A Nurse First

What you keep

• Sigma Nursing • Season 5 • Episode 4

Share episode

The thrill of her first nursing paycheck seemed like the promise of financial freedom but quickly led Renee Carter down a path of hard lessons and surprising discoveries about money.  With relatable stories and practical tips, Renee reveals how she broke free from paycheck-to-paycheck living, unlearned bad money habits, and mastered budgeting, retirement planning, and negotiating pay—essential advice for any nurse ready to take control of their finances. 

Connect with Sigma:

What I remember about receiving my first nursing paycheck, I had never seen so many zeros in my life. So many numbers. Like, am I what? I was excited. I really didn't know what to do with it. It was an amount of money that I hadn't made in my lifetime before. Welcome to a nurse first. This is Renee Carter telling her own a nurse first story. It's very exciting to get a lot of money at one time and to have it, you know, keep flowing after you work so many hours and all this stuff, it led me to establish a budget, right? Because at this point in time, you know, I could spend $2,000 in the mall easy. I've had jobs before, but I never really looked at the w two. I didn't know anything about taxes. And I'm like, whoa, wait a minute. I look at my w two or my pay stub, and it's like,$500 went to Medicare, Social Security, and I'm like, who took my money? So a lot of it was going to taxes. I had to understand that concept. I went from making $15 an hour to basically, like, what, $28, 29 an hour? That was a big deal in 2016 for me. So at that time, they were like, when I got my first job and, you know, my first paycheck, they're like, okay, well, healthcare insurance is rolling around. You gotta fill out these forms. And I'm like, I don't know nothing about this. Like, why does all this come along with the money right in the first paycheck? So it definitely led me to understand about, you know, base salaries, shift differentials, taxes, and then 401 ks and retirement planning, because they shove those papers in my face, too. And I'm like, I don't know what a 403 b is. Like, I had to look up all these things that came. I was doing a lot of googling, and I was asking family members. It was a big sigh of relief to go from$11, then $15, then$28. You know, I thought I was doing something. I'm like, oh, I can pay my bills, right? But now, like, you know, you make more bills when you have more money to spend. So you definitely have to plan your mind. You have to rethink your perspective about money in general. It's really not about how much you make, it's how much you keep. So that's what I learned to, and I had to shift my mindset to think about that. From juggling surprise expenses to navigating the fine line between wants and needs, Renee had to learn through experience the value of prioritizing her spending and planning for the future. Along the way, she also had to break free of some unhelpful money habits she inherited early in life, which added another complicated layer to her journey to financial stability. You have to unlearn bad money habits first to make room for the financial stability and the discipline that you need to have in order to be financially stable. Right. And that looks like getting that first paycheck and not racking up, debt, not getting a lot of credit cards. Right. It really depends on kind of, like, your household and how you grew up and how that was passed down to you. Because in my household, in my, like, growing up, my parents, they weren't young, but they weren't financially stable either. Right. So I kind of adopted their habit. So, again, at 22, you have the mindset of, oh, my God, I have all this money, I can spend it. When. And planning is hard. Like, let's just be honest, planning is very hard. So I don't want to do it. I would have loved to have someone sit me down and say, okay, this is what it looks like to budget, or this is how you have to think when you have a surplus of money that you don't know what to do with. I think having financial goals, in addition to career goals, helps you to stay out of survival mode. You don't want to live paycheck to paycheck, which is what majority of America does, and you want to build a cushion with your financial income, because if you don't, then it just makes your life much, much harder. You have to dig yourself out of a hole when life happens. Right. The immediate goals that I set for myself and my family after receiving that first paycheck was to buy a house and then, of course, paying down debt because I had student loans. Another goal was just to save money and start, you know, building an emergency fund. I would say build the emergency fund first because life happens. Typically, the golden rule is you supposed to have three months of, you know, like, your rent saved up or three months of your expenses saved up. That's a true emergency fund. If you want to be an overachiever, you could do six months. If you don't plan ahead that financial stability, then it just makes your life much, much more harder. So I give you an example. So when we first did our. I think our emergency fund, we, started it. I think we ended up saving, like, $5,000. Well, my car broke down, and it was $2,700 to get it fixed. So if I didn't have that emergency fund, how am I going to work? Like my car broke down, how am I getting to work to get to the paycheck, to get to the money? So because I had that$5,000 or we had that $5,000 saved up, I just pulled from my emergency fund, took the money, gave it. My car was fixed in two days. Now I don't have to worry about where that money is coming from. I have to replace it, but now I don't have to worry about how am I going to get my car fixed. Financial stability means to me that I have money to basically move, like how I want to move. It really is important to have financial stability. Just establish that discipline and that money mindset now, no matter where you are in your life, right. The discipline comes in following the budget financially discipline for me, looks like if I'm going to use my credit card to keep it under low utilization, that means if I have, you know, a $1000 limit, then I'm only going to spend$100 of it. Okay, that's 10% utilization of a, that keeps my debt to income ratio low. Because we know that in the credit world, our credit cards are attached to that credit score and credit profile. So if you max out the card, right, if you max out the car, then it has consequences for your buying power. Financial discipline also looks like, you know, not splurging when I really want to, right? You know how you get mad and you say, I need retail therapy. We all like to go out and buy things because it makes us feel better, but I can't do that every time I get mad, right? So I have to divert that energy somewhere else. Following that budget, basically. What are your go to strategies for managing your budget? In keeping your finances in check, what has worked best for you? Some of the strategies to manage the income was just like I said before, the budget just breaking down what my income was and what my expenses was. Remember I said in the beginning, it's not about how much you make, it's about how much you keep. And so you don't want your out your expenses to outweigh the income that you're bringing in. One of the strategies is if your money is going to too many expenses, you could cut back on expenses. That way you keep more, money. Let's say you eat out all week and you're spending$200 a month on, you know, just fast food or dining or whatever, you can say, hey, here's where you can look at that budget. Because the budget breaks down everything and then just, you know, negotiating your pay basically is another strategy. It doesn't hurt to ask, right? It doesn't hurt to be leveraged in that manner, to say, hey, I'm coming to you with these skills. Even though I'm a new nurse, you know, the next thing is like, sign on bonuses. Sign on bonuses is the hospital's way of keeping you retaining their nurses. So they say, hey, if you apply for this job, we'll give you $15,000, but we're going to stagger it. And you got to work for us two years now, to a new nurse, that's like $15,000. What you gonna give y'all that? Exciting, right? but there's a reason for that, and I learned. I had to learn that sign on bonuses are not m always good. Depending on, like, you know, what's going on. You may have some things that may not keep you there for two years, right. Or, you know, something happens and you want to maybe change job, you may relocate. So sometimes they make you pay it back if you do not stay within your contract parameters. So final bonuses can be a good thing or it can be, you know, a bad thing. So just be mindful of that. I would say, please, please, please get a mentor that has goals as well that can show you how to set goals and that can show you how to change your mindset. It is 100% mindset first before you can dive into any of these things, because if you simply just don't want to do it, you're not going to. If you don't believe that you can do it, you're not going to do it. So get a mentor, someone that is doing what you want to do. If you never had to do it ever before in your life, why would you utilize that skill? If you don't have that skill in your toolbox, surround yourself with positive people that are positive people that are doing, you know, just don't. They don't let stuff get in the way of their goals, of whatever they're trying to achieve. Because, you know, they say birds of a feather flock together. Right? Surround yourself with people that have the structure, have the discipline, have the money mindset that you're striving towards. Thank you for listening to a nurse first from Sigma. If you loved this episode, do us a favor and subscribe rate and leave us a review. It is very much appreciated. For more information about a nurse first and Sigma, visit sigmanursing.org dot until next time.