The Budgeting Advice You Didn't Ask For

In this episode, we're talking about why traditional budgeting advice might actually be keeping you stuck - and what to do with that energy instead. If you've built something real, you're earning well, and you're still financially anxious despite doing all the right things, this one is for you. We get into the real opportunity cost of the subtraction mindset, why ikigai is actually a financial framework, and what it looks like to stop making your budget the main project and start making yourself one instead.

Transcript

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So there was a period of my life when I was in grad school and working full-time when I was going over my numbers and realized that everything would be okay as long as I didn't spend more than$60 a week. So at the beginning of each week, I would go to the ATM and I would pull out$60, and that would be my money for the week, for food, for socializing, for anything that I had to spend on. And I remember going to the Safeway by my university and buying a pear and a wedge of gouda cheese and a loaf of good bread. And I made myself this pear and gouda sandwich. And I remember realizing like, yes, this is the kind of life that I want. This is it. And even though I didn't really have that much money to spend, I wasn't, I didn't put myself in survival mode. I wasn't like, let's just eat rice and beans, and that way we'll save more money. I really wanted to make my life feel good. And in that season of my life, I didn't really learn to be careful with my money. I learned what money was actually for. So today's episode is called The Budgeting Advice You Didn't Ask For. And just to be super clear up front, I'm not trying to tell you to stop budgeting. I'm not trying to tell you that, you know, being careful with your money is not important. I'm just here to ask whether the energy you're putting into your budget could be costing you something, could be the wrong allocation for that energy. So that's what we're gonna be talking about today. Thank you for being here, guys. We reached 75 downloads for the podcast the other day. And it's, I don't know, it's so exciting. I don't know if that number is like big or not, but it feels cool. It feels really cool that, you know, 75 times my voice has been listened to. So again, before we go any farther, if you are in a genuinely tight financial situation, like if the math is actually really hard and every single dollar counts, this episode probably is not for you right now. There is a time and a place for tracking every single dollar, and that time is real, and I respect that and I understand that. So if that's where you are right now, take what you hear with a grain of salt or skip this episode. But if you actually have built something or you're earning well, you feel like you have enough money coming in to cover your expenses, and you're still feeling anxious about your money, you're still obsessively tracking a spreadsheet, you're still budgeting as though you are back in the position in your life, maybe where you didn't have much coming in. That's who I'm talking to today. You know, I have clients who are making seven figures in their business and they still have the urge to want to track every single penny and make sure that their money is allocated. And there's not anything wrong with that, but it does take a little bit of life force from you. It takes energy. So the framework that got you to the place where you have more than enough is not necessarily the framework that's gonna take you to where you really want to go. So today's episode is really gonna be all about that. When you really think about it, budgeting, once you have more than enough, is more of an energy problem than a math problem. It asks you to look at your life and find out what you should cut. It's a very almost a reactive way of looking at your money. You see where you spent and you see whether or not it aligns, and then you either praise yourself for doing it right or you beat yourself for not doing it right. Um, this is just kind of the way that budgeting is structured. It's this the subtraction framework, right? So you see how much money is going in, and then you subtract all of your expenses until you have as much possible left over. And again, there's a season for that. When you're early in your career, you're paying off debt, you're building an emergency fund, all those things, you do need to keep close tabs on your money. But most of the women I work with are past that season and they might not even realize it. Like if money comes in and you have enough to pay all of your immediate necessities, like your food over food in your fridge and a roof over your head, and insurance to cover emergencies and clothes for your back and these like essentials, and you have more than that, like you're paying those things and there's money left over. That's who this conversation is for. And that's really what we're gonna be who we're gonna be talking to today. And if you're spending, if you're in that position and you're spending a lot of time analyzing your budget, it's costing you more than you actually think, right? When we're tracking and overthinking our money and justifying what we spend, we're using cognitive bandwidth when we're stressing about debt and looking about how, you know, when is it actually going to be paid off? And really like putting every expense in this moral court where it's like, oh, if I spend on this instead of paying down my debt, like, am I doing the wrong thing? It's requires so much cognitive energy, you guys, emotional energy, feeling guilty about spending, feeling like you shouldn't be spending on XYZ. All of that time spent optimizing and stressing could be spent building. Right? It could be spent creating. You don't want your relationship with money to feel like a test that you're constantly taking, and sometimes you pass and sometimes you fail. That is not the relationship that we want to have with our money. Money is a tool that we get to use to support us in living a beautiful life. That's the real relationship. It's not a punishment or like a way in which we can further restrict ourselves. When we use that energy to budget, to track, to feel guilt, what we are sacrificing is energy that could be used on ourselves. Energy that could be used to live a better life, energy that could be used to raise your earnings ceiling, energy that could be used to increase your creativity. Right? So this opportunity cost is so real. I've had in the past when I started my business, my messaging was more towards people who had debt, were stressed out about it. And so I attracted a lot of people. And they would come to me just like, all I think about is this debt, and I can't figure out how to get through it. And I'm calling these companies all day long and renegotiating my trying to renegotiate my interest rates and you know, looking at bankruptcy, all these things. And I was like, that's hours of energy you're spending a day that you could be spending trying to get ahead in your work, or if you're a business owner, like figuring out your messaging for your clients or raising the prices of your offerings, all of these things that actually will lead to more money and get that debt paid off so much faster. But instead, that energy just kind of gets sunk. And I'm not saying this to be judgy. I'm really just saying this because that's how the math usually works out. You see people who, you know, grew up in families that were financially great and they didn't have a lot of financial restriction or constriction, and then they go out to like build businesses from scratch that do well too. It's because they didn't, they're not carrying around the energy of restriction with them. They're putting their energy toward building something, and obviously they have a leg up. You know, there's a myriad of reasons. It's very complex, right? But at the end of the day, how do we reallocate our energy toward the things that are actually going to move us further along on our journey instead of plugging all of our energy into money? Because in life, you are the main project, not your budget. You perfectly following a budget doesn't make you a better person. You perfectly following a budget does not make you a better person. It can feel good, right? It can feel good to be like, yes, I succeeded, and you get that little dopamine hit, but it doesn't mean that you've actually accomplished something that like feeds your human soul. So there's this Japanese concept called ikigai, and I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly. I think I am, but in Japanese philosophy, ikagai translates to reason for being. And ikagai is really the intersection of four different things. Okay. So it's what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. And a lot of people use this as a career framework. I actually was introduced to this concept when I went through a program called the Financial Coach Academy. This amazing woman who started this financial coach training business, her name is Kelsey Dick, Kelsey Dickey. Look her up if you are interested in learning about budgeting and things like that. But I learned this concept going through her program, and it really opened my eyes is to like the different ways that the different way that we can look at the world. So a lot of people use this as a career framework, but I really like using it as a financial framework. Because when you can find the intersection of what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for, then your whole conversation around money is going to shift, right? So when you think, so let's think about it. What you love. When we say what you love, we're not talking about the things you're supposed to love or the things that someone tells you you should love or society says you should love, the things that make you lose track of time, the things that you sit down to do and you have no idea where the day went, or you just don't want to stop. That is like a natural source of energy for you. And you know what? Maybe you're the person who can sit down and like budget for hours and hours and it feels fun for you. And if that's true, like go ham. I am not gonna stop you. But really pause and think about what it is you actually love, the kind of thing the more you do it, the more energy you actually have. Because that is gonna be in alignment with a way for you to increase the amount of money that flows to you, right? The second part of Eggagai, what you're good at. So your genuine skill set, the things that feel so natural to you that you don't even realize it might be a problem for somebody else. I had a neighbor and he knew I was a financial advisor. We were talking about money, and he's like, Yeah, and he's very good with money. Like this person, you know, bought their home young, saved up a bunch of money, was able to use it to buy a second home, like corporate, very unassuming person. But then when you like dig deeper, you're like, oh, you know what you're doing, man. And so he was we were talking, and he was telling me about how, you know, his sister needs help. And he's he was like, Yeah, it's so funny. Like, she just never seems to be able to figure out her money. It's like just spend less than you make and save the rest. Like, I don't get it. And it's like, okay, this person's a genuine skill set for this, right? And doesn't realize that for other people that might be difficult. So that's where kind of what you're good at exists. Something that you can just do, and you don't really realize that other people might have a hard time with it. I like, I'm a very social, I'm a huge extrovert, if you can't tell. I'm a very social person. And so when I hear people who like struggle with networking events, it just like doesn't occur to me that that's a thing because I just love going out into the world and meeting strangers and talking to them like that. It feels really natural for me, probably why here I am with my podcast and hosting money circles and things like that. But that's the kind of thing I mean figuring out what you're good at. And then the third thing, oh, phone's ringing. Uh, the third thing is what the world needs. So the real problem that you would be excited to solve in this world. So, really, when you start to think about what you love and what you're good at, you can try to find examples of maybe other people who also have the same type of thing, something they love and that they're good at. And you can see how they're using that to serve the world. So let's think about like Martha Stewart, for example, polarizing person, but lover or hater, but Martha Stewart. So she is really, she actually started in investment banking and investing in the investing world on Wall Street. So she's really good at numbers and finance, and she really loved making her house a home. And so she combined those two things to build this empire because she thought that more women would be excited to learn from her. And that was what the world needed. So if you happen to be good at those two things, then you can look for, you know, someone like Martha Stewart and say, okay, so so the world really does appreciate having examples of what it looks like to build a beautiful home and someone who can make it look approachable and easy. Great. And then the fourth thing is what you can be paid for. So it's really like, yeah, you can make your home beautiful and be good with numbers, but you were not going to be paid unless you have some kind of offering. And maybe it's a magazine or maybe it's classes or lessons or something like that. And this is like maybe more specific to someone who's interested in starting a business, but it also applies if you're in a career, right? If you're really good at numbers and speaking, then like pursuing roles where you're in like the, you know, a finance, a finance role where you have to run meetings, an upper level finance role, that could be your career path. So take some time. You can pause this right now if you're if you want and get a notebook out, but take take some time to really dissect what those four things are for you and where they might overlap. And if you can figure that out, and it might take you 10 minutes, it might take you 10 years. Not gonna lie. It took me a long time to actually figure that out for myself. Like, if I tell you my career history, my first job out of college was for Dish Network. And I was miserable working in that corporate environment. Then I worked for like a computer IT support company. I worked for a nonprofit, I worked for a food startup, I worked for a real estate dude. Like I had a very colorful past before I actually ended up getting into the financial planning world. So once I found that, once you find the place where those four things overlap, it's like breathing a sigh of relief. It's like, oh, I get to be me here. I get to do what I enjoy, and people are actually benefiting from it. And all of a sudden, it's not hard, right? Things feel less hard because you're doing something that you actually want to be doing and it's in alignment with what you need and what the world needs. And then from there, this is like the what happens next once you figure that out. Because for so long, spending feel felt like losing something. It felt like I'm doing this hard work that I hate and it's miserable to make this money, and then I have to go spend it on these things and I don't have it. And it's like, ugh, I was miserable to make this and now it's gone. Once I found the thing that I actually enjoyed doing, spending became enjoyable because it's like I'm doing this thing that I love and now I have money, and I can use that money to support this life that I love. Money became a byproduct of the work I was doing instead of some kind of punishment. So that shift from money as some kind of test to money as an expression of who you are and what you want, that's what I want for every woman in this world. That's what I really, really want. Because no matter what you do, right, there is a place for you to actually enjoy the work that you're doing. And then when you receive the money from that work, there is a place for you to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Now, none of the things I'm saying in this episode mean that you should spend all your money, ignore your finances, throw out your budget, buy all the cheese in the world. The lean lux life still means you have intention with your money, right? It means that you don't buy the things that are not really elevating you, and you do buy the things that you know are gonna make a difference in how you live and who you see yourself to be and how you feel. So it, you know, it really is about having this intention when it comes to money. And then instead of how do I spend less, right? Like somebody sent me the other day this Instagram post about having a paid-off car and not having to spend$500 a month, and that's great, right?$500 a month is a significant amount of money, and that's great. But also, if you're doing something that you love and making enough money to spend$500 a month on a car that you really enjoy driving, I'm not gonna fault anyone for that either. I'm not gonna say that that's a bad financial decision. The intention we have with our money should support who we want to be. So instead of spending less across the board, it's like, what do I actually care about? What actually elevates my life? What actually makes me feel good? How can I allocate my money in a way towards those things rise up and everything else can fall away? So my parangouda sandwich, right? Imagine like 23-year-old me in my studio garden level apartment eating my parangouda sandwich. That was like the that was the lean luxe, that was me living the lean lux life. I had this tiny, kind of dark apartment. I loved it. I didn't want to spend the same amount of money on something that was outside of the neighborhood that I wanted to live in, or that would force me to not be able to eat pear and gouda sandwiches, right? Like that was my lean luxe moment. I had decided that I wanted to spend my money on something beautiful that made me feel amazing instead of something that was just filling. And it didn't feel irresponsible because I knew that it was gonna affect how I showed up in this world. So here's what I want to leave you with. Again, not telling you to throw out your budget. I just want you to take an honest look at how much mental and emotional energy you're putting into managing your money, you're putting into minimizing your expenses and ask yourself whether that energy could be better used doing something else. And if you take anything away from this episode, if you normally spend 30 minutes looking at your expenses and seeing if they fit your budget, can you reallocate that money that time to your Aka guy this week? Can you allocate that to sitting down and journaling for a moment and figuring out what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and how you can be paid. I truly think that is so much more of a financial plan than anything else. Because when you prioritize your own growth, your own development, when you prioritize yourself, you can thrive. And then money starts to become so much easier. You're not constraining, you're expanding. Thank you for being here. I appreciate you. I will see you next week.