Desire Fulfillment Cycle. The desire fulfillment cycle is when your money management is optimized to say yes to present day wants and needs, but it’s not designed to build long term safety or wealth. And this is where a lot of high earners get tripped up because we start to associate certain behaviors with being good with money.
Tune in as I walk you through why this cycle forms, how it often shows up after financial healing or income growth, and why feeling good about money can quietly replace the work of building wealth if you are not paying attention.
If you have ever thought, “I’m doing better than I used to, so why don’t my numbers reflect that?” this episode will help you see what is actually happening and what needs to shift.
Episode Highlights:
- [01:05] What the Desire Fulfillment Cycle actually is
- [03:40] Why feeling stable can stall long-term wealth
- [06:55] How emotional relief quietly replaces financial strategy
- [10:20] The difference between comfort spending and intentional growth
- [13:45] Why this cycle is common for high earners
- [17:10] How to interrupt the cycle without restriction
- [21:30] Building a system that supports both ease and expansion
Tune into this episode of Money Files to understand why feeling good about money is not the same as building wealth and how to create a system that supports both stability and growth.
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 Desire Fulfillment Cycle, check out Episode 211: Permission Spending vs. Permission Budgeting. It expands on how emotional relief can shape spending decisions even when the numbers look fine.
Transcript for “When Financial Comfort Quietly Replaces Financial Growth”
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, before we get started today, I want to invite you to a masterclass that I am hosting on February 25th. It’s a Wednesday and it’s going to be at 12:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. I am going to be talking about how to budget for the last time. And the goal of this masterclass is to help you create a system that allows you to pay off debt, save money, and invest automatically because this is the last year that you need to be thinking about the debt. This is the last year that you need to be trying to figure out how to save. And I want to make sure that you feel good about retiring comfortably. So go to the link in my bio or you can go to www.wealthovernow/masterclass and sign up.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Money Files. Thank you so much for tuning in. So diving into today’s episode, I want to tell you that we are going to talk about giving things that we experience financially a name because I think it’s so important for us to be able to name what’s happening because then we can own our own money patterns and so we can understand what’s happening with our finances. One of the things that coaching provides is language. It gives you language for the things that you might have felt for a very long time, but didn’t know quite how to describe. And when you have language for the things that you’re experiencing, one, you can call it out. Two, you can call it out in a way that doesn’t let shame overwhelm you. And three, you can decide from that place, how do I actually want to address what I’m experiencing?
And I think that is the power of coaching, is if you listen to my client, Emily, on our podcast, she talked about, I felt like Keina was like holding me up underneath my arms and like shame was able to wash over me, but like she was holding me up and I was able to look at the things that I couldn’t have looked at on my own. And so that’s where you actually see progress start to happen. Like a lot of my clients tell me that working with me feels more like financial therapy than it does anything else. I think it’s the thing that they don’t expect when they actually sign up to work. They’re like, I thought she was going to give me a budget, which you were definitely going to get a budget, but you start to experience what I call budget therapy.
So in this episode today, we are diving into something that I want you to be able to name because it might be happening to you or it might be happening to you in the future. And I want you to be able to call it out. So I want to start by sharing that you have three financial phases in your life. The first one is what I would call survival. And it’s really categorized by this question of will I make it through the month? And so your money is defined by urgency. The second phase is stability, and it is categorized by the question of, can I afford this right now? And your money is defined by containment. And then the last phase is wealth. And the organizing question for wealth is, is this aligned with who I’m becoming? And in that phase, your money is future anchored.
Today I want to focus on something that happens in the stability phase that almost nobody talks about. Something that I call the desire fulfillment cycle because understanding this one pattern might be the difference between staying comfortable and actually building wealth. So let me come back to what I mean when I talk about like the survival phase. When I say that you are in the survival phase, I don’t necessarily mean that you have low income. When you’re in the survival phase it’s the season in your life where your relationship with money is organized entirely around time.
You are wondering if you have enough before the next paycheck. You’re asking what needs to be clear first. You are moving money around, you’re doing mental math based on dates and due dates and balances. You are the master of financial Tetris. At the end of the day, you recognize money decisions are anchored in urgency. So the survival phase has a very specific organizing question underneath it, which is, do I have enough to get through this next stretch of time? And when you finally come out of that umbrella of how you’re organizing your money, when your money management gets better, when overdrafts are in a constant fear, when you’re no longer bracing for impact, it feels really, really good.
And you move to the next financial phase, which is stability. And the stability phase is defined as being better than you used to be, right? You’ve probably heard yourself say that like I’m better than I used to be because being better than you used to be, it feels like a win and it is a win. You’ve improved your system, your stress is down, you feel more in control. You’re aware of what’s going in and out of your account. Like you actually know your numbers, you’re proud of yourself. And I would say that you should be but oftentimes I have clients who will look up and think, why don’t I feel ahead? Why does something still feel unsettled? And I would say it’s at this moment that they recognize they’re stuck in what I call the stability trap.
Their money feels better than ever, but yet they find themselves feeling behind, again, just from a different angle than before. They might not have as much as they’d hoped in retirement, or they might not have as much as they believe they should have in their emergency fund, and they don’t feel like they’re making the adult moves they thought that they would be making at this point in time in their life. And so this episode actually came from a client call and my client, I would say like my client has made very notable progress. She’s actually a business owner and she’s financially savvy. She knows how to create money when she needs to, and she’s developed better money habits and started using syncing funds for the things that she wants.
And so on a recent call, we were talking about her traveling and she said, but Keina, I have a sinking funds for it because I probably gave her a face like when she was talking about it. And I joked with her and I said, I think you’re sinking funds. I think they actually restart throughout the year. Like I don’t think they have a cap. I think you just put money into the account that says travel, and you call it your sinking funds. And just to give you a little bit more context for what I meant by this, she is learned how to save for things. She’s learned that cash gives her permission to spend. And her takeaway, if I simplified it is, if I have the cash, I’m doing money right and I’m implementing money systems well. And I would agree, like it’s not bad. We all want to make sure that we actually have cash on hand even if we’re not physically using the cash, but we don’t want to be using debt.
We want to be using our cash and so spending money when you have the cash isn’t irresponsible. So I don’t want you to hear me say that. Sinking funds aren’t actually a problem. So don’t take that away from this and even giving yourself permission to enjoy your life, that’s not a problem. But in talking to her and just trying to describe what is going on, what I realized and I wanted to bring to everyone’s attention because I know it’s not just her, is what is quietly going on in the background of her financial decision making is the desire fulfillment cycle. The desire fulfillment cycle is when your money management is optimized to say yes to present day wants and needs, but it’s not designed to build long-term safety or wealth.
I’m going to say that one more time. The desire fulfillment cycle is when your money management is optimized to say yes to present day wants and needs, but it’s not designed to build long-term safety or wealth. And here’s the thing, you don’t notice it’s happening. It just feels like I’m doing the right thing with my money. Remember I told you this is happening in the stability phase. Things are stable, they’re not chaotic. And so what I want to show you is what this actually looked like for her and why it’s hard to see. As my client and I were talking about some of her other financial goals and why she gives herself permission to spend on certain things.
Something she named was that she’s no longer in survival. And she literally named that, she literally said survival. And she isn’t thinking about her money out of urgency anymore. So things in her life have settled in the last year, the last five years, even in the last 10 years. And because of this, her spending habits have optimized themselves for experiences, family care, comfort, for not feeling deprived and for being the yes person. So on the surface, this looks like values focused spending and in many ways it is. But here’s what’s missing. Her spending has not left room for wealth creation, not intentional wealth creation. And this doesn’t just happen to business owners.
So if I want to give you another example, just thinking about W2 earners. Let’s think about when you get a raise, what happens. Oftentimes you go and immediately increase your lifestyle. You might buy a new car or you might put more money towards travel, or you update your clothes or you start renovating your home. And meanwhile, you don’t actually adjust your emergency savings goals. You don’t adjust your retirement contributions. Everything else in your life increases in terms of your yeses and the things that you want to be able to say yes to, but you don’t actually say yes to your future self. And so you get stuck in that desire fulfillment cycle. And this is where a lot of high earners, I would say, get tripped up because we start to associate certain behaviors with being good with money. Like I’m using cash, I pay my credit cards off each month.
I put money in my savings and please hear me. Those are skills. We want to actually protect those behaviors and we want those habits to stick. But just because you use cash doesn’t automatically make you a good money manager. Just because you pay off your credit card every month doesn’t either. Just because you put money into savings doesn’t mean you’re building wealth. A lot of savings in the desire fulfillment cycle is already assigned. It’s already earmarked, it already has a job, and that job is usually to be spent. So your savings account might have $8,000 in it. But you might be saying, oh, 3000 of that is for a kitchen renovation. $2,000 of that is for Christmas. 1500 is for like a summer trip, and another 1500 is my emergency fund. But when we look at that emergency fund, you’ve had that same $1,500 in your account for the last two years.
So what happens is your money system gets really good at funding what’s in front of you, your trips, your experiences, your self-care, your comfort, but it never ask different questions. It never asks about long-term safety. It never asks about your future self. It never asks what you’re building beyond what you can see. The reason this cycle sticks isn’t because people don’t care about their future. It’s not that you don’t care about your future. It’s because it feels good not to be surviving anymore. It feels good not to feel restricted. It feels good to finally say yes without feeling like you have to panic. It feels like proof that you’ve grown. And there’s also something deeper that might be happening if you take time to actually sit with this. Most people don’t yet have intimacy with the identity of being or even becoming someone who builds wealth.
I’m going to say that again. Most people don’t yet have intimacy with the identity of being or even becoming someone who builds wealth. Wealth building doesn’t seem tangible at first. It doesn’t give you an immediate payoff, and it doesn’t really come with a dopamine hit. I would say, honestly, if I were going to be completely truthful with you, I think wealth building can feel very boring and it can feel very anti-climatic. And sometimes it asks you to say no, even when you technically could say yes. So what I notice when I talk to people about paying attention to their future is that they think they have more time, or that saving for their future self isn’t that urgent. Maybe it doesn’t demand our attention the way a bill does, or the way a trip we’re excited about does.
And maybe you’ve never felt like you were a saver, and maybe that’s not part of your identity yet. So your natural inclination isn’t to save money because that doesn’t feel comfortable, that doesn’t feel like someone you can rely on, especially if you have a relationship with yourself or you feel like I can’t be trusted with money and I have never really been in a position where I’ve just had money. I’ve never allowed myself to have money. And you have to actually practice the skill of having money. So like I said earlier, it can be really anti-climatic to focus on this part of yourself where you are focusing on your future and you’re deciding to save. And that’s okay. And when I was talking to my client, one of the things that came up was that she’s had a lot of fast growth in her business.
And when we talk about saving for retirement, it really does feel boring. It feels very anti-climatic. But we also talked about time and that it could be okay to move slowly, like time is going to pass you by whether you like it or not. And when we’re talking about saving money, being anti-climatic, you might tell yourself something like, what’s $200 a month really going to do? Why would I save $200 a month? $200 really isn’t that much. But that’s where you’re underestimating the power of time. When we underestimate the compounding effect, we aren’t giving ourselves the opportunity to actually see what can happen. Because if you actually give your future self some money to set aside in your 401k or in your emergency fund, like that is actually going to become a future gift for yourself.
One day you’re going to open that account up and you’re going to look at that account and say, wow, I’m so thankful for my past self for saving this. And let’s just take the example of $200 a month. It feels like, okay, that’s $2,400 a year. But if you save that and you save that over the next five years, you’re going to have over $11,000 in an account. And think about what’s happened in the last five years of your life. We went through COVID in the last five years of our lives, like imagine if you just were tucking away $200 every single month. Today, you would’ve woke up and you would have just $11,000 sitting in an account. You would most likely have more, especially if it’s in a high yield savings account, or if it was in your retirement account.
Because you have interest that you’re going to get added to that account. But in the last five years, if you hadn’t been saving $200 a month, depending on where you are in terms of your finances, you probably wouldn’t have missed it that much. But you’ve also missed an opportunity. If you haven’t been saving that $200 a month, you’ve missed the opportunity to take care of your future self. And I don’t want you to be in the desire fulfillment cycle and miss your opportunity to build wealth. And there are many different variations of wealth. In this case remember when I’m talking about wealth, I’m really talking about you being anchored in your future. You can learn more information, but right now, I want us to be taking some of the actions to get us into building wealth and to get us to ask questions about our future self.
I want you to be okay with saving money, being boring because those boring habits are going to take care of your future self. And here’s what I think is really tricky. We think saving feels good when we see a big number, but the habit has to actually come first. We have to practice being someone who prioritizes their future self before it might actually become natural. Your identity in this case is going to follow your behavior, not the other way around. And you are going to see that watching your retirement account grow by, let’s say $500 a month, it doesn’t give you the same hit as booking a trip. I understand that, right? But your 65-year-old self, she is going to be so grateful you started prioritizing her right now, even when it felt boring, even when it felt like it wasn’t going to do that much.
So if you are listening to this podcast, and maybe you’re hearing yourself in this, I want to offer you a reframe. Desire, fulfillment isn’t the problem. Desire, fulfillment without wealth intention is feeling good about your money and feeling safe with your money are not the same thing. And if you’re in that space where you’re doing better than you used to, but something still feels unfinished, you haven’t failed, you have just outgrown the system that actually got you to where you are right now. So this week, I don’t want you to change anything. I just want you to really, truly, truly notice where your money system says yes easily.
And I mean easily, where do you not even have to think about it? Where does the money just go? Notice what it’s optimized to support. Notice what conversations it never forces you to have with yourself. Especially notice moments where you might tell yourself, I had the cash. And that becomes the end of the conversation. And if you get a raise or a bonus, notice where does that money go? Go and reflect on where did my bonuses go the last year, the last two years. Did it go towards my lifestyle or did it actually go towards my future self? That awareness alone is going to be powerful for you. If this episode gave you language for something that you felt, but you couldn’t quite name, I just want to let you know, this is the exact work I do in coaching. I am not the coach that is going to tell you, you can only have rice and beans, and that’s the only thing that you can afford.
We are going to actually focus on building a customized budget for you that is going to support both your enjoyment and safety, and even within this episode, being able to pay attention to where might you be falling into the desire fulfillment cycle. Like what are the things that need to be on your radar in the next six months, in the next year, so that you are building in a routine where you’re going back and you’re looking at your money and you’re saying, where is my money going? Am I paying attention to not just my present self, but am I also making sure that I’m paying attention to my future self? So if this is the work that you’re like, Keina, this is the work I need to do. I am tired of living paycheck to paycheck, I’m tired of being in and out of debt, I would invite you to go and apply and work with me and my five month coaching partnership. You can go to Wealthovernow.com or you can go to the show notes. But until next week, have a great week and I will talk to you later.
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.
