Ep. 25 - Money & Mindset Series: Financial Prioritization & The Order of Operations for Your Money Plan

Recap of Episode
What do I focus on first? If you’ve ever stared at your finances and felt stuck, this episode is for you.

Host Sarah Jones cuts through the noise and delivers a straightforward, no-fluff framework for prioritizing your personal finances. Whether you’ve just received a financial gift, an inheritance, a work bonus, or you’re simply trying to figure out where your money should go next - Sarah walks you through the real order of operations for your money plan.

She gets honest about the two biggest reasons people feel stuck (spoiler: it’s not just about the numbers), calls out the most common - but totally wrong - places people start, and introduces the concept of the Peace of Mind Fund as your non-negotiable first financial move. Because life will throw curveballs, and Sarah’s here to make sure you’re ready for them.

This is the kind of real, practical, and empowering conversation that makes your money feel manageable - and your life feel a little more free.

What You Will Learn

• Why following too many financial gurus on Instagram, TikTok & YouTube is keeping you stuck - and what to do instead
• The surprising reason your financial priorities feel unclear (hint: it’s not the math - it’s the vision)
• Why tracking expenses and making more money are NOT the best places to start on your financial journey
• The Order of Operations for your money: Peace of Mind Fund → Debt Payoff → Other Goals
• How much to put in your Peace of Mind Fund to start ($2,500–$5,000 range) and why it comes before paying off debt
• The “two focuses at a time” rule that will simplify your entire money plan
• The 5 most common budget disruptors you need to plan for (and why generic budget templates never work)
• Your non-negotiable essential expenses and the order they must be funded
• How to realign your spending habits with your actual financial values

Timestamps
[00:00] | Introduction  What does financial prioritization even mean? Sarah frames the big question listeners are asking.
] | Reason #1: Information Overload  Too many financial gurus = too much noise. Why following only 1–2 people is your first money move.
[03:30] | Reason #2: You Don’t Know What You Want Yet  The power of building a life vision before you tackle your finances.
[05:30] | The Two Biggest Misconceptions  Why expense tracking and chasing more income aren’t the right starting points (yet).
[07:00] | The Order of Operations: Peace of Mind Fund First  The core framework. Why you fund your safety net before paying off debt - every single time. ($2,500–$5,000 starter target.)
[09:30] | Two Focuses at a Time  The simplicity rule that keeps your money plan followable and your brain from burning out.
[11:00] | Building Your Personalized Money Plan  The 5 budget disruptors (medical, car, home, pets, kids) and why your plan must account for them specifically.
[12:30] | Non-Negotiables First  Housing, utilities, food, transportation, medical, and insurance: the foundation of every money plan.
[14:30] | Realigning Your Priorities & Wrap-Up  A real talk on misaligned spending, how to bring your habits back in line with your goals, and how to book a complimentary call with Sarah.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Traveling Towards Wealth, the podcast where money meets adventure and freedom is always on the horizon. I'm Sarah Jones, financial coach, full-time traveler, house plant lover, sourdough maker, and your guide to building a life that's as rich in experiences as it is in peace of mind. Each month, we dive into a new theme. Whether it's real money stories, the ins and outs of full-time travel, building a business, or multiples while on the road, or finding wellness and simplicity wherever you are. Here, you'll get practical tips, honest conversations, and a gentle push to spend, save, and live according to your values, not someone else's rules. If you're ready to design a life you truly love, one where you can travel more, stress less, build financial confidence, shop safer, and wake up every day feeling like you're exactly where you're meant to be, then you're in the right place. So grab your favorite drink, settle in, and let's start traveling towards wealth one story at a time. Hey friend, welcome back. So today we're gonna talk about prioritization when it comes to your finances. Now, this can be a very broad topic, so I'm gonna keep it kind of high level and go through a couple of different scenarios with you. Because I know this is a question that gets asked a lot. What do I prioritize? If I can only focus in one area, what am I focusing on first? If I receive a gift of money or an inheritance or I win the lotto, what do I do first? Right. And so the question of what happens first, where do I focus my energy? How do I prioritize what it is that I'm working on is a very common question. So let's break it down a little bit here. And again, this is a broad topic. Each situation is a little bit nuanced. So I want to keep it kind of high level, but I want to give you some tips, some things to think about. I think one of the reasons why it feels confusing and overwhelming, and you don't know where to prioritize comes from two different reasons. The first reason is you're trying to follow too many people, you're letting the noise of all the financial gurus on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube, on wherever you're getting your information, your Google search, that overwhelm is making it worse for you. And so I always suggest cut down on some of that noise. Pick two different people to follow, and then just follow them. I would love to be one of them. Queen. But truthfully, quit trying to follow and get advice and everything from so many different people because you're gonna come up with a lot of contradictory information. And when that starts creeping in, you're on information overload, which just throws you into overwhelm. And it's impossible to make any progress when that happens. Alright, and the second reason why it feels like you don't know how to prioritize is because you don't really know what it is that you want in life. You might say, Oh, I want to get my debt paid off, I want money and savings, but you haven't really given yourself the gift and the time to really look at your vision, your true deep goals for what it is that you're working towards. Paying off debt is great, but why? What's the purpose of it? What does that allow you to do? What emotions does it bring in for you, right? What does it eliminate? It's really about again giving yourself that gift of taking the time to see what you want life to look like. And when you do that in combination with only following two other financial gurus out there, you begin to start to be able to piece things together and not feel so overwhelmed. And so when you're looking at prioritizing your next step, it becomes a little bit easier because you've reduced the noise and you've got a clear picture, clear vision of what you want life to look like. So those are the two things right off the bat that you really need to be able to start to prioritize and to figure out what it is that you need to work on first. And I would I would say that's prioritization number one, right? So on your list of what do I prioritize, those two things would be top of the list that you do before you start looking at your numbers. Look at those other two areas first. I think there's really this misconception out there too when you're looking at your finances, when you're trying to prioritize. Most of the time, I find that people focus only on two areas, and in my opinion, they are not the best two to start off with. The first one is to start just tracking all of your expenses, and the second one is to just focus on making more money. Those two pieces, those are actually pillars and parts of my system that I use when I'm working with clients, and it's beneficial, but when you're looking at prioritizing and getting your money organized and trying to figure out what do I do now, what do I do next, and then what comes after that, when you focus on just tracking and just making more money, you're putting your energy and efforts in the wrong areas. It's great to know where your dollars are going again, that's a piece of it. It's great to look at making more money. Fabulous, that's a piece of it. But what I would rather you do is after you've sat down and pictured out that vision of your life, what you want life to look like, what you want it to feel like, what does it allow you to do when you start reaching some of these financial goals, is I want you to really sit down and say, okay, what then do I need? What needs to happen so that vision starts to come to life? The next area that people focus on is paying off debt before they start focusing on protecting themselves, protecting their income, protecting their plan. Call this the order of operations. Did you ever hear that in math class, algebra class, in school? So there's an order of operations here when it comes to your finances. And one of the first steps is to protect yourself. This is your peace of mind fund. So after you've put together a good money plan, the peace of mind fund is the area that gets funded first before the debt payoff, before the travel funds start being contributed to. Protecting yourself, creating and contributing to and funding that peace of mind fund. That is the protection that creates some confidence, it creates security, and it creates some financial safety for you. So think about if you receive a financial gift. Think about if you receive an inheritance. Think about if you win the lotto, you get a big bonus at work. Your first instinct is generally to go and pay off debt. I would encourage you and tell you, please don't do that first. Fund your peace of mind fun first. Because here's the thing: you know this, but let me give you this reminder. Life is gonna come and fuck you over at some point. It happens to all of us. And your peace of mind fund protects you from that. Your peace of mind fund allows you to keep going when that situation comes in. If you pay off debt, you spend all of those dollars paying the debt off, and you're still really tight between your income and your expenses. When life throws you those curveballs, what do you have to fall back on? Credit cards, personal loans from other people. So it puts you right back into that debt cycle. I've seen it happen time and time again. I've also seen it happen where people have received a gift from somebody, and the the person giving the gift has said, I only want this to go towards your debt. And I would say respectfully, I understand where they're coming from, but you need to protect yourself first. And that it's wise to have a conversation with the gift giver. Why is protecting yourself more important? Because when life comes and throws you those curveballs, when you hit a new season, when you lose your job, when you are on maternity leave, when you get sick, when your house catches fire, when you're in a car accident, all the things, you need to have that peace of mind fund that carries you through the lower times. So your order of operations is contribute to and fill your peace of mind fund first. Now, what I suggest you do in a full three to six months or six to nine months in there right off the bat, no, no. How we determine how much you put in there to get started, it's varied by each situation. Most people that I work with, it's in between about $2,500 and $5,000. Put that those funds in that peace of mind fund. And then if you have gift money that is in excess of that, then use that to work on paying off debt or funding some other things that you're working towards, right? Down payment for a home, those types of things. But think about your order of operations in you always want to be protecting yourself first. This, so when we're talking about the prioritization of personal finance here, right? This definitely falls into it. You want to prioritize the protection, you want to prioritize your income and your goals. And how do you make this work? How do you put these pieces together in a way that this is doable, that this is followable, that you can actually stick to your money plan. It comes to that prioritization. What needs to happen first, then where does my focus go second, and then what happens after that? Those are a couple of things to be thinking about. Your order of operations, peace of mind fund first, debt payoff second, or second for debt payoff is most often what we do. But again, it depends on your situation. There's some other things like if you're moving across country and we need to fund that so you don't go into debt with that, or you're maybe you're planning for maternity leave or something, then we want to make sure that we have additional funds put back. You're gonna be out for surgery. We want to make sure that we have additional funds to cover that. So again, each situation is a little bit nuanced, but you get my point here, right? Prioritize first, peace of mind fund, and then move down the list. Most often it's gonna be debt payoff after that. It's really important to kind of look at, I don't want people and my clients, we don't focus on a lot of different areas at the same time. We're not building peace of mind fund and paying off debt and growing a travel fund and putting together a moving fund all at once. That's too many things for your brain to focus on, and that creates too much overwhelming, too many moving parts and pieces. Our goal here is to make your money more simple. And so to simplify it, we cut down on our priorities. Two focuses at a time. Two focuses at a time. So we might be building peace of mind fund while we're creating a moving fund, depending on your situation. No more than two. No more than two. And that really is important, right? Think about like your computer running with 15 open tabs and trying to navigate like which one is which, where, and you keep clicking the wrong one, and you just become confused and become frustrated. Same thing happens with your money plan. When you have too many moving parts, then it becomes confusing. You forget what you've done with one, you don't know when the next one needs to take place, you're creating overwhelm, and that doesn't need to happen. When you're looking at prioritizing, I keep I don't want to keep saying that this is nuanced and this could go a lot of different directions, but I want to give you some examples of different situations and different scenarios that can happen in the hope that it's helpful for close to where you're at right now. I always want people to start off with following one or two people finance, right? We've talked about that. I want you to have that vision for what you want life to look like. Okay? I want you to create a money plan that is actually based on your life, what it is that you want. Not one of those free downloads that you get that is very generic. Those never work, by the way. So if they didn't work for you, it's not just you. They don't work for anybody. I want you to really think about where you want your dollars to be going. Where do you need protecting? What are the things that happen in life that throw your budget off balance and feel like you're starting over each month? What are the things that happen over and over that you can plan for ahead of time so that it's not throwing the budget off? Most common, there are five most common areas that happen. Medical expenses, car repairs and maintenance, home repairs and maintenance, pets, kids. Those are the five top areas that people really struggle with planning ahead for. And so when I'm working with clients, we make sure that we cover and protect each of those areas. We build those areas into the money plan so you are protecting yourself, you're protecting the mindset, you're protecting your actions, you're protecting your dollars, you're planning ahead for these things that we know are going to happen. We can look back, history has proven that for us. So the way that we change it going forward, the way that we create a money plan that actually works going forward is we use the past, that data, and we create a money plan that accounts for those things. And I know you're sitting here thinking, Sarah, I don't have enough money to do that, it never works. My friend, it does. I have built hundreds of money plans with people in all different scenarios. And while your scenario is nuanced, it is not that much different. So I guarantee you it works. I guarantee you. There is a way to do it. I promise. And so it's under that umbrella of protection. Protecting your plan against the things that you know are going to happen, we just don't know when. So when you're creating your money plan, well, that's how you start to pick the areas to prioritize. Another thing when we're talking about prioritization, and I just went through this with my Reclaim and Rise cohort that's going on. We worked on money plans last week. And when you are putting your money plan together, there are certain areas that you put in first that you make sure these are your non-negotiables. These are the essentials that no matter what happens, you take care of these things first and the rest we deal with separately. Housing, you want to make sure that you have a roof over your head. My friend, don't not pay your mortgage to make a credit card bill. Pay your mortgage first. We'll deal with the credit card companies separate. Alright? Pay your mortgage, pay your rent first. Yes, it's a larger expense. Pay it first. You need a roof over your head. You don't want to be living out in a tent, you don't want to be living in your car. So pay your rent or your mortgage first. Utilities. You need electricity, you need water, right? Make sure that you pay those. Those are the priorities that you cover first. You want to make sure that your utilities are taken care of. These are basic human rights. These are basic human necessities. So keep a roof over your head, keep your lights and your water on, right? Third is food. Keep food on your table. There are a lot of resources out there to help you bring food into your home. Utilize them, but essential foods first. I'm not talking about grocery store runs or gas station runs. Okay. I'm not talking about just running through the drive-thru. I'm talking about going and getting food that you can make at home. Groceries to keep you fed. That's important. Okay? And then transportation. Money for Uber, money for the bus, money to help your neighbor with carpooling, gas for a vehicle, and medical. Those are the top things. Make sure that you have money for your prescriptions. Make sure you have money to go to the doctor when you need to. Insurance is another one. You need to pay your car insurance. You need to make sure you're paying your homeowner's insurance. You need to make sure that you have some kind of health coverage. So insurance is important. Those are the non-negotiables. Those things get covered before anything else. Before you run through a drive-thru, you make sure that those categories are funded first. Before you pay for Amazon, you make sure those categories are covered first. When we're talking about prioritization, you also have to figure out what is priority for you. And if you're going to the gas station and you're getting drinks, but you're not making your mortgage, your priorities are misplaced. Sure. I know the justification is there. Sarah, I don't have $2,500 for my mortgage. This is only $10 for a drink. Yeah, I get it, but your priorities are misaligned. It's the energy behind some of that. I don't want you to be more willing to go and spend a few dollars every day at the gas station over making your mortgage payment. So we need to realign your priorities, those non-negotiables, so those get funded first. What gets funded after that? Every situation is different. Arguably that peace of mind fund. Right? Making sure school supplies and those things happen. I've talked about on another episode about impulse spending and creating a free money line item in your money plan. That's important as well. Covering the home repairs and maintenance, vehicle repairs and maintenance, medical, those things then come into play. Right? So when we're looking at priorities, uh, there's a lot of ways to put this together in by way of priority. This is the work that I do with my clients, and because each situation is so nuanced, it might feel a little clunky with me going through this with you today, but I hope that you see that there are ways to prioritize and there are areas to focus on first. So you're bringing a little bit more clarity to your money plan, to your financial situation. You're bringing a little bit more understanding of how money flows and why you should um have certain things as a priority above other ones because it's protecting you, it's protecting the long game, right? It's helping to ultimately reduce your financial stress, not create more of it. And so I hope that some of this helps you. I hope that it gave you some new perspective. If you have any questions, if you're like, Sarah, my situation feels a little bit weird, the link to my calendar is in the show notes. Go and schedule a complimentary call with me. Uh, I offer those complimentary calls for a reason. I want to be able to help you pinpoint some areas, talk about what should be priority uh in your money plan, and uh we can also talk about what it might look like to work with me. So with that, uh think about your priorities, take some notes, share this episode with somebody that might find it helpful. And with that, I will say goodbye for now, my friend. Thanks for joining me on Traveling Towards Wealth. If today's episode sparked something in you, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, or share the show with a fellow free spirit who's ready to design a life they love. Want to dive deeper? I'd love to connect with you. Book a free call with me to chat about your money, your dreams, and your next steps. No pressure, just a real conversation. You can find the link in the show notes or on my website. And let's stay connected on socials. Follow me on Instagram or Facebook for behind the scenes RV life, money tips, and a little gypsy spirit along the way. Remember, your money, your journey, your role. I'll see you next to me for another story and some practical steps to help you travel further towards wealth, freedom, and a life you live. Until then, keep wandering, keep growing, and keep depending on what matters.