Do you make a great income but still feel like you’re living paycheck to paycheck?
In this episode of Money Files, I dive into what I call High Earner Syndrome, the mindset trap that keeps six-figure earners stuck in cycles of overspending, fake math, and financial stress.
On paper, you’re making more than ever before, $12K, $20K, even $30K a month, but you still don’t feel like you have enough to show for it. Raises, bonuses, and promotions come and go, but your savings doesn’t grow, your debt lingers, and your stress remains.
The problem isn’t your income, it’s the way you think about and manage your money. And until you shift your mindset and create a plan, lifestyle creep and fake math will keep you stuck, no matter how much you earn.
In this episode, I share:
[02:00] What High Earner Syndrome really is and why it’s not an income problem
[05:45] Why big bonuses disappear before you can enjoy them
[10:10] How fake math sabotages even six-figure earners
[15:30] Why planning 14 days at a time keeps you broke (and what to do instead)
[20:25] How a client went from paycheck stress to having $14,000 in her account
[24:10] The one mindset shift that puts you in control of your money today
Tune into this episode of Money Files to learn how to break free from High Earner Syndrome, stop overspending, and create financial freedom with the income you already have.
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 High Earner Syndrome, check out Episode 177: The Hidden Cost of Rushing Through Debt Repayment. Both episodes will help you stop relying on fake math and start building a financial plan that truly supports your life.
Transcript for “Why Even High Earners Are Living Paycheck to Paycheck”
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.
Hello, welcome back to another episode of Money Files. So I want to talk to you today about something that a lot of my clients deal with and they may not have the words but I’m going to give you some words today and it’s the High Earner syndrome. So with high earners, they are really good at earning more money and I work with a lot of different clients that are great at earning money. They have no problem negotiating, they have no problem to go into a new job, they have no problem like working extra shifts. And so they are making good money and when I say good money, I am saying they might be bringing in $12,000 a month, $20,000 a month, $30,000 a month, even $60,000 a month. But they’ve solved the income problem, but they haven’t actually solved what I see as a mindset problem.
And they are in the paycheck to paycheck cycle, not the paycheck to paycheck cycle that you might think about that is actually related to income. But the way that they act and the way that they think keeps them in the paycheck to paycheck cycle. So for them, paycheck to paycheck is actually a mindset and it’s not actually an income problem. And so just to break this down for you a little bit, I see paycheck to paycheck as being two different things. Sometimes people really have an income problem and I work with those clients as well where they need to earn money because they are not earning enough to cover their essentials and also make sure that they have money to be able to spend and money to be able to save.
But more often for the high earners that I’m working with, it’s a mindset problem. And so their income looks really, really good on paper, but they still feel like they don’t have enough. And what I find is that the way, like I said, the way that they think and the actions that they take are what keeps them in the paycheck to paycheck cycle. It’s almost like they have broke money habits and the broke money habits really are rooted in the fact that they give themselves permission to spend based off of how much money they make. And that is why I am calling this the High Earner syndrome. So I just want to give you a couple of examples and this can look like getting a raise, but you feel like nothing is actually happening. So I got a $30,000 raise, why don’t I feel like I have more money?
Or maybe you are someone who gets a bonus every single year and I’m talking like a $30,000 bonus, even a hundred thousand dollars bonus. And that bonus comes in, it’s gone before you even know it, you probably have a tax bill that you’re not able to pay for and you can’t figure out while you’re stuck in this cycle of making a lot of money, having these large bonuses that are sometimes equivalent to someone’s salary, but you still feel like you have debt or you’re having to put money, towards debt. But you’re using these bonuses to pay off the debt, you’re using the bonuses to travel, you may even be using the bonuses to upgrade.
The other thing that I see with this type of client is that they, I use this phrase probably more than I should, but they hoe out their bonuses. Like they are constantly saying like, I can buy this because I have a bonus coming in. We can do this because I have a bonus coming in. And let’s just say the bonus is $30,000. Well, what the High Earner syndrome doesn’t allow you to think about is one that $30,000 is really more like $15,000 because you’re not getting the whole bonus and you have tied so many things to that bonus. You’ve tied the trip to the bonus, you’ve tied the home repairs to the bonus, you’ve tied the fact that you need new tires to the bonus. So that bonus is having to do a lot of work for you. So by the time that the bonus comes, you don’t actually get to see the bonus because you’ve spent it 3, 4, 5 times.
And what you really created is debt in your life. You haven’t actually made space or created an opportunity for you to be able to save money because you’ve spent the bonus multiple times. The high earners syndrome. They’re also swiping their credit card to cover like car repairs. They’re covering home expenses and all of my high earners aren’t starting at $0 in savings or they’re not even starting with debt necessarily. But you can have savings but it doesn’t necessarily match where you think you should be. So your savings might have come from a lump sum of money. Maybe you got an inheritance, maybe you accidentally saved one of your bonuses and it actually worked that you saved it, but you have maybe $10,000 saved but you feel like I should have more than that saved because I make $500,000 a year.
You probably don’t feel comfortable even tapping into that savings because you’re not sure that you could actually rebuild it. Like these are the thoughts and the feelings and the circumstances that are happening for someone who has this high earner syndrome. And so I actually want to just dive in and I’m speaking about this client anonymously right now, but I want to tell you about what I think is a very classic case of High Earner syndrome. And so my client came to me, she actually told me that she was making more than she ever had, but she didn’t feel like she had anything to show for it. She’s like literally Keina. She gave me like the history of her past three jobs and she’s like this job I am making more than I did in my last two jobs. And when I was actually talking to her on our first call and even on our consult, she told me she basically brings in $25,000 after taxes. That’s how much she brings in.
And when I was asking her to describe how she manages her money and what’s happening, she was talking about her paychecks based on like when they come during the month and based on when her bills are due. So if she gets the paycheck at the end of the month, that paycheck is usually for her mortgage and then whatever other bills are due in between essentially the first and the 15th. And so with that paycheck being for her mortgage and the bills that are due, a large chunk of it is gone because mortgages are expensive. And so she’s left with some money left over but then not really confident about whether or not she can pay other bills. Like one of the bills that she was telling me that she kind of negotiates on, and by negotiates I mean like mentally negotiate where she has an electricity bill and she said sometimes I’ll just pay half of it.
So she pays a portion of it to make sure that like the electricity doesn’t get cut off but she never feels comfortable paying the whole electricity bill because it’s expensive, right? And she’s also not confident that she’s going to have money left over for the other things that she needs to do. And she had tried saving but every time that she tried to save she had to like pull the money back out. So she gave up on saving money because it just seemed like what was the point in her actually saving if she can’t actually keep the money in savings. So when it came time to do anything, like something broke on the car or something broke on the house, at the time that we talked, she had like a leak in her bathroom that she needed to fix. And the only way that she’s been able to take care of any repairs that have happened in the house was to pull out her credit card.
So on paper she has solved the income problem, but she hasn’t solved the mindset problem that is going to help her actually feel like she has enough. And here’s why that matters. When you don’t shift your mindset, your habits are just going to increase with your income. As you are climbing the income ladder and you’re going from, I was making $60,000 a year, $150,000, now I’m at $225,000 a year. But you’re still experiencing the same financial stress as when you made less money or maybe you’re even experiencing more financial stress than when you made less money. The key issue that I know is that you are still relying on fake math and fake math is this, it will tell you that you can figure it out later and it will tell you that the payday is tomorrow and it’s okay to just go ahead and spend it and you can figure it out.
But you’ll never be able to out earn your spending habits. I’m going to say that again. You’ll never be able to out earn your spending habits, especially when they’re rooted in you not actually being honest with yourself about how you spend money and how you want to spend money. And you might be listening to me right now and telling me like, Keina, I make way too much money to have to budget. And I would say, guess what? You make way too much money to not care where your money is going. You have given yourself permission to spend as you’ve made more money because you think that budgeting is a consequence. That budgeting is only for when you don’t make enough money. Budgeting is not a consequence. I believe that like budgeting can be a tool to help you build wealth.
You are making multiple six figures and taking an hour to decide where you want that money to go for the rest of the year could be a 100, 200. It can even be a seven figure decision for you. Because when we’re thinking about what do you want to contribute to retirement, when we’re thinking about what do you want to put in your personal savings, when we’re thinking about what do you want to plan towards, in terms of travel, you want to make those executive decisions. If you are in a place in your role at your job and you manage a budget, if you are at a company that has a multimillion dollar budget, you know that people aren’t just trying to figure it out. In order to sustain that company, to sustain the company’s growth, to make sure the company doesn’t go into bankruptcy, there is management of those finances. And the same thing is true for your own personal life.
You have to look at the fact that I am building a multimillion dollar business in my life, right? Like I want you to think about for my life I am building a multimillion dollar business and that multimillion dollar business is going to come in the form of retirement. So I need you to look at your life and your finances as a business. You are making business decisions. This has nothing to do with you like budgeting being a consequence, you not making enough money. No. This is about you being able to build wealth that you can give to your kids, wealth that you can leave behind for other people or wealth that you can spend up and make sure that from the age of 60 to 1000 that you can enjoy it. And maybe you want to leave $0 for everybody behind you.
But I want you to be thinking about why would I want to manage my money now? Like why is that important to me and how can I interrupt the conversation that I have with myself about budgeting being a consequence? And you may not say that directly, but your actions say that you think that budgeting is like a consequence for not making enough money. That budgeting is only about restriction. What I want you to think about that budgeting is actually going to be the thing that helps you build a multimillion dollar portfolio for when you want to retire. It is going to help you build an empire for your 40, 80, 100 hours a week that you are working. Budgeting is a tool to help you create something bigger than yourself.
Whatever you need to tell yourself to get you to not think about budgeting just being something that is a consequence and actually a tool to help you build wealth. And there are many other tools I will say to help you build wealth, but the reason that I start with budgeting is because that’s the plan for how you want to spend money day to day. And that’s the key word. It’s a plan. Right now you don’t have a plan and that’s why you feel like you don’t have enough money. And so budgeting is a form of self care is my thought. I also think that budgeting is therapeutic. Like I love knowing that I can spend money on something and I’m not stressing about it mentally.
And so when you know that you have the numbers down and you have space to be able to travel, you have space to be able to take care of the HVAC if it breaks down, you have space to be able to pay for dinner when your family comes to town and you’re not thinking about it being on your credit card, like that’s why you want to actually sit down and budget because when your money feels safe and predictable, your stress is going to stop. When you actually like get a hold of how you are increasing your lifestyle and you actually see some of the lifestyle creep that you have come in, that it’s come in slowly and it’s not actually things that you value anymore. You are going to be able to stop the things that no longer feel valuable to you and you’re going to be able to keep more of the money that you are making from month to month and paycheck to paycheck and you’re going to have something to show for it.
So just to take you back to my client, who I’m telling you is like picture perfect case of the high earner syndrome. On our first call when we were talking about her expenses and she’s really in this like, hey, how do you budget your paycheck? And she’s basically budgeting for the next 14 days. We built her like a year long plan. So when I budget with clients, I’m thinking about what is happening in a year. When a client tells me and I say, Hey, tell me about your Costco membership, what level do you have? How much is it?
They’re like, oh Keina, I already paid for it. I said, okay, but next year it’s going to be due, right? Whether it’s $60, $120, whatever it is. So we’re not ignoring the annual expenses because there are months when those annual expenses all hit at once. Especially for some of my clients, say that they are attorneys or they’re nurses or even doctors, they have certifications and things that they have to maintain that are annual or they have CEUs and those things can cost money.
A little $200 there, $300 there, isolated. It doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. But when we add it all together and we realized like, okay, you actually spend $6,000 to maintain like your professional licensure, that makes a difference. $6,000 is not just money that you can just go find on the ground or go work at McDonald’s for a weekend.
And so we want to make sure that those types of things are in your 12 month plan because those are the things that are disrupting you in the same month that your car breaks down. And so that’s why you experience inconsistencies in how you feel about your finances is because you’re not thinking about what are the things that I pay for all year? What are the things that I want to be able to experience? How do I want to spend my money?
And so with this client, we mapped out every single bill, we mapped out her lifestyle expenses, we mapped out her roll your eye moments, I’ll call them. And like those things that she would usually use her credit card for, we put those into her 12 month plan and we gave it our best guess. What do you think? Like just tell me about your car, what has it done this past year? Tell me about how you spend money on your kids. I hear that you said that you’ve given different people money to help them out. Tell me about what it looks like in order to give money to others, let’s make sure that we have a giving fund. Literally, we poked holes in every single thing in every single way that she spends money. We poked holes in when do you feel really stressed? Where do you feel like you want to set boundaries? And so like we really got into the nitty gritty and you are not going to get into that if you are just looking at, I get paid on the first what’s coming through from the first to the 15th.
This is why you feel stressed and this is why you feel guilty and don’t want to open up credit card statements is because you are planning in 14 day cycles instead of looking at your expenses in a 12 month plan. And let me be very clear with you, when I am talking about planning for 12 months, it doesn’t mean that you have to nail every expense and you have to get it right, but there is a difference in between thinking about like, I’m so glad I actually thought about this thing because I’m going to have some level of preparation for when it comes versus the thing happening. And you have no preparation and so you will have to just like respond and like recalibrate when you’ve actually thought about something in your plan. So I know I keep talking about auto repair on my podcast, but literally this is the thing my clients I think are most scared of.
And my client who I’m telling you about, she actually had to get her car fixed for $1,200. She’s like, Keina, I don’t have the whole $1,200 in my auto repair. And I said, okay, that’s fine. But what we do have is that we’ve said that you want to set aside $400 a month for auto repair and even if we put this on a credit card right now, we can pay it off in like three months because instead of putting the $400 into your auto repair, we could just put it towards your credit card. So that level of preparation in us thinking about the fact that like the car is something that we need to be thinking about allows us to be able to like pivot easily versus sit there and shame ourselves about how we’re not prepared again. So I’ve kind of gotten a little off my script, but I just want you to know that12 month plan is going to help you feel like, okay, I don’t have to feel like I have to know every single number, but I do see the power in asking myself about what are the things that I’m going to want to spend money on.
And as I find new things that come out of my account, I’m going to know how to respond to them instead of shutting down and feeling like, my budget’s not working for me. So after we actually got her 12 month plan together, we went in and we set up my three money bucket system. And so we did bills and her bills like account for, her bills today, but then also the upcoming bills, her quarterly ones, her annual bills. We also made sure that she had a spending account. So just thinking about like her groceries, her gas, things that are more, you don’t need them to keep the lights on, but they’re just ways in which you like to spend money. And then we also made sure that we started building some savings so that she could prepare for things to not have to put them on her credit card and being able to have a safety net for herself when she needs to spend money in a fashion that it doesn’t feel like, okay, this isn’t a monthly bill, but this is something that makes me roll my eyes if you’ll.
So within the first month of us working together and like this new accounting or not accounting system, but the new bucket system, she had $6,000 in her bills account and it was just sitting there and it was two days before payday. And I remember this call very vividly because she was telling me, she’s like, Keina, this has never been true that I have $6,000 in my account before payday. She’s like, usually before payday what happens is that I either have a couple hundred dollars and I have things that need to be paid or I’m negative. I am using my personal line of credit or I’m using my credit card. And so in 30 days she went from being in that financial stress to having $6,000 in her bank account. And then on one of our most recent check-ins, she was telling me, she’s like, Keina, we’ve been working together for two months and I have $14,000 in my bills account.
Her Bills account is a five figures account now. Like she is well within the space where she just recognizes that I’m going to have like 7 to $8,000 in that account all the time. And it doesn’t matter when payday is, like she looks forward to payday, but payday is not her lifeline anymore. She more so looks forward to payday because she knows she’s going to see her accounts come up and increase. So what I want to be clear about is that this high income earner, she’s not making more money, she has the same income, but she’s been able to have completely different outcomes with how she’s experiencing life day to day.
And the biggest shift wasn’t just in the money, but it’s been within her mindset. So she’s no longer thinking in these 14 day cycles, she stopped asking like what’s in my account and started asking what’s in my plan. So I’m going to say that again, she’s not looking at what’s in her account, she’s thinking about what’s in her plan and she stopped even like that electricity bill that I told you she was only paying half of, we are now paying like on auto pay and not worrying about how much the bill is or whether or not if the bill comes out, if she’s going to have money for other things.
So here’s what I want you to do after listening to this episode today, I want you to look at your paycheck and I want you to think about instead of asking what bills do I need to cover right now, I need you to ask yourself, what do I want this paycheck to do for me? Not just today, but over the next month? And it’s going to even expand outside of just that paycheck. I want you to think about like for the whole month, like if you get two paychecks, let’s say one of them is $8,000, the other one is $8,000, you make $16,000 a month. How does this paycheck need to support you both in paying your bills that you see right now? How does it need to support you in paying bills that might be six months out? How might it need to support you with experiences that might be six months out, experiences that could be three months out, a year out?
Like those are the things that have to go into the 12 month plan and that are going to help you experience more ease. That one question or kind of series of questions is going to help you shift from having that like 14 day mindset to really having like a longer vision, from you just using the fact that you make a lot of money and you should be able to afford things to actually creating predictability so you know I can afford anything that I actually want and anything that I actually need. Yeah, I want to put you in control. So if you’re listening and you have realized like Keina, this is me, I want you to know that you don’t need to earn more money to feel safe.
Now if you want to earn more money, I love that for you. Don’t get me wrong on that one. But you don’t need to earn more money to feel safe. And in fact, before you earn more money, I want you to work with me because I want you to know that when I make more money, I’m going to know exactly where it’s going and I’m going to have something to show for it. Because the High Earner syndrome once again is when you solve that income problem but not the mindset problem and you are not broke, you just haven’t created a plan for the income that you have and fake math is taking over. So I would invite you to go to the link in my show notes and you can apply to work with me. You can go to Wealth over now and apply to work with me. If this episode resonated with you, definitely send it to somebody. And thank you so much for tuning in. Until next week, have a great week.
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.
