The Money System That Saved My Nervous System [Summer Shorts Series]

Episode 84: The Money System That Saved My Nervous System [Summer Shorts Series]
 

“You are not one of many. You are one of very, very few—and money is energy, and energy is my specialty.” —Caitlan Siegenthaler

Business finances don’t have to feel like a dumpster fire or a total mystery. In this episode of Return, energetic business strategist and former therapist Caitlan Siegenthaler shares the monthly money system that’s helped her stay grounded, well-resourced, and energetically in integrity while running a soul-led business.

Inspired by the Profit First method by Mike Michalowicz, this isn’t a lecture in spreadsheets it’s a clear, practical walkthrough of how to pay yourself, set aside for taxes, and invest in your business without feeling like you’re guessing or overgiving. If you’re ready for financial clarity without burnout? This one’s for you.

This episode is part of the Summer Shorts series—quick, potent solo episodes to help you return to yourself and build a business that actually feels like you.

✨ Missed the earlier episodes?
 👉 Episode 1  in the Series— Meet Your High Achieving Parts (IFS)
👉 Episode 2 in the Series— Your Life Purpose & the Incarnation Cross in Human Design

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• A breakdown of the Profit First system—and how Caitlan simplifies it
• The 4 essential financial “buckets” every soulpreneur should use
• How to organize your accounts and monthly workflow with ease
• What it actually means to pay yourself first (and why it matters)
• Tips to keep you out of tax-time panic or overspending spirals

Key Takeaways:

• Structure is a gift to your nervous system—not a punishment.
• Profit isn’t the leftovers. It’s the plan.
• Financial organization gives you freedom to invest, rest, and lead.
• Paying yourself is a non-negotiable. Not an optional “one day.”

Chapters:
00:00 – Welcome back + Summer Shorts vibes
01:45 – Why no one teaches us about money (and how that’s a problem)
03:00 – The buckets: profit, owner pay, taxes, ops
06:30 – Sally’s Services: A business example you’ll remember
08:00 – Monthly breakdown with $1,000 revenue
10:30 – How Caitlan sets up her accounts + automates flow
13:15 – Making room for investments without sabotaging pay
15:30 – Your financial structure = your energetic capacity
18:45 – Next steps + business mentorship waitlist

Links & Resources:

• Profit First by Mike Michalowicz → mikemichalowicz.com/profit-first
• Book a 90 Minute Deep Dive for more clarity → www.caitlansiegenthaler.com/deep-dive
• Podcast cover photo credit: Kiara Opara Photography 

 If this episode gave you clarity, confidence, or

Transcript

Caitlan Siegenthaler (00:00.984)
Hello, hello. Welcome back to another episode of Return, a podcast that helps you return to your brightest, your most beautiful, your most authentic self. I'm your host, Caitlin. I'm an energetic business strategist, a former therapist, and just like a general curious human being. What are we doing this week? This is episode three in my little July.

summer shorts series. And these are little summer treats for us. We are busy. We're reading in the sunshine. We're swimming in the lakes. We're doing all of the things. And I want to give us just little taste testers of a few different topics. So if you haven't already listened to the two previous episodes in this series, I highly recommend the first one is all about making sure you're high achieving parts using IFS work.

are not the ones running your schedule, especially this summer. And the second one is all about your life purpose and human design and how there's way less information about that on there, on the internet, because there are 192 different combinations and I walk you through checking that out. And this episode is about Monday. Now, this is gonna be a very logical business focused episode. You could also apply this.

to your personal finances, I do suppose, but no one teaches us about money. And it's such an emotionally charged topic. I have so much to say about it, but I'm still processing, I'm still doing my own work with it, and it's definitely gonna be a different podcast episode for that. But today I wanna make it easy for you to organize your monthly money in your business, and I use a very simple process.

It's worked super well for me. It's been validated by financial advisor, Rick Kahler, who I did some IFS work with. So hello, Rick. Shout out to you. And this is a process that I follow and it comes from a book by Mike... Michalowicz... I don't know. And I recently had someone butcher my last name so badly that I kept the voicemail.

Caitlan Siegenthaler (02:27.872)
It's so fun. So sorry to Mike, but it's called profit first transform your business Blah blah blah, so I will put the book link in the show notes actually didn't read the book in full transparency and I don't think you need to either what I have borrowed from the book are the percentages that Mike teaches so Here we go. This is what I do to organize my money in my business

this is the process that I follow. So I pay myself once a month and I have a whole little like ritual that I won't get into in this episode because we're trying to keep it tight. We're trying to keep it short. But basically I have a yearly spreadsheet where I track all of my finances and I have that broken down by month and the month has like a summary.

for the month and then it has a tab for revenue. So revenue is your money coming in. Every time you get paid from a client, that's revenue, revenue, revenue. And then expenses, that's your money going out. That's when you pay Riverside and the Stripe processing fees and ChachiPT and like whatever business expenses you have, that's the money going out.

So every month I sit down and input all of my revenue and then I do the same thing with my expenses. Cool. Easy, straightforward process. However, I'm going to teach you the buckets to kind of track your revenue so that at the end of the year or quarterly, you have enough money to pay your business taxes. You have enough money to pay yourself and you're not overspending in the operating expenses.

because there are 10,000 things I want to invest in all the time and I work part-time, which means that my business revenue isn't unlimited as I'm sure yours is not either. And I want to make sure that I'm not overspending so that at the end of the year, I haven't like paid myself any money for working in my business.

Caitlan Siegenthaler (04:51.606)
So here's what we are going to do friends. We are going to grab a notebook or some sort of note taking device so you can track these percentages. And I want you to write down profit 5%, owner pay 50%, taxes 15%, and operating expenses 30%. And I'm gonna give you a high level overview of these percentages and like how this all works. And then I'm gonna break it down.

by a month and then talk through my process. So for a business with $100,000 in real revenue, these allocations, I picked a very easy number, these allocations look like, and we'll say that's $100,000 for the entire year. So at the end of the year, this business will have put $5,000 in its profit bucket. So that means that

That's just pure profit. They can take that $5,000 and do whatever they want with it. Then that means that this business, we'll call it Sally's Beauty Supply. I think that's a real business. We'll call it Sally's Services. God, sorry. I'm not feeling like extremely creative naming today, but just roll with me. So Sally has paid herself over the entire year $50,000. That's straight from Sally's Business.

bank account to her personal bank account and she spent that money however she wanted to. Then that means that Sally has set aside $15,000 for her taxes. Now, depending on your tax situation, you may want to up this percentage, which means you would probably take from your operating expenses. So you might do 20 % for taxes and 25 % for operating expenses, but

For the sake of this example, let's say that Sally has $15,000 set aside for her taxes so that she has that money ready to go and she can automatically pay that. And when she has her tax bill, she's not like keeling over. And then let's say that Sally has spent $30,000 in all of the different things that she does in her business. Great.

Caitlan Siegenthaler (07:13.524)
This is the kind of ideal scenario. So she has enough money to pay herself. She has enough money to pay her taxes. She has enough money to pay all of those expenses that come up, trainings, tools, all of the things. And she still has paid herself $50,000. Isn't this great? And it's, I find it fairly easy to use. So.

Let's break it down to monthly and I'm keeping the numbers so simple. Here's our monthly example, $1,000. So if you got $1,000 in client revenue for the month, you would enter all of that in, if you want to use my process, into your spreadsheet. There are ways to automate this, of course. And then you would enter in your expenses on a different spreadsheet and...

you would then take your $50 because that's 5 % of a thousand and move it into a business savings account, for example, every month. And this is my process that I do every month. So if I made a thousand dollars in revenue that month, I'm sitting down during the day that I do this and I'll get more into the ritual of it sometime, cause it's pretty cool. And I do it at a specific point in my cycle and blah, blah.

But you are sitting down and you're clicking move $50 from business bank account to I have a business savings titled profit that I move that $50 to every single month. So if I make $1,000 the next month, I'm moving 50 more dollars into my profit bucket. And if we go back to the Sally example, that's how she ended up with 5,000. I mean, she was making way more than 1,000 a month in the example, but.

Um, you get it. Okay. Bonus points if your profit savings account is high yield interest, because that money is just sitting there, right? Then if you made $1,000 in revenue, at the end of the month, you would go and transfer $500 because that's 50%.

Caitlan Siegenthaler (09:34.712)
from your business bank account to your personal bank account. That is now your money. That's your paycheck that you're giving to yourself. Then you're going to move $150 into a tax business bank account, like savings account. So I have two business savings account and one business checking account, and one I use for profit and one I use for tax.

And the reason that I do this is because the tax one, well, I don't touch either of them, but let's say that I had, this actually just happened. I made a really big investment and it was over, way over my 30%. And so I needed extra money to pay some of that like deposit for the investment for my business. So I went into my profit account.

and paid some of that from there, right? But I'm not touching my tax account because I need that money to pay my taxes. Okay, so then I'm moving, or you're moving, if you made $1,000, $150 into your tax business savings account that you do not touch until you go and pay your quarterly taxes. Or if you pay them at end of the year, whatever you do with your taxes, right?

And then you're gonna take the remaining $300 and in theory you're paying your business credit card that is approximately $300 or under so that you're keeping those operating expenses around 30 % of your business revenue. Are you with me? I wish I could see you. I wish I could hear you. So this.

Process ensures that you are paying yourself You need to get paid Not spending too much money in your business. It is so easy to want to invest in everything and Unless we're really sitting down and looking at the numbers we can over invest, right? and We can get the timing wrong and then we can be in credit card debt or we can Not have enough money to pay our taxes or whatever it is

Caitlan Siegenthaler (11:55.862)
And it also ensures that you have enough money to pay your taxes. I think the worst thing that can happen as a business owner is getting your tax bill and being like, holy shit, I don't have 10 grand or 20 grand or whatever, just hanging out, I already spent it. And that's what's really tricky is Uncle Sam is counting on us to pay that money.

And in a traditional setting, when you get a paycheck, the tax is already taken out. So that process is already done for you. But when we work for ourselves, depending on what kind of business you have set up, usually you have to pay them in reverse. And then it also helps keep everything super simple. So it's a monthly process, and you can really feel confident in how

you're spending things in like, let's say you do want to invest in someone's course, you want to invest in business mentorship with me, then you can be like, wow, cool, maybe I really want to increase my revenue. So maybe I do these things to increase my revenue so that I can up my operating expenses. And that's, to me, that freedom, that choice, that's part of the best thing about being an entrepreneur.

And I want to say a few things. Operating expenses can fluctuate sometimes, especially if you do make a big investment. So keeping it around 30 % of your monthly revenue is really important. Or what I usually do is I want to keep my monthly expenses at 15 % or under so that I have that wiggle room to make more one-off investments.

Because if you're already keeping all of your monthly expenses, like any services you're paying for on a monthly basis, if you're keeping those, you know, already at 30%, then you don't have any wiggle room later on. So you can kind of play. These aren't like exactly focused. There's room to play, but you just have to make sure that the math works out in your favor.

Caitlan Siegenthaler (14:14.592)
Okay, what are your next steps? I would definitely recommend checking out the book if you thought this was interesting but you need more. You can also ask me to create like a visual breakdown of this. I think that could be really fun for us, but if there are enough people interested, I'd be really happy to do that. And I would also recommend signing up for the wait list for my business mentorship for the fall.

The three spots that were open just closed yesterday on the 22nd of July. But if you sign up for the wait list, you'll be the very first to hear when the next mentorship round open ups. And there is some early access options for that as well. Next round will open up probably late September, maybe early October. But once you're on the wait list, we can get you booked in.

early on so make sure you sign up because my philosophy is always capacity comes first. You are not one of many. You are one of very, very few and money is energy and energy is my specialty. So I highly recommend signing up for that. Thank you so much for listening. If this episode helped you, amazing. And I would love it if you would share it with your business bestie or if you want to

create an energetic exchange where you got something from this episode and you want to give something back to me. I would love, love, love if you went to Apple Podcasts and clicked on return, scrolled all the way down to the bottom where it says write a review, clicked on write a review, and wrote a review of the podcast. This is beautiful currency in the podcast world and it helps me keep creating this podcast and keep creating content for you for free.

I adore you. Thank you so much for being here and I'll see you next week for our very last episode in the series. It's the grab bag. It's the wild child. I don't know what I'm gonna say, but it's gonna be 20 minutes of wild things and I'm very excited. Take care. See you next week.