A six-figure salary should feel like freedom… so why does it still feel like you’re barely keeping up?
Welcome to Why Your Money Feels Messy, a special podcast series where I get real about what’s actually going on with your finances — and how to finally fix it.
In this first episode, I break down something I call “fake math” — the sneaky budgeting habits and financial assumptions that keep high earners stuck in stress, shame, and money confusion. I’ll show you how fake math shows up in your numbers, your mindset, and even your language — and why it has you trapped in the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle. I also share four simple steps you can take today to disrupt fake math and start getting honest (and strategic) with your finances.
If you are tired of feeling like your money is messy, this episode is your wake-up call — and your starting point. Hit play, and let’s clean up your finances together.
Listen to learn how fake math is keeping you stuck in financial uncertainty…
- [02:57] How fake math shows up in your life
- [08:23] Why fake math is dangerous
- [09:30] 4 types of money shame
- [11:30] 4 steps to disrupt fake math
Tune into this episode of Money Files to discover how fake math shows up in your life and four steps you can take to disrupt it.
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 the discussion about fake math keeping you stuck, check out my episode, How Fake Math Is Killing Your Budget!
Transcript for “Why Your Finances Feel Messy: The Truth About Fake Math (EP 1)”
Intro: Hi, and welcome to Money Files. I’m Keina Newell from Wealth Over Now. I work everyday with professional women and solopreneurs to help them get out of financial overwhelm and shame so they can experience more flexibility and ease with their finances. Are you ready to gain confidence and learn to manage your finances intentionally? Tune in and grab financial tips that will help you master the way you think about and manage your finances.
Keina: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Money Files. So before we jump into today’s episode, I want to let you in on something a little different and just giving you a candid moment. I don’t think I share a lot of my life. I share some of my life here, but I was thinking about episodes to record, and I want to be really honest and transparent with you. I am actually at home in Oklahoma. I’m spending some time with my mother. So today is April 18th and this podcast will actually go out in about two weeks. And I’m at home with my mother. I know that I’ve shared with you guys about my grandmother. And so I’m actually at home because my grandmother recently passed away about a little, almost a week ago now. And I have been working while I’ve been here, but I’m actually going to intentionally take a step back to take some time off.
And so that feels very new, especially in the space where my grandmother has passed. I think I’ve taken time off but not needing to separate my brain in different spaces. So I’m going to give myself some space to rest and reflect and be present with my family. So what I wanted to do this week, if you haven’t had a chance to dive into a mini series that I recorded, it’s a mini series all about the four types of money shame. And today I’m going to share with you the first episode in that mini series. And it’s an introduction to the concept of fake math. It’s not the same concept that is on the podcast. It has a new little flavor and flare to it. But this mini series walks you through fake math, but then it actually goes into four types of shame.
And these four types of shame are the most common reasons that I see people being stuck. And I know with myself it is always, always, always really helpful to be able to have a name for things that I am experiencing. I remember the first time that I was actually in a room where someone identified, like another business owner identified that they were feeling shame. And I was like, oh, that’s me, that’s what I’ve been feeling. But I didn’t have the name and I didn’t have the emotion for it. And I’ve been doing a lot more emotional work and just being able to elevate my own awareness of what’s going on in my body, what’s going on with my mind.
And so I put together four different types of shame that I see show up with money. And so this podcast miniseries goes into those four different types of shame. So the first type is spending shame. The second type is system shame. The third type is situational shame. And the fourth type is stalling shame. So here’s the thing, this podcast series isn’t just to call you out. It’s not an opportunity for you to feel bad. I never want that to be true, but I do want you to feel like, oh my goodness, Keina is like all of my business and she’s listening to my Alexa, she has my Google history. I’m okay if you feel that way because I really want to call you to a place where once again, you’re able to name what’s happening and what you’re experiencing.
So we can actually get to name the financial stress you have. We can get to name the reason why you’re avoiding something. We can name the guilt that’s happening for you.
And I think that’s the number one reason why it’s different to work with a coach. We’re not just putting a spreadsheet together and hoping for the best. We are doing both the internal work, if you will. I know that’s a little coachy, but we’re doing the work that you need to do to manage your finances on the inside, but also to show up for your numbers when we need to add the math and to be able to look what’s happening. And so we want to be able to balance those two things as much as possible and just have the power to name it. So shame can’t be solved with a spreadsheet. So this episode just really, I want it to be able to speak to you and I’m also going to give you the link so you can download the shame series so you can go through and you can binge the entire series.
So if you actually go to my show notes and go to Wealthovernow.com/money-shame. So you can go to my show notes and in my show notes you can get the link to this podcast series. But also you can go to wealthovernow.com/money-shame, and you can experience this entire miniseries. So whether you’re new here or you’ve been listening for a while, I hope that this series gives you language. I hope that it gives you some compassion and a path forward. So we’re just going to go ahead and dive into this episode.
SPECIAL PODCAST
Hi, my name’s Keina, welcome to this special podcast series. I am the financial coach behind Wealth Over Now, and I am so excited to be talking to you today. So in this special podcast series, we are going to get real about why your money feels messy, and most importantly, I’m going to help you fix it. If you’ve ever thought I make good money.
So why does it feel like I’m struggling? This is for you. So we’re going to open up this podcast series by talking about fake math, which is the reason your budget never seems to add up and why you keep feeling stuck with your finances. Before we dive in, I want you to know that if any of this resonates with you, it’s not your fault because no one teaches us how to actually manage money in a way that works for real life. And I want to help you change that.
I also want to let you know I am guilty of fake math as well. At the end of last year, I made sure I went in and actually redid my budget for 2025 because fake math was starting to creep in. We’re not in 2003 anymore where you might spend about $200 on groceries at the grocery store. It’s closer to more like 500 or $600 a month. And I realized that fake math was creeping into my budget because I was going to the grocery store a little bit more than I normally would like out of my normal grocery shopping trips. And in addition to that, I was just buying things that I didn’t necessarily need. But all of those things creep up, especially when I want to use real numbers in my budget and I want to be honest about how I spend money and when I say honest, like I want to be honest with myself. So I redid my budget so that way my grocery budget was more aligned with the times of today, but also more aligned with my habits.
So let’s talk about you, there’s a hard truth. Your money isn’t messy because you’re bad at budgeting or that you’re irresponsible. It’s actually messy because of fake math. And fake math is when you guesstimate how much you spend on things or you tell yourself that doesn’t matter, it’s not that much. It’s when you assume you know where your money is going without actually checking. So fake math feels like you’re making better financial decisions, but the problem is you never go back and check where your guesstimate are right or potentially wrong. This means you keep operating under financial assumptions that might be just completely false. It’s the reason your income keeps going up, but your stress around money never seems to go away. It’s why you feel like you should be able to save more. You should be able to invest more, you should be able to pay off your debt but at the end of the month, you are back in that cycle where you’re left wondering where your money actually went.
So let’s talk about how fake math shows up in your life. One of the number one ways that I see this is with your paycheck. If I were to ask you like, Hey, how much do you make? And you start by just telling me, oh, I make like $3,700 every two weeks. But then when we actually go and look at your pay stub, we find out that you make $3,538 and 24 cents. So you just underestimated your paycheck by almost $200. That’s almost $400 a month, which is $4,800 a year. And it tells me, no wonder you always feel broke because you don’t actually know how much you make. And if you are going off of the assumption that you make $3,700 every two weeks, there is going to be a gap in between what you think you should be able to spend versus what your paycheck actually allows you to spend.
Another way it shows up, and I know that it shows up, is if you’ve ever done a budget and everything in your budget ends in zero, I know you’re doing fake math, so just like hear me out, If you have in your budget that your Netflix payment is $8, but then when we actually go and we look into your bank account and they actually pull $10 and 98 cents every month, $8 and $10 and 98 cents, those aren’t the same. No matter what math class you’re in, those two things aren’t the same number. And so it’s not that I’m trying to get you to like nickel and dime everything, but I’m just giving you an example of how your guesstimation show up. And you don’t just have one guesstimation in your budget, you have more than one. And so when we have more than one guesstimation in our budget, that’s hundreds of dollars that is unaccounted for each and every month.
And we want to make sure that when we’re using a budget that we’re actually using real numbers and fake math it shows up in the math of things, but it can also show up with how you think and how you talk about money with yourself. So there’s also fake math thoughts. They sound like I paid all my bills so I should be good to spend what’s left over. And so you go and spend what’s left over, but you haven’t actually sat down thought about, okay, what are my upcoming expenses? What savings goals do I have? You just assume that because your bills are taken care of, your adult responsibilities are taken care of, that you have extra money. Another thought that is a fake math thought is I always pay my credit card in full. Now, listen, I love that you pay your credit card in full, but the truth is, in order to pay your credit card in full, you’re probably having to dip into your savings account because sometimes your credit card balance is higher than what you expected so something isn’t working with how you’re actually budgeting your money.
You being able to pay off your credit card in full each month doesn’t mean that you’re actually doing the things that you want to be doing with your money. Another fake math thought that also happens is, oh, that’s not until insert whatever your future date is. Oh, the holidays aren’t until November. I don’t need to worry about that right now. Oh, that’s not happening until October. I don’t need to register my car until October, so I don’t need to worry about that right now. Just because you don’t need to pay for something until a later date that’s in the future, doesn’t mean that you don’t need to have a plan for it. When you’re ignoring those annual fees or you’re ignoring the things that we know that are going to come up like the holidays, or if you drive a car, we know you’re going to have auto maintenance fees.
If you’re ignoring those things and you’re not putting them into your budget, it’s a fake math thought that you have the thought of, I don’t need to worry about this right now because it’s not until this future date. Or you don’t even think about the things in your life that are going to come up in the future. You’re just focused on how your bills are showing up and you’re just paying what’s in front of you right now. This is the epitome of fake math. So one of my clients figured out while we were working together that she’s been doing fake math for years, and she thought, I never spend money on myself. But when we actually got into my coaching container and we were doing the five month coaching partnership, and we started actually looking at her bank statement, we realized that last month she spent $500 on herself just from impulse purchasing, shopping on Amazon, picking up things that she saw while she was out, scheduling a facial.
So that was her wake up call that fake math was creeping into her life. But don’t worry, we got it solved. But just to let you know, fake math shows up with the actual math and it can show up with how you talk about your money. So I just want to apologize right now. If you feel real exposed and you’re like Keina, get off my doorstep. But these aren’t just random spending habits, it’s fake math in action. It’s the sneaky unexamined ways that we keep ourselves stuck in a cycle of financial uncertainty so fake math is dangerous because it supports fake financial progress. Because what happens is you start to self-soothe your financial challenges. So you start telling yourself, you’ll start saving next month, but you never actually start saving money. You put things on credit cards, or maybe you start to use Klarna or Afterpay or Affirm.
And so you figure out creative ways to actually manage your money, but we don’t actually start saving. Or maybe you start tracking your spending because you hope that something will change. But let me just tell you that you are tracking your spending, and it’s really just a list of things that you spent money on. There’s nothing actually changing about your behavior or your spending habits. Like fake math can create this illusion of control in your life. And what happens is it actually feeds and it fuels four different types of money shame. And let me just tell you these four different types of money shame. The first one is spending shame. So with spending shame, you start avoiding like actually looking at your money because you feel guilty about how you actually spend. The second type of shame is a system shame. So maybe you’ve tried budgeting before, but it never worked, so you just assume you’re just bad at managing money.
The third type of shame is situational shame. So you feel behind because of your circumstances, like maybe it’s a job loss, a divorce, maybe you feel like you’re someone who was just born into money, and so you have shame about that, or maybe you were growing up without financial guidance. That’s situational shame. And then the fourth one is stalling shame. So you keep putting off getting organized, telling yourself you’ll fix your finances once life slows down. And over the next few episodes, I’m actually going to go in and I’m going to break down each one of these levels of shame and how fake math shows up, because I want you to stop feeling like your money is a mess. And I want you to know what’s really keeping you stuck. And then in the final episode of this mini series, I’m going to introduce you to the Real Money Method, a simple way to structure your money so it finally starts working for you and not against you.
But because I love you and I don’t even know you, but I still love you and I want you to make some progress. I want you to wait until the final episode. I want to give you some opportunities to actually start addressing fake math in your life. So remember, fake math isn’t about actually being bad at math or even being dishonest with yourself. It’s about you having unconscious habits. And so to actually address these unconscious habits, you need to look at your actual numbers instead of relying on your memories or even just relying on how you think about your money. So I want to give you these four simple steps that you can use today to start disrupting fake math in your life.
The first step is I want you to look at your actual pay stub. I want you to do this every single time you get paid. I don’t want you to guesstimate what you’re bringing home. What you’ll find when you actually start to look at your pay stub is that number might be lower or higher than you thought. And as you look at it throughout the year, you’re going to notice that sometimes your paycheck fluctuates because there are different things that are happening with taxes or different things happening with your healthcare elections, whatever that looks like. So you want to make sure that you actually understand your paycheck. It is a level of awareness that we all want to have.
The next thing that you can do is I want you to try to track your spending for the next seven days. And this is not about judging how you’re spending money, this is just to be curious. You’re going to write down what you spend and where. You don’t need to analyze it, you don’t need to have guilt about it. I just want you to have awareness and you can start to use these actual numbers that you’re tracking and writing down to help you actually craft a budget that makes sense. Remember, I told you, I was going to the grocery store and overspending, I had to actually look at what am I actually spending money on at the grocery store? Let me get a better number for how much I actually spend on groceries every single month. And so it starts by me tracking my spending and having that awareness.
The third thing I want you to do is I want you to look at your bank statement. Notice in the last 30 days, where did your money go? Was there any surprises when you actually looked at it like, oh, I forgot about that annual expense. I forgot that my Apple music, I pay it annually and it comes out in February. That might be something you want to pay attention to and just notice what you maybe didn’t pay attention to and ask yourself, are there any areas, as I’m looking at my budget, where I can see fake math at play here. Then lastely having a conversation with yourself, I want you to ask yourself, where am I doing fake math with my finances? Maybe you tell yourself you don’t spend money on yourself, but after actually looking at the last 30 days of expenses, you realize that you went to Sephora and you also scheduled that much needed massage. So let’s just be honest that we do spend money on ourself.
It might only happen quarterly, but we still want to plan for that. Maybe also, when you looked at your expenses, you noticed that, oh yeah, I forget that we take our pet to the vet twice a year, and that actually happened in the last 30 days, and we never planned for it, but it always costs us $300. That could be another place where fake math is actually creeping into your life. So just ask yourself, be curious, where am I doing fake math in my finances? So that’s all I’ve got for you today. And in the next episode, we’re actually going to be tackling spending shame, which is the reason that you’re avoiding looking at your bank account because I know some of y’all heard me say, look at your account. You’re like, mm-hmm Keina, no.
So if you have some resistance to actually looking at your bank account, you definitely don’t want to miss the next episode and you’re going to learn so much. So if today’s episode hit home, I’d love for you to send me a message on Instagram and tell me after you checked your bank account statements, what was one place where you found fake math creeping up? I want to hear what surprised you, what ahas you had, and if you are ready to start getting your money organized. Stay tuned. I’ve got something special for you coming up in episode six. See you next episode.
Keina: Hello, it’s me again. So if this episode hit a nerve in the best way, I want to invite you to grab the full four types of Money Shame series. I think it’s one of the best resources I’ve recorded, and I created it to help you understand the emotional patterns that are keeping you stuck with money and how to start moving forward with real tools and the support. So if you are ready to go deeper and you’re curious about working together, you can always apply to work with me and go to Wealthovernow.com/appointment but I want you to do both. I want you to listen to the Money series, and I also want you to book a call with me. So talk to you later and 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.wealthatal.com/appointment and let’s get started.
