140 | Money Check-Ins

One of my favorite money strategies is the money check-in.

This is one of the biggest factors in my clients achieving the goals they set for themselves so quickly.

It’s a simple strategy that will keep you on track with your planned spending throughout the month, and I’m sharing it with you today.

In this episode, let’s talk about why people resist looking at their finances, how to do a money check-in, and why they’re so beneficial.

• why people (and especially high-achieving professionals like lawyers) are often so resistant to looking at their finances
• the effect of avoiding your finances
• what happens when you take the emotional charge out of money
• what a money check-in is and how to do one
• the reason to do money check-ins
• the benefit of reviewing your planned spending against your actual spending

n/a

If you’re ready to learn the mindset and strategies to master your money, let’s schedule a call.

You’re listening to Wealthyesque. We are a community of lawyers who believe that true wealth is having control of our time. I’m Rho Thomas, and as a busy wife, mom and former Biglaw associate, I know all too well the tension between the culture of the legal profession and pretty much everything else you want to do in life. That’s why each week, I’m bringing you the information and tools you need to improve your money mindset and manage your money to create true wealth. Because ultimately, it’s not about the money. It’s about the freedom and flexibility the money affords.

Hey friend. Welcome back to the show. I hope you’re doing well and having an amazing day so far. Today we are talking about doing money check ins. It’s one of the things I teach all my clients to do and it’s a big reason that they’re able to achieve their goals so quickly. People are often really resistant to looking at their spending looking at their finances. And this idea of the money check in is where I get the most pushback from my clients. And look, I get it. There are so many negative thoughts and emotions that come up for people around money that they’re used to avoiding by avoiding looking at their finances altogether. A common thought is I don’t know what I’m doing or I should be further along by now. Or I don’t have enough in savings or I have too much debt. And there’s often shame especially for those of us in high achieving fields like law, we’re used to being the smart one or the one who has it together. And so when we don’t in this area, it feels bad. Embarrassment often comes up when people aren’t where they would like to be or where they think they should be. There’s fear. There’s doubt there’s uncertainty, there’s guilt. I think these kinds of feelings come up for most people in the world but especially when talking about lawyers and other high achieving professionals, where we are so accomplished professionally, it feels or almost amplifies the negative feelings when there’s this area that you haven’t been able to get control of yet. When this is the way you think and feel about your finances. The natural thing is going to be that you avoid them. I’ve seen people avoid looking at their credit card statements, looking at their student loans looking at their spending, which is what we’re talking about here. They avoid opening their bank account, right, all of that kind of stuff. But while you’re avoiding your finances and avoiding looking at these numbers, you’re also avoiding improving them. And sometimes it even leads to your finances getting worse for example, people often end up in more debt because they’re not paying attention to their spending and they end up spending more than they have and supplementing their income with their credit cards. So these negative thoughts and negative feelings that you have associated with your finances leads to you deciding either consciously or unconsciously, to not look at them and just sweep it all under the rug. But that avoidance never leads to what you want. You either end up further from where you want to be with your finances so deeper in debt, for example, or you just end up staying in the same place and not moving forward on your goals the way you’d like to one of the things I work with my clients on is taking the emotional charge out of money. So you’re able to look at your numbers objectively and you can get curious about your finances and why you made certain decisions. And then you’re able to make decisions about how you’re going to manage your finances moving forward, looking at the goals you have and what’s important to you. So you’re able to make more empowered decisions, more informed decisions about what you’re going to do. Because when you can take that emotional charge out of money and you cannot feel the shame, the guilt, the overwhelm, the confusion, all of those things, then you’re much more able to move forward and take the steps that you need to take to achieve the goals that you have for your money. Alright, so now let’s talk about what a money check in is going to take n is where you’re going through everything that you spent over the course of the previous week. And you’re looking at your actual spending against your plan. So the budget that you created for that month, you’re going through all the accounts that you use to spend money. Hopefully, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, it’s not too many accounts. I am big on simplifying your finances, because that makes them feel much more approachable, which means you’re much more likely to actually look at and manage them. But anyway, you are looking at all the accounts where you spend money so your checking account if you’re using debit cards, all your credit card statements and bank statements I just mean log into the app and look at the transactions for the previous week. But any accounts where you’re spending money, go through and look at what you spent in the last week and make sure that you’ve accounted for those things. And you’re looking at those expenses against your budget for the month. So each week you’re getting a snapshot of where you are with your spending. So far in that month. It only takes maybe 10 or 15 minutes each week and some of my clients have even gotten into the habit of checking in on their finances daily, because looking at their spending on a weekly basis felt too infrequent for them. And they felt like it was too many transactions to manage. So doing it on a daily basis only takes them a couple of minutes. That’s an example of how I teach everyone a way to manage their money, but everyone makes it their own. It’s completely up to you how often you do your money check ins, but I recommend at least weekly The point is that you are regularly checking your actual spending against your plan. The reason we do this is we want to see what’s happening with your finances in real time during the course of the month. So you want to know where you are periodically throughout the month because that helps you stay on track for your goals and it allows you to course correct if you need to. So you don’t just get to the end of the month and realize that you spent x in this category when you were intending to spend less than x. You can see for example, in week one, hey, I’m more than a quarter through how much I plan to spend in this category. Let me adjust coming into week two, or maybe my plan was too low and I need to increase how much I plan to spend in this category going forward. That second one has to come up in the first few months after you create a budget or after some change in your life. So maybe you got a new job or you moved or you’re going back to work in the office after working remotely for the last three years right all these things have actually come up for my clients. But by doing your money check ins you have a better chance of staying on track with your goals. You may be off track or off course and a given week. But you can make different decisions coming into the next week that allow you to not completely blow your budget by the end of the month. Like I say all the time. It’s really hard to stay on track with a plan that you don’t look at and that you’re not paying attention to. This is what so many people do when they create budgets, they create the budget but they never look at it again. It’s an exercise in futility. Because when you’re not looking at what’s happening with your money throughout the month, you might as well not have created that budget in the first place. It really serves no purpose. You basically wasted your time, right and whether you’re a lawyer who builds time or not, we all have only so many hours in a day and a week in a month so you don’t have time to be wasting. Let’s make sure that when you invest your time and doing something for your finances, it will actually move you forward and give you a return on that investment. Making a budget and then not looking at it is not one of those things, right? It’s just the numbers on a screen or on a sheet of paper that you wrote down. But when you create the budget and then look at your actual spending against that budget, it becomes a plan that gives you real time feedback for your spending decisions. So that so that is the money check in. It’s a strategy that keeps you on track with the plans you create for your money. And when you couple that strategy with evaluating your execution of the plan. You know exactly how to adjust your plan for the next month and what you’re going to do next. And listen, you don’t have to try to figure all of this out on your own. That’s what I’m here for. I will walk with you step by step to implement all the strategies I teach in your finances so you can manage them with greater ease and less stress. Make sure you’re on the waitlist to work with me so you don’t miss your opportunity head to rho thomas.com/waitlist to sign up. Alright, that is it for this week’s episode. Connect with me over on social media. You can find me on LinkedIn rho Thomas and Instagram I am rho Thomas. Subscribe to the show and leave a review both of which help more people to find it. And please think of a friend or two who could use this information and share the episode with them. As we close out friend I pray that you take the information you learned here, apply it in your life and open up to the realization that wealth is available to you. As you do that consistently. Week after week. You’ll continue to take steps to regain control of your time, build wealth and live the life of freedom and choice you deserve. Talk to you later.