Money Mom Podcast

78: Five Hard Truths About Money for Moms

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Warning: this one’s a little spicy. In today’s episode of the Money Mom Podcast, Rachel Coons is laying down five hard truths about money that every mom needs to hear.

These truths may feel uncomfortable (and you might even feel called out), but they come from a place of love, abundance, and wanting more for you and your family.

Inside, Rachel unpacks the blind spots that keep moms stuck, why no one is coming to “save” your finances, how debt carries more than just numbers, why more income isn’t the fix you think it is, how grocery spending can secretly sabotage your budget, and why mindset must come before any budgeting app.

If you’re ready for some tough love, honest perspective, and real talk about what it takes to create lasting financial change, this episode is for you.

xoxo,
Rachel

Where to find me:
Instagram: @heyrachelcoons

Join me for my next LIVE training 'Save $600 On Groceries'!: REGISTER HERE

SPEAKER_01:

This is your official warning before you jump into this episode that you can turn back now if you want to, but if you click play and you're ready to go, buckle up because in this episode, I am going to be sharing five hard truths. They may be hard to hear about money for moms. I am going to get a little spicy, and I apologize in advance if this is slightly uncomfortable to listen to. And if you feel like I am calling you out, it may be because I am, but it's coming from a place of love and abundance for you. That's what I want for you. And sometimes it takes someone being a little hard and sharing real truths that you may not realize. And so that's what we're gonna do in this episode. So stay tuned.

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Money Mom Podcast, the show where we empower moms to take control of their finances, break free from money stress, and build a life of freedom, confidence, and abundance for their families. I'm your host, Rachel Coons, mom, money mentor, and your personal cheerleader on this journey. Whether you're here to save money, pay off debt, or dream bigger for your family's future, you're in the right place. Here, we believe that being a mom is already a full-time job, but your role in shaping your family's financial success is just as important. And the best part, you don't need to sacrifice everything to start winning with money. Let's get started. This is the Money Mom Podcast.

SPEAKER_01:

Hello and welcome to the Money Mom Podcast. My name is Rachel Kuhnz. I'm your host of today's episode. And I am just gonna apologize in advance that I really hope we can be friends even after this episode. Um, I am feeling a little spicy today, and I don't know what it is. It could be where I am in my cycle or the faces of the moon, or I don't know, but I am feeling like I just want to drop real emotions, real things. I just want to be real with you on today's episode, and maybe a little hard, maybe a little giving a little tough love that you know. Sometimes people need soft and gentle coaching, and sometimes people just need a nail in the coffin, like, and sometimes people just need pause, and sometimes people just need you to tell it to them straight, and that's what this episode is gonna be. I am telling it to you straight when it comes to hard truths that moms don't realize, or I've noticed we have we have blind spots, everybody has blind spots, and sometimes when another person can say from an exterior perspective, hey, you need to check out these blind spots and see maybe things you're doing or not doing that are causing you to be in the situation you're in, it can force you to re-evaluate. Right now, we are doing a 21-day money challenge. I mean, I call it a challenge, but really it's like an experience, a 21-day money experience inside the Money Mom Club. And so I am like knee deep in this right now with our members where we're coaching them through money blocks, beliefs, emotions that people have had leading up to this point and what's creating their reality, right? And we all have money realities, we all have money situations that are good, positive or negative. And so when we can step back and really start to evaluate, okay, what money situation am I in currently and what types of actions led me to this situation? So if I am in debt and I'm like, ah, can't get out of debt, have to figure out how to move through this, it is really helpful to look to your past self and evaluate, okay, what actions brought me to this point? How did I get myself into debt? Or what inactions brought me to debt? Like, what did I do and what did I not do? And why am I here? And then what beliefs, energy, feelings, emotions led me to those actions? So when we can go even deeper than the actual actions that got you into the current situation, when we can go into those underlying beliefs and realities, then we can start to dissect and maybe implement new beliefs, new experiences, new positive outcomes so that you can change your reality. And that's the work we're doing. And so, because I'm knee deep in this, I'm like, I'm gonna record this episode, we're going in, we're going hard, I'm gonna tell it to you straight. So let's do this. Five hard truths about money when it comes to mom. And the first hard truth, and I say this with so much love and with so much appreciation and honoring wherever you are at in your money story, whatever your current financial situation looks like. But the first truth is that no one is gonna save you. No financial guru can save you, no partner, no government program is going to solve your money stress for you. And if you're waiting for that white knight to come in and sweep you off your feet and fix everything, you're gonna be waiting for a long time because it just is something that, I mean, again, tough love here. Pause. Again, tough love here. You got yourself into this mess. Only you can get yourself out of this mess. And it isn't until you can stop blaming, stop defending, stop putting up barriers to your success, where you can take back your power and take ownership of your finances so that way you can have a different outcome, right? We know that everything that led you up to this point right now, where if you are feeling stressed, if you are in debt, if you are struggling financially, all the actions that led you to this point are not the actions that are gonna lead you to a new point. We want different results. We have to incorporate different actions. And so you have to step into your power and say, I want to do this, I want to change. And sometimes that means rock bottom for some people. Like some people get to an extreme where they're like, I have to fix this. And if I don't, then I'm going to, you know, be stuck in debt the rest of my life. I'm gonna be miserable the rest of my life. But hopefully, you don't have to reach rock bottom. Hopefully, you can get to a point where you're like, I just, I just don't want to feel anxiety when I open up a new bill that comes in the mail, or when I open up my bank account. Like, I just don't want to feel icky. So I would rather move into a new change, new actions. And I don't want to be forced to do this. I want to come from I want it to come from a place of ownership where I know that I am in control and that I can do this, that nobody else can do this for me. Um, and so that that is hard for some people to hear, but it also hopefully you hear the hope and the possibility in that, in that scenario, where like, yeah, no one's gonna save you, but you can save yourself, right? You don't have to stay in this for forever and you don't have to, you don't have to sit in the icky mess of it all. And if you have been getting comfortable in the icky mess of it all, like if you're like, well, this is just where I'm comfortable. I'm comfortable feeling stressed about money. Well, imagine what it would be like if you weren't. Imagine what that would change for you. Imagine how freeing that could feel, how much lighter your life could feel, how much less stress and tension it would put on your relationship if you were able to change that and and come from that place of possibility. And I'm here alongside you to help you out and make that make that possible. Okay, that's number one. Hard truth number two is that if you are someone who is in debt, debt is not just numbers. It is not just tactical numbers on a credit card. Debt is so much deeper than that, than the interest rates, than the actions that put you in there. Debt is about chaos in your nervous system and in how you view your money. It's about carrying you are carrying a mental and emotional load that other people who are not in debt are not. And it's like uh carrying a backpack that has 10-pound weights in it. Like you are carrying that day after day after day. And I want to acknowledge that first. I know that there is so much weight that can come from being in debt, but it isn't until we acknowledge the emotional side of this and we start to unpack the backpack that comes with carrying the mental weight and the load of it and releasing the shame and the judgment and the fear that we have that we can actually start to start to look at the numbers, right? Because chances are you got into this situation where you are in debt not because you just kept swiping your credit card. It's not that simple. It's deeper than that. You kept swiping the credit card because either you were trying to fill an emotional void that wasn't there, you were avoiding your bank account, you were feeling like the money that you were spending was filling some type of happiness cup that wasn't being filled somewhere else. So there's so much more to debt than just numbers. And ignoring it and ignoring the emotional aspect that comes with debt isn't gonna make it go away. It's just suppressing it deeper and deeper and it and it grows in silence. We know that shame lives in the dark, and when we can open up the door and let the light in, shame can't reside there. So if this is you and you're like, yeah, I feel like debt is forcing me to live in stress and overwhelm. I want you to imagine what it would be like, what kind of peace would come if you didn't have to pay off that credit card every month, if you didn't have to worry about living in the negative every month. There's so much potential here for just moving in the right direction. And I'm gonna share an episode with you next week that I think will really tie this in. And I honestly should have done this as the last one because pause. Where I'm bringing on someone who was in a ton of debt, and she has successfully paid off debt little by little with small intentional actions, and she's she talks a lot about the emotional load that debt plays on you. And so if you're here and you're like this is resonating with you, just know that we have to go deeper than just the numbers. And that's why, honestly, that's why I kind of have an issue with just like budgeting apps, right? Because they don't focus on the deeper emotional aspect of debt, they just focus on the numbers. And yeah, the numbers are important, but there's a whole other aspect, it's like you're eating half of the pie. You need to get to the other half to really achieve full financial peace and acknowledge that that is a part of this. Number three is that more money isn't going to fix your problems. If your solution to stop living paycheck to paycheck or feeling like stress around money or anxiety when an extra bill comes in, if your answer to that is, well, we just need more money. I need my husband to go get a pay raise, or I need to go out and get a job and bring more money into our house, you are looking at the wrong solution. More money doesn't fix your problem, it amplifies them. If you don't have healthy money habits now, how are you ever going to have them when you have more money? And we see this all the time with people who have lifestyle creep, right? They start to slowly build their income and hopefully over time you will build your income. But we have to have the foundation of healthy financial systems so that way when more money does come in, we're not breeding more chaos. We're not breeding more overspending. We are knowing where our money goes and we are in control of it. Now, here's a good example of this. A couple weeks ago, I was on a call with our Money Mom Club members, and about three or four of the women on the call had just, their husband had just lost their job. Or I think all of them had lost they had lost their job, or there was a significant pay cut coming into their house. So a significant decrease in their income. And so they had joined the Money Mom Club to get in control of their finances. And what I told them was that this is the time to do it. When you are struggling, when the income is low, when you really feel like I gotta figure this out because it's life or death, when you do it in those moments, it's such a beautiful experience to then create a system so that when the money does come, because it's not always gonna be as hard as it is right now, it's not always gonna be where you don't have as much income as you would like, or the the pay is going to decrease even more. It's going to come back. Money will come back to you. And now you've created this foundation where you didn't have a force. So sometimes our hardest lessons become our biggest teachers. And so you have to let the times of lack or the times where money isn't in abundance, teach you so that when money does come, you are ready and set up for success. And truthfully, financial abundance comes not with more money, it comes from intention, it comes from structure, it comes from learning how to handle your money correctly. And you'll get to that goal, whatever that financial goal is, faster and easier if the systems are set up. If you're if you have correct habits when it comes to structuring your bank account and how to run the numbers and how to feel about money and all of those things. It's about building healthy habits now. It's not about just increasing your income. While that is a solution, it is not the only solution, and I don't think it is the most important one. Okay, that's number three. Number four, I sound like a broken record, I know. But number four is that your grocery spending is secretly sabotaging your finances. If you are not spending$150 to$200 per person every single month on groceries, you can do the calculation. Take how many people you have in your household, times it by 200. And if your grocery spending is above that number, you are sabotaging your finances through your grocery bill. And that's a hard truth for a lot of people because you're gonna come back at me and you're gonna say, Well, I have a child who's gluten-free, and that's why I'm spending so much. Or I have protein goals and I want to eat healthy, and that's why I'm spending so much. Or we are vegetarian or vegan, and that's why we're spending so much. There, I've I've heard every excuse in the book, but the truth is, most American families and Canadian families, we work with both, are oversending$500 to$800 a month. And that feels normal to people. That feels like that's what we're supposed to be doing. But it is silently draining your bank account six to$10,000 a year. That's the amount of money you're leaving on the table by not focusing on this one budget. And the reason that I scream so loud about your grocery bill is because it is the fastest and easiest way to take back control of your finances and have that extra$500,$600,$800,$1,000 a month. And it's really easy and it's gonna save you time. We do that with the shop method. I teach the whole shop method in my free training. You can grab the link in the show notes. Um, but if you are someone who is a spending above$200 per person, stop it. You're here, and I'm gonna give you a hard truth. You gotta stop and you gotta figure this out. And I am here to help you. Obviously, that's like one of my areas of expertise. We have helped thousands of families cut their grocery bill in half through the shop method, and you have to recognize, and it's the hard truth, that you have to recognize that this is the one place to start. This is one of the easiest places to start, and and it's like a case study in what works and what doesn't, and this works. So that is my hard truth number four. My hard truth number five, we've kind of been talking about it a little bit throughout this episode, but budgeting won't work unless you work on your mindset first. Everyone wants to tell you that you just gotta look at the numbers, you just gotta look at your bank account, you just gotta run the numbers at the end of the month. That's all you gotta do. If you do that, you'll get out of debt, you'll you'll be a budgeting queen. And we talked about this a lot two weeks ago with my husband when he came on the podcast. No amount of budgeting, of number crunching, will stick and work if you do not focus on the underlying emotional aspect that money is creating in your life. Money is one of the strongest forces of energy on this planet. And we see that because money provides the high, some of the highest highs, and you can experience this in your own life, and you can look back on your life and realize this is true for many, many people. Money creates high highs. When the when there's extra money in the account, when you win money, when when you get an inheritance of extra money, think of the joy and the high that comes from that. Money can also create some of the lowest lows. The deepest, darkest moments can come from when you don't have enough money, the highest levels of stress and anxiety, the biggest fights between you and your partner. Money creates both points of energy. It creates high energy, it creates really low energy. And there are not very many things universally that do that. So there's power in money, and we can recognize that when we see the energy that it holds. There is so much power. How many times per day are you giving up your power to money? How many times per day are you letting money are you reacting to money? Are you letting money rule your emotions? Are you letting money show up in your relationships, in your friendships, in your day-to-day life? Just start to notice it. Because if you start to become aware of it, you may notice that money is running the show. And I don't know about you, but I don't like anybody running the show, anything else running the show except for Rachel Koons. I want to run the show of my own life. I want to be in charge of my own emotions. I want to be in the driver's seat. I don't want to let something else, something external to me, something that truthfully I don't have much control over, run the show. So you can download all the budgeting apps, you can sit down at your computer and try to make sense of it all. But if you are scared to open your bank account, if you are stuck in scarcity, if you think money is hard, if there is shame and avoidance and sabotage going on with money, it is not budgeting that's going to fix that. Mindset shifts and the deeper work that we do are foundational to long-term success. I've seen this in my own life where money was creating so much tension in our marriage and in our life, and we felt lack, and our energy was negative. Brad and I, we shared this on the podcast. And it wasn't until we came from a place of scarcity and moved it to abundance. We came from a place of fear. A lot of our money was run by fear, and we moved it to gratitude and just feeling that overwhelming sense of security that can come from money. It wasn't the income that changed. It wasn't the money coming into the bank account. It wasn't the budgeting that fixed everything. It was going deeper and evaluating how are we showing up? How are we giving our power to money? And how can we take that back and not let money rule our life? And that is a hard truth for so many people because they want to say it's an easy fix by just budgeting, but you gotta do the deeper work. You gotta do the emotional work, and that's the hardest work of all, but it is also the most rewarding because if you have the backpack on, if you're carrying the weight that money runs in your life right now, you can take the backpack off. You don't have to carry the backpack, but you gotta do the work. You can't just expect results to be different if you don't do something differently about it. And that's the process, that's the shift that can happen. And that's why you're here. That's why you're even listening. That's why you even made it through all these five hard truths that we're going through, because you want something different. And that's what I'm here for, because that whole work, that process, I mean, that's why we're doing this in the Money Mom Club. That's why we're doing the money challenge. Because I know how important it is, and I know how life-changing it is, and that's why I'll scream it from the rooftops. Because I see the work, I see the changes, I see the transformations that are happening when our members do the work. And I'm it makes me so excited. Like, this is it. This is what we've got to do. And while you may not know it, um, that's the hard truth about money. So I hope you learned something. I hope you feel like this was helpful and not just me yelling at you or um scolding you the whole time because that was not my intent. I am here taking the time to record this podcast, to coach, to do the things that are necessary. Because when we come to realization that you are in control, you're in the driver's seat, no one else is gonna change this for you. And there's actual things that you can do to change your current situation, whatever that is, like you're unstoppable. More money in the hands of good women, in the hands of women who are going to do good. That's how we change the world. That is how we create change, and that is what I'm here for. So I'd love your feedback. I'd love to hear what you thought of this episode. Um, we've got some really fun episodes coming up in the next couple weeks. So I hope you'll tune in next week when Jenna comes on the podcast. And I will see you in the next episode.

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Rachel Coons

Host