The Better Budgeting Podcast

Episode 88: Being Busy Costs Money and Sanity

• Danielle Reese • Episode 88

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What if the real budget leak isn’t a line item—it’s your calendar? Danielle Reese, money coach and founder of the Better Budgeting Playbook, takes a scalpel to the cult of busy and reveals how constant motion fuels impulse spending, late fees, and emotional burnout. We trace the quiet path from overloaded schedules to DoorDash dinners, Amazon boxes you barely remember ordering, and the creeping disconnection that makes stress spending feel deserved. Then we flip the script with a practical plan that protects your money and your peace.

We start by naming the cultural badge of busy and its financial fallout, then move into the emotional costs—decision fatigue, frayed family time, and the health dip that comes from skipping rest for months at a stretch. Danielle shares real-world stories from coaching and home life to show how “earning ≠ managing” and why a two-hour setup plus 15-minute monthly check-ins can bring clarity faster than you think. You’ll learn how to audit commitments, identify the one activity you secretly dread, and step back without guilt—even when you feel irreplaceable.

From there, we get tactical: schedule anchors first (budget dates, family dinners, therapy), batch and automate to end daily re-decisions, and create true white space—quiet minutes with no phone, no chores, and no noise—to reset your brain. We wrap with alignment: if your values are family, rest, and financial freedom, your calendar should prove it. Expect simple routines, honest mindset shifts, and a journaling prompt to catch where you’re confusing activity with effectiveness. Subscribe, share with a friend who’s stretched thin, and leave a review telling us one commitment you’re cutting this week to buy back your time and your money.

Danielle is a money coach helping those who have been trying to figure out their finances FINALLY create a clear plan so they don’t have to worry about waiting to refill their bank account the next payday.

She is the founder of The Financial Freedom Society on Facebook and her signature money coaching program, The Better Budgeting Playbook. You can sign up for her newsletter by clicking here.

Take the first step towards financial freedom and sign up for a complimentary assessment call with me, Danielle Reese.


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SPEAKER_00:

Hello and welcome to the Better Budgeting Podcast. I'm your host, Danielle Reese. I'm a money coach and the founder of the Better Budgeting Playbook, and this is my one-on-one coaching program for women and couples who have been trying to figure out their finances, finally create a clear plan so they don't have to worry about waiting on payday anymore. I became a money coach in 2020 after paying off over$60,000 in debt, rekindling my marriage, becoming financially free, and wanting others to experience the same. If you'd like to work with me, you can check out the link in the show notes there. Also, we have the Financial Freedom Society on Facebook. It's a free Facebook community focusing on debt payoff, saving strategies, budgeting, and money mindset. You can find the link to that community in the show notes as well. Hey, welcome back to this week's episode. I'm so happy you are here. This week I am going to be focusing on busyness. Now, I do have another episode out there. It's about busyness and how it affects your finances, and we're going to talk about that as well. But I felt this push or pull nudge, whatever you want to call it, to talk to you all about being busy because this is part of my life, a lot of my clients' lives right now. It just seems like holy cow, we are already in October. And it feels like just yesterday we were celebrating the new year of 2025 and it's almost over. And you know, Christmas is only like 12 weeks away or something like that. It's it's going really, really fast. And when things are going really fast, and when we're busy, we become unintentional, right? We're just trying to make it through the day. Every day it feels like it's groundhog day, and we're doing the same thing every single day, over and over and over, and there's no additional progress. There's no additional, you know, life left in you. And I want to talk to you about that because it's something that I've been talking a lot about with my clients, and I just feel like it's something really, really important. So let's get into it. First off, I think there is this sense of honor, like a badge of honor in our culture with busy. I think of like boss babes, and I think about parents who share about all weekend they've gone here and done this and we've done that, and every weekend it is jam-packed, and there is no time in the schedule just to live, just to exist, just to be at peace and be quiet. And what happens is we start avoiding things that really need to be taken care of, or we have a lack of intentional living, or even just like burnout in general. So we're gonna break this up into two segments: financial and emotional. Okay. From a financial standpoint, there's a a couple things that happen when we're really busy with our schedules. Financially, we are going to spend more. You it's just how it is. Every client that comes to me and they say that they have no time to themselves, that they're always busy, that the calendar is always full, they're always spending more money than they would if they just didn't have that. And more so it's it's unintentional spending, it's impulse spending at that. Because when you're exhausted, you don't make rational decisions. Okay. I don't know if you've ever seen that video where the kid, he's like, I'm not gonna take a nap, and he's like slowly falling to the ground, and I'm not taking a nap, I'm just not, and then he he ends up falling asleep, right? We are like that with ourselves when it comes to being so busy and then spending money, right? We're just exhausted and we're just not making rational choices, okay? So there's the DoorDash, it's the Amazon, it's the drive-throughs, it's the target runs. All of that happens when we are in a season of busy, okay? Lack of awareness is another thing. You can't budget if you are too busy to look at your numbers, okay? Many people fall into this trap of I don't have time to take care of my finances. I'm volunteering, I'm working full time, I'm running the kids here and there, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. But here's the thing: those numbers are the lifeline to freedom. You understand? You wouldn't have to go work 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a week if we didn't have all of the debt and unintentional spending and poor money choices and all those other things. You could free up a ton of time, but we got to look at the numbers, which leads me into avoidance of planning. Okay. You feel like maybe you don't have time to meal plan, you don't have time to check your accounts, you don't have time to automate some bills or to look at the finances. This is going to lead to disaster. It's gonna lead to overspending, it's gonna lead to late fees, it's gonna lead to all of these things that you are having trouble with, and that's why you're listening to these podcast episodes. So we need to rein in what we are doing with our time so that we have this free time because time is irrelevant, right? Like there is no more, you can't gain more time. You're just choosing how you're spending your time. So we need to choose how we're spending our time so that we can get into our finances, that we can make better choices with them. And this one I really love. It is earning does not equal managing. Okay. Just because we earn more money doesn't mean that we're gonna magically be in a better situation. You have to manage all of those dollars. All right. And what does that require? You just spend the time to do it. And, you know, a lot of the times I hear, you know, I'm just busy, I'm busy, I'm busy. I'm telling you, it takes 15 minutes for my clients to set up their spending plan for the month. You know, once they really get an understanding of it, 15 minutes. Okay. I'm not gonna even sell you on that. I'm gonna sell you on two hours, all right. One time setup of two hours. That's how long clients take. After that, the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth month, 15 minutes. Because things kind of just repeat themselves, right? You gotta get an idea of what are we gonna be spending for the next month, just get a number in there. You're not doing that right now. So anything is better than nothing, right? Before we get into the emotional side of being busy, here's one thing that I want to leave you with. And it is being busy feels productive, but oftentimes it is just expensive chaos. Think about it. Think about how many drive-thru bags are in your car right now. Think about the Amazon packages that have come over the last three weeks, but now you can't even remember and recall and recite what you've what you've purchased. You know, like being busy requires you to have instantaneous decisions, and they're not always the best decisions. I'm gonna be honest. So, this is the section that I really want to kind of focus on the most, and this is where my heart has been pulling me for this episode. It's the emotional and well-being cost of being busy. Being busy requires decision. And I don't know about you, but I get decision fatigued. I don't want to make any more decisions. If I ask you, what would you like to eat for dinner? I want you to say an actual food item and not I don't know or I don't care.

unknown:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

Any other mamas out there in the same boat. Okay. Every small decision drains mental energy. Okay. It's leaving less capacity for intentional choices. So think about it. When you are running around, even like, oh, which way am I going to go? The road is closed. I'm gonna have to turn around, or am I gonna go down that side street to get to there or whatever? You know, like all of these decisions build up all day long. And what happens is we we can't make good decisions. We don't make the best decisions because we're tired. My next one would be the cost of connection, right? Like disconnection. And busyness is going to pull you away from your values. And you might not even know what your values are quite yet, but you feel them. Okay. You you might feel them. So family dinners, rest, time with loved ones, the opportunity just to do nothing. Do nothing on a Saturday. Okay. When we are busy and we're constantly saying yes and we're filling the schedule and we're doing this and we're doing that, we are going to lose that connection. And I have a wonderful client of mine, and she always says, Well, I just want to create memories and moments with my kids for them. And I had to kind of like check with her and be like, Are we creating memories for them or for you? And she's like, Oh, yeah, not. I mean, of course they're memories for for me, like that, but but it's more about them. And I'm like, but but that's not doing you any favors. You're making memories for them, and it's not about you. And and when it comes to being busy, we're putting you on the back burner so that you can create memories for your kids. No, no, no, no, no. Like, you got one life to live, sister. We gotta make sure it's you're you're doing well with it. Okay. And I don't know if I've shared this before, but when I was a kid, my dad, he was a stickler about family time and also like running around. There are five kids, and we are aged out, I think, I think 22 years apart between the oldest and the the youngest. Um, so there was always three in the household at one any given time. And he would say, you know, one kid per season and one event. Like there's not going to be three kids in the fall season doing three different things. We don't have the capacity for that. And we value family time, we find value dinner time. So we're not, we're not going to do that. And as a kid, I really didn't like that. I think I've shared this on another podcast episode. I just, I really didn't love that. And now as a parent, I totally, I, I totally get it. All right. I totally get it. Right now we are in this like transition season where baseball is ending and swimming is starting for the other kid. And it is like divide and conquer. Okay. So I understand if we were doing that for 12, 13, 14, you know, six months at a time together. Oh my goodness, how exhausting that would be. It would be super exhausting because now we're not spending time as a family anymore. We're conquering and dividing, right? Or dividing and conquering. Yeah, it's that way. We are dividing and we are conquering. And we're losing that connection as a family, which is something that I value a lot and my husband values a lot as well. So when we are busy, we start to lose the values that we have as a family. And I know just talking with a lot of moms, like that is a hard point for us. That is something that really hurts our hearts, is, you know, putting our babies to sleep at night and being like, I don't feel like I've had a valuable conversation with you today. You know, tell me about your day. Tell me about this. And you know what I mean? And we've got 10, 15, 20 minutes to really get into it with our kids and to learn more about them and learn about their day and things. And that's what we've been craving for the whole time. But we've injected things into our schedule so much that we leave very little time to be able to do those things. And then from an emotional well-being kind of cost as well, it's it's the stress, okay? Specifically the stress spending. All right. We use the money to soothe the discomfort, the burnout, you know, all of the things that we're feeling that all these negative emotions, and we feel like, well, I deserve this. My kids deserve this. That's a big one I hear a lot too. My kids deserve that. And now we go and we purchase these things. I'm telling you, I'm I'm trying really hard to convince you that being busy is not, it's not good. Okay, it's not good. Nobody is getting out better by being busy. And this one I think is is pretty prevalent for a lot of people. They notice it maybe the first. It's like being tired, right? Not sleeping well, just the health cost, right? We're feeling sluggish, just yucky. And it's it's not good. We're skipping rest. We're, you know, self-care kind of goes on the back burner, and it leads, you know, to if if it lasts for a long season, you know, you think 10 years or you know, 15 years that you're doing this with your kids and you're running around and busy and stuff and you're doing the job and whatever, you know, that can have long-term health care effects, but more so immediately, like we're just tired, right? We're just we're just tired, you know. And I I had to have a realization this past month of we we signed my son up for a travel team for next spring for baseball. And you know, we thought that that was gonna start later on, like in January. So we put him in the fall season and they collided actually. One started way earlier than we thought, and he's doing the other one. And three nights a week, we're outside of the home, like running ourselves ragged. And I'm like, this is this is not good. This is not good. This is not allowing our family to spend time together, and and it was really causing some tension. Um, even so, where my son got to a point where he's like, I don't want to go play baseball today. I play baseball three days a week. I love baseball, but like I just want to sit at home and watch TV or I want to play with my friends outside. And you know what that told me? That he valued connection with family and his friends. And even though he's got friends at baseball and stuff, he was like, I kind of just want to break. And do we ever feel like that? Like, do you ever feel that way where you're just like, I just want to break? I just want, I just want a small little break. And I hear women all the time saying, I just, you know, I want to go get a hotel room and I just want to be by myself. I don't want nobody to know me, I don't or want anything from me or anything like that. I want to order takeout, I want to watch trashy TV, and I just want to be by myself. But like, how did we get here? How do we get so far gone that we want to remove ourselves from all the things that we love because that has caused so much chaos and burnout, right? So we got to start looking at our daily schedules to say, all right, what do we need to do to shift this? And that kind of leads me into my next section here. And it's like reframing busy into balanced. Now, balanced is never going to be 50-50. It just never is. Um, work-life balance does not exist, by the way, in my feelings. They do not exist. It's there's always going to be a day where one is going to require more of you than the other. That's not balanced. That's still uneven. Okay. This is what I want you to do this week. Okay. If you are in this season of busy where you are like tired, exhausted, you feel like you have no time with your family, you feel like your finances are just spiraling and all this other stuff, here's what I want you to do. Number one, I want you to audit the busyness. Okay. What is truly necessary and what is a choice? Okay. I if if you are volunteering at church three nights a week, and then you are also, you know, running kids' places four days a week, and every weekend there's a party and you say yes to every single thing and all of this stuff, what can we take off of our plate? When I was recently talking to a client about this, I had asked her, when you think of all of these things that you're involved in, is there one that you don't have as much love and joy about attending or doing? What is that one thing that you kind of dread, maybe a little bit, or maybe it's not as fulfilling for you as some of the other things? I will go watch my kids play baseball and swim and swim meets every single day. That brings me so much joy. I love cheering on my kids. I am the loud mom on the baseball field. I am the loud mom on the bleachers. I am like yelling and cheering for my kids so much. I will not let that go. That is my thing that I will prioritize with my time. What will I let go of? Probably an event at church. That's that's probably just one of those things. If I had to pick and choose between those two, that's what I'm gonna do. Okay. Or if a birthday party came up and um, you know, we had a family event, I would then weigh the pros and cons of that. Maybe I had family coming in from out of town, or we had a wedding to attend or something, and then there was this birthday party. I would weigh those pros and cons instead of trying to do all of the things. So I want you to ask yourself that question. What is self-imposed? And if you were to lay all of these events and um requirements of you on the table, which one are you less inclined to go towards? Which one don't you love as much as the others? Maybe back off of that for a month, three months. Now I will interject here real quick that maybe you feel like you can't let go of something because there's nobody to take your place. All right. Maybe you're on a board or PTO or you're part of this community of things and you're responsible for this task and and this thing, and you feel like there's nobody that can step up and take that place. Listen, businesses do this all the time. They've they let go of people, people decide to leave and give a two-week notice, and they've got a pivot. Same thing with any other kind of organization. All right. You can also feel like I want to step back and transition out of this, out of this position. But don't say that I can't go because there's nobody else to do it. Great, teach somebody else how to how to do it. Somebody else on that team is probably eager and and they're feeling God's calling to step up. Okay. So I just wanted to interject that real quick. Number two, time equals money. All right, your time should be treated as an investment. Schedule budget check-ins, schedule dinner time, schedule date night, schedule all of the things that are very important to you. Those go in the calendar first. They do not go in last. If therapy is very important to you in this season, it goes in first. It does not go in last, honey. Number three, you need to create white space in the calendar. Okay, and what I mean by that is you need one to two hours a day to do nothing. And some of us, this is really hard. It's really hard for me. I was just talking in Bible study today about it, how I really am struggling in this season with my kids gone, and like I have a whole day, a whole day of like eight hours where nobody's bothering me. And you know what I've been doing? I've been filling it with a ton of stuff. Ton of stuff. Like, all right, I'm starting this, I'm doing that, I'm you know, doing laundry, I'm doing this, you know, blah blah blah blah. And and I'll even find myself like on my phone scrolling for hours. Guys, it's so terrible, but I'm gonna be real and raw raw and honest about it because it is, it's terrible. But I've not given myself the white space to be quiet and have clarity. So I've been really just trying this last week of just sitting and not doing anything, not looking at my phone, just like thought processing in the quiet, in the peace, because my brain needs to desensitize from always doing something because if we want to know something, I feel most at peace when I create space and peace. You know, some of you, it's like when you're driving home from work and it's one of those days where you don't even have the radio on. Like you just drive in silence the whole way home, and you don't even remember how you left work and got home. You know you got there safely because you're there, but like it just like disappeared. Right? That is your life begging for peace, for quiet, for white space in the calendar. And I encourage you to find it. It's not easy. You can't start with an hour. Maybe it's 10 minutes, maybe it's 20 minutes, maybe it's like, hey guys, um, I'm gonna start dinner in about half an hour. Go outside and play. Mom's gonna sit in here in the house, right? Just for like 20 minutes, and you just sit in the chair and look out the window and watch kids play. You know, like it doesn't need to be something extravagant, but you gotta build white space in the calendar. Okay. Um, number four, batch and automate. This is more of a tactical thing, okay? Use tools, use routines. Okay. That way you can reduce decision fatigue. Okay. So for me, my husband just sent me this reel like two days ago or something. I saw it. Um, there was a little girl, and above it had one of those like press-on lights and they were stuck to the wall. And above that, it was like a picture of um the clothes, and then it was a toothbrush, and then it was like shoes and stuff, and it and all the lights were on. And as she completed them, she came and she turned one off. I need you to do something like that for you as an adult.

unknown:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

And even if you wanted to get the lights, you could totally do that. But I need you to do something like that um as an adult because our lives crave structure and routine, all right. Even if you are a creative soul who says, like, no, I don't love structure. I don't, you know what I mean? I bet you you thrive in getting up every morning and having the first thing that you do, whether it's go to the bathroom, create your coffee, you know, whatever. There is some sort of routine in your life.

unknown:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

We crave that type of structure, something of the sort. So I need you to create some type of routine, some type of structure so that you have white space in your calendar. All right, going back to number three there. Number five, set alignment goals. So does my schedule match the best person that I could be? If I look at my calendar, does it match my values? Do I have family time in there? Do I have therapy in there? Do I have, you know, kid, individual kid time in there? Do I have friend time in there? Do I have volunteer? Do I have passion time in there? Do I have, you know, all of these things? And wait, one second. When I say passion time, I thought of me like using my watercolor paints. If that means something else for you, that's fine too. You can schedule that. Okay. I just wanted to be clear. Like instantly the Holy Spirit was like, wait a second, you know, clarify that. Okay, so it you oh goodness, I am like beside myself. You need to schedule this stuff out. And then you need to ask yourself, does this align with how I want my life to be? All right. If you are working from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., like you leave the house at six and you get home at seven and you want to spend time with your kids, why are we scheduling meetings with church from seven to eight? Why are we scheduling, um, you know, I'm gonna call whatever, I'm gonna take care of this, I'm gonna clean the house from seven to eight. Why are we doing those things? If our value is I want to get to know my kid more and I want to spend time with them and it's a school night and I haven't seen them all day, I've been gone from the whole house. Yeah, there are responsibilities that need to be taken care of, right? Laundry needs done, dishes needs done, all these other things, right? But where is the priority? Where are the values? Okay, so that's what I want you to work on this week. Along with, I want you to reflect on how slowing down actually is going to accelerate your progress in your life and in your finances because intention creates traction. Action equals traction. That means we're gonna move forward when we have intention, action, traction. I also want to encourage you to create some white space this week, whether it's 10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour, whatever it is. I want you to choose peace over productivity. Okay. This is called the Sabbath, by the way, um, which I I uh I 100% struggle with, I'm gonna be honest. But I need you to create peace over productivity. Productivity is always going to be there. You're always going to have something to do. The to-do list never ends. We know that. But you've got to create peace in your life, you've got to create less busyness to feel fulfilled, okay? And then I want you to try this like little journaling prompt. This is something new. All right. So if you are a journaler, I want you to write this out and I want you to ask yourself this question. Or if you're not a journal, like just ponder on this as well. Okay. Where in your life are you confusing being busy with being effective? And what's it costing you financially, emotionally, and or physically? I bet when you uh start thinking on this question, you start journaling on this question, you're going to start to see a lot of space in our day that we're not using very wisely. And we think we're being productive, but we're just being busy. All right. Thanks so much for being here. I really do appreciate it, and I'll talk to you all soon. Bye bye.