Have you been telling yourself you’ll start when things calm down? Maybe when the debt drops a little, when the new job comes through, when the kids settle in, when you finally feel ready? I want you to sit with that for a second, because if you are honest with yourself, that future start date has already moved more than once.
In this episode I am talking directly to my Keina lurkers. You know my work. You have been following along for months, maybe years. You know that you need support and you keep telling yourself you are almost ready. What I want you to understand today is that the waiting has a cost, and it is showing up in your life whether you are doing anything about it or not.
I am breaking down five specific costs that do not show up on your bank statement: decision fatigue, the intention tax, stuck money, the avoidance tax, and the emotional cost that lives in the background of everything. I am also walking you through two versions of you six months from now so you can see clearly what the choice you make today actually creates.
The best time to start is not when things are perfect. It is right now, in the middle of whatever is going on in your life.
In this episode you’ll learn…
[00:02:10] Why your future start date keeps moving and how the cycle of waiting is keeping you comfortable in your discomfort
[00:06:45] What a financial hum is and why you have stopped hearing the noise that is running in the background of your financial life
[00:10:30] Why you do not need to get organized before working with a coach, and where else in your life you hire help without judging yourself for it
[00:14:55] The real question: not whether you can afford coaching, but what it is costing you to keep doing this alone
[00:18:20] The five costs of waiting: decision fatigue, the intention tax, stuck money, the avoidance tax, and the emotional cost that never appears on your bank statement
[00:24:10] Two versions of you six months from now and why the difference between them is one decision made in the mess
[00:28:40] What Keina’s actual clients said when they applied, in their own words, and what they all have in common with you
Tune in to this episode of Money Files to understand what the cost of waiting is actually adding up to in your life, and why starting before you feel ready is the decision that changes everything.
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 episode on the cost of waiting, check out Episode 226 How Lisa Paid Off $15,000 in Debt and Built $7,000 in Savings In One Year.
Transcript for “Why You Keep Waiting to Start (And What That Waiting Is Actually Costing You)”
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 want to acknowledge that maybe you are listening to me right now for the first time, or maybe you have been following me for a couple of months. You know my podcast really well. This is your favorite thing to tune into. Or maybe you’ve been reading my emails, you’ve seen my content, and you have been on the Keina side of the world for years, and you are someone I would call a Keina lurker, affectionately. And you told yourself, like, Keina, yes, girl, yes, this is exactly what I need. You know that I am all in your life, but we have never actually met, but you have that sentiment. And I would also acknowledge that somewhere in the back of your mind, you’re telling yourself, I just need to get a few more things together, and then I’m coming for you, girl. I’m going to apply to work with you next week. I’m going to apply to work with you in a couple of months. I’m going to start this fall. I’ll start next year when I get a new job.
And you’ve given yourself a future start date with me. But if you’re really honest, you’ve never actually shown up for that future start date, and you keep pushing the date out for when you’ll be ready. And here’s what I want you to notice. This isn’t actually a new conversation that you’ve been having with yourself. You’ve been having a conversation about your finances for years. It is a cycle, and you know it really, really well. When things maybe get really tight, or you experience maybe a bill that doesn’t get paid, or your credit card looks a little bit higher, or you don’t have money in savings, that’s when you probably feel the pressure to say, I’m going to work with Keina. That is what I call one of those my back is up against the wall scenarios, where you’re like, oh, no, no, no. I’ve got to do something about this.
But something happens. Maybe your paycheck hits, or you figure out a way to cover what was causing you pain in the moment. And so you keep telling yourself, I’m going to wait. But no, no, no, Keina, I’m coming. But you can actually name that you are in a cycle. And I don’t actually think that you are doing this consciously. You are doing this subconsciously, where you’re telling yourself that you just need to try one more time on your own, or maybe you need to do a little bit more research, or gosh, the kids got a lot going on right now. I just spent a whole bunch of money to get my car fixed. You just paid off their credit cards. And you are waiting to work with me until you have this perfect scenario.
Maybe you’re waiting until you’re making more money. You’re waiting until the doctor’s appointments slow down. And you think that you need the exact conditions, the perfect conditions for when you’ll finally be ready to start. But by you telling yourself that you need these perfect conditions, it’s actually allowing you to be comfortable in your discomfort. And it’s causing you to stay exactly where you are. And I want to name for you that is the dangerous part of telling yourself that there’s going to be a perfect time, because that comfort is just allowing you to live with the financial hum that you have in your life. I describe a financial hum like being that noise that in the beginning, you actually heard it, but now you don’t hear it anymore.
So think about maybe your refrigerator. Maybe it’s a little bit louder than it should be. And you noticed it in the beginning, but now you don’t notice it anymore because it’s just in the backdrop of your life. Some of you have a smoke detector that beeps. And I would argue that you don’t hear it anymore, which for the sake of everybody involved, please change that battery. But your finances can have this financial hum, and you can experience things that you have just become accustomed to. You’ve become accustomed to waiting on your paycheck. You’ve become accustomed to not being able to put your bills on autopay. You’ve become accustomed to paying a partial bill so it’s not late, but then you can pay the other half with the next paycheck. That’s just the way that you’ve operated. And you have this chaos in your life that you’re not addressing because you’re in this cycle of waiting for the perfect condition, waiting to make more money, waiting until you pay down a little bit of debt.
And those conditions have not presented themselves. And I would argue that what you want to do is to get organized before you work with me. You want to clean up enough so that when you show up, you look like you have it somewhat together. But what I would say to you kindly is that if you were able to organize your finances on your own, you wouldn’t need a financial coach. And I’m not saying that to say that you are not capable because I know you’re capable of a lot of things. But when you work with me, you get a mirror to be able to support you with the things that you are doing well, to also help you see where can you shift and how do you need to create a new belief system about how you manage money.
And so the mirror that you get in working with a coach is going to help you feel like things aren’t really scattered around in your brain. Working with a coach is going to show you where to start. Working with a coach is going to help you stop circling around the same problems. And that’s why you don’t actually need to get organized before you work with a coach. Something that I would name explicitly, especially if you are a high achiever, is that you are very successful. You are successful at work. You are probably a high-achieving mother if you have kids. And that’s the way that people see you. You are the one that has it all together. And you have real measurable proof that you know how to figure things out. And that’s why, when it comes to your finances, that this area of your life is particularly frustrating because you are used to being the person who can just figure it out.
And what I want you to think about here is, where else in your life do you actually hire help and you never judge yourself for it? I’m going to say that again. As a high-achieving woman, where else in your life do you hire help and you never judge yourself for it? I’m sure you hire someone to do your taxes. Why? Because you know that they can see things that you can’t see. You’ve probably hired someone to come clean your house. You may have hired someone to organize your home. Why have you done that? Because you want your time and your energy back. Nobody looks at you and says that you have failed.
So why is your money any different? I think it’s because, when we think about money, it feels like something that we should be able to figure out on our own. We have examples of other people, or what we presume to be examples of other people, who are figuring out their money on their own. You’re wondering, why can’t I do that too? Why can’t I figure out how to put my bills on auto pay? Why can’t I figure out how to pay off my debt? Why am I the one that is flawed, if you will? I should know how to do this. You’ve made it mean something that is negative about you. That’s where shame comes in, the guilt comes in, the overwhelm comes in, because you can’t figure it out. But here’s what’s actually happening.
You’re spending an enormous amount of mental energy every single month trying to calculate, how can I pay off debt? How can I save? How can I make it to the first of the month? How can I make it to the next paycheck on the 15th? And how can I make sure that I handle all of these unexpected things that are coming up? What that is creating for you is decision fatigue. And it’s costing you in ways that aren’t necessarily showing up on paper. One of the questions that people ask me about investing in a coach is like, Keina, you’re naming all the things that I’m experiencing, like I’m trying to figure out how do I pay these bills? When can I do this? And I’m trying to organize myself. But how can I invest in coaching when I’m already feeling financially stressed? Like my money is already stretched really thin. Like does it make sense to actually spend money when money is the actual problem?
And I hear that question. And I want to reframe it for you because the real question isn’t whether you can afford to invest in coaching. The real question is, what is it costing you to keep doing this alone? That decision fatigue, the avoidance, the patterns that you have with your finances, those things are running your life and you need help interrupting them. That has a cost. You may not see it as exact dollars and cents, but if you’ve listened to my podcast over the intention tax, you have a list of things that you have said like, okay, this is what I need to do. I need to cancel this expense. I need to make sure that I call my accountant. Oh, I want to make sure that I had a client who was talking about increasing her rent at one of her rental properties or separating her rental expenses from her personal expenses.
People like you who are high achievers, you have really good intentions when it comes to your finances, but there’s a distance in between you identifying, here’s my intention, and then you executing on that intention. And that decision fatigue makes you completely overwhelmed. And you’re like, I have no idea how to attack any of this. I can’t even imagine getting on the phone and talking to somebody about canceling a bill. I just can’t do it. And so what happens is in between your list and your execution, you have what I call stuck money. That’s the cost of you not working with a coach. And you can’t necessarily see that every single day, but there is a tax placed on you every single day because you aren’t executing your intentions. And I know why you’re not executing.
You’re not executing because you’re overwhelmed and you’re telling me, Keina I have no idea where to start? And working with a coach shortens the list and it shortens the time that it takes you to execute. So we could do some of the things that you need to execute on a call. And now you have momentum. You have money that gets released because it’s not stuck. And that momentum keeps you moving forward. So when you think about the cost of coaching, you are just probably thinking about the dollar amount. Like how much is this going to cost for me to invest in coaching? I don’t have that money, Keina. You don’t understand. I literally have a client right now who, it’s a couple and they are $100,000 in debt. And they were like, Keina, we can’t not invest in you.
And so we are willing to figure out whatever we need to do because like our marriage is at stake, filing bankruptcy is at stake. We want to work with you. Or I’ve had clients that had $40,000 worth of debt. Debt is one of the things that people think like, if I work with you, Keina, could I be adding to my debt and does that make sense? And I will generally tell you, you can’t afford to not work with me because there’s an uncounted cost. But when I think about what you’re already spending and I think about what’s not being accounted for that isn’t showing up on your bank statement, it’s so much more than the dollar amount that you have on your credit card statement, on your bank statement, what you do or don’t have in your savings. You are losing time because every single month that you wait to book a call with me, every single month that you wait to actually say yes to coaching is a month of the same patterns that are running in the background.
When you’re like, oh, here it goes again. Here’s that cycle again. And you can’t get that time back. There’s the decision fatigue where you’re making hundreds of like micro money decisions every single month and you’re doing it alone. You don’t have a system. All you have is your paycheck and you have what’s in your bank account. You don’t have a framework. You don’t have anybody to sit alongside you and to help you think through the things that are coming at you. And that’s exhausting. And it’s also a cumulative exhaustion. Because now you’re telling yourself like, here I go again. Oh, it’s the same story. And so you’re building a negative identity when it comes to your finances when that identity isn’t supporting you. That identity is making you feel like a fraud. And we don’t want you to feel like a fraud. I want you to feel like, you know what, I make $250,000 a year. I am successful.
I am the first person in my family to go to college and I have a graduate degree. And yes, I feel like I have the identity of the things that other people think about me. And I want to be careful because you shouldn’t care what other people think about you. Just to be able to say like, my mom, she looks at me, she sees me as successful and I also feel successful. I don’t feel like a fraud. That’s what I want for you. And then you have what I would call the avoidance tax. So there are accounts that you’re not looking at. There are numbers that you’re not paying attention to. There are conversations, there’s mail that you’re not opening. And you are just pushing it to the background because you don’t want to have that conversation. You don’t want to have a conversation with yourself. You don’t want to have the conversation with your partner. You don’t even want to have the conversation with your future self. And then there’s the opportunity cost.
And it’s the investing that you’re not doing right now. You’re not investing in your 401k. You’re not even sure if you have a 401k, right? You’re losing money by choosing to wait until things are perfect. And you’re going to have an opportunity cost when it comes to negotiating a raise as you are thinking about applying for new jobs or you’re going for new roles within the company. And then there’s the last cost that nobody talks about and that’s the emotional cost. It’s that low grade anxiety that lives just in the background of everything. The stress that doesn’t have a name, but you can feel it when you’re at dinner and your mind drifts to the account balance. When something unexpected comes up and your stomach just drops, you’re like, oh my goodness, I just felt that in my chest. That’s a cost and you are paying for it every single month whether you do anything about it or not. And none of those costs are showing up in your bank statements, but it’s costing you to not take the opportunity to move forward.
Financial coaching isn’t something that you do when you’ve got it together because you feel like, okay, here I’m now in the brain space to learn everything that I need to learn. That’s not when you do financial coaching. Financial coaching is about preparing in the midst of what might feel chaotic. It’s building the system while you’re living your actual life, not some imaginary Cinderella version where everything is calm in the future because life isn’t always calm. There are things being thrown at you all the time as an adult. And so when you can work through the chaos when life feels a little bit calmer, that’s going to be rainbows, daisies, and butterflies for you. And that’s the work. The best time to start coaching is when things might feel a little messy.
When you’re like, Keina, I got more trips than I should have. Because the truth is that right now you are like the poorest that you’re ever going to be. And if we start working together right now in the middle of your mess, it means that when life does smooth out, when the busy season ends, that debt is going to be coming down, your income is going to be increasing, and you are going to be further ahead. And you’re going to have a foundation to actually start building all of your other goals that you have said are important to you. So I want you to imagine two versions of you six months from now. In the first version, you waited, and it’s the end of the year. The kids are back in school. Things have calmed down, or at least that’s what you told yourself. But the patterns are the same. Your account looks familiar. You’re having the same conversation with yourself that you were having in June and July.
And you were researching coaches back then. You were telling yourself, okay, I’m going to come back. I’m going to look at this, and you haven’t made any progress. In that second version of you, you’re like, Keina, okay, I hear you. You book the call in the midst of whatever’s going on in your life. It’s busy, it’s the middle of summer. You got things on your plate. But at the end of the year, you’ve spent the last five months focused on building a new belief system about your money, focused on making sure here’s how much I know I can save. Here’s how much I know I can spend. Here’s what my bills are. And not only has life truly calmed down, but your nervous system has calmed down around money. You know your numbers. You’ve made hundreds of micro money decisions that you couldn’t even imagine having made in the first part of the year.
You’ve had some unexpected expenses, but they weren’t news. You just figured out how to handle it. Your credit card balance is coming down. You look at your bank account and you’re actually excited about what you see. And you no longer are going to bed at night thinking about your finances. I mean, you think about them, but it’s more so like, man, girl, I can’t believe that you got all your bills on autopay. You’ve been trying to do that for years. And so that version of you at the end of the year isn’t going to be created by you waiting for October, you waiting for September. She’s going to get there because she decided that starting in the messy, starting before she was perfect, was better than waiting. So I just want you to know that I have seen this in my own life, like the cost of waiting. And it hasn’t necessarily been with a financial coach, but it is the cost of, okay, should I work with a nutrition coach? Should I not work with a nutrition coach?
And then you look up and you’re like, dang, it’s three months later and I don’t know if my underwear fit me better versus having worked with that person while life is busy, while you have summer going on and just thinking about with myself, like how much I learned about being able to support myself when life does feel busy. And that’s what a coach is there to help you do to support yourself, even when things feel crazy or a little bit chaotic, because what that means is that when you stop working with that coach, that gift is always going to be with you. You are going to know how to support yourself even when life feels a little shaky. And I want to share something with you because I never take it lightly when someone does say yes to working with me. And one of the things that I ask clients to do is fill out just the getting to know you form.
I want to let you know some of the reasons that people have said yes to coaching because maybe one of them will resonate with you. The one client said that I recognize that I need help in this area of my life and I want to feel the sense of accomplishment after I conquer it. Another said, I have massive debt, multiple years of outstanding taxes and deep shame around my financial position. Someone else wrote, I’ve struggled for decades to master my personal finances. I want a spending plan that works for me. I want to pay down debt, save and yield the results. I want to be a money queen and I want to take what I learned to teach my kids. Another client said, I’ve been following your work for a while. Your approach resonates with me. I’m excited to feel more relaxed and organized when it comes to my finances. And one more said, I need a partner who’s smarter than me.
These are my clients. And here’s what I want you to hear. They were exactly where you are right now. The only difference between them and you is that they took the next step. That’s it. They weren’t more ready. They weren’t more stable. They just decided that the cost of waiting was higher than the cost of starting. So I will end this podcast by telling you there will always be a reason not to start. There will be a busy season, a job transition, a medical situation, a life thing that feels like it has to get resolved first. I’ve worked with clients who are managing a parent’s estate from across the country. I’ve worked with clients going through divorce, clients finishing cancer treatments, clients who are on FMLA, clients doing a fellowship abroad, and none of them waited for the perfect time.
And every single one of them has told me the same thing afterwards. I wish I had started sooner. The question isn’t whether your life is messy enough to wait. The question is how much longer you want to pay the cost of staying stuck. So my friend, if this podcast resonated with you, or you know somebody who needs to hear it, send it to them. But if it’s personally you, I would invite you to apply to work with me. Go to my website. You go to wealthovernow.com. We spend an hour together talking. I think it’s honestly one of the best money conversations that you’ll ever have in your life because it’ll be the first time that you feel like, oh my goodness, I get to release the things that I’ve been holding and I’ve been believing about myself.
And I get to feel like I’m in a space where I’m supported. I get to be in a space where I don’t feel judged. And I want you to experience that. I’ll then tell you how I think I can help you. I’ll lay out a plan for exactly what it looks like in your specific financial situation. I have clients I know that come to me and they think that they’re like a special snowflake. Like, Keina, have you ever seen someone as bad as me? And I’m laughing because it’s all subjective. It’s like, have you seen somebody that’s as bad as me and they could have $6,000 worth of debt? They could have $60,000 worth of debt. They could have $100,000 worth of debt. It’s all different. It’s all very relative. So I can lay out a plan to help you be able to move forward. So thank you again. Go to my show notes. You can apply to work with me. And until next time, have a great week.
Outro: Thank you so much for listening to Money Files. If you’re ready to take the next step to reach your financial goals, head to www.wealthovernow.com/appointment and let’s get started.
