182 | Money in Moderation

Closing your eyes and hoping for the best is not a good money management strategy. At the same time, you don’t want to be obsessing over every penny.

I’ve been on both ends of the spectrum, and both sucked in different ways.

In this episode, let’s talk about a better way to approach your finances that doesn’t suck and keeps you moving toward your goals.

• • the “strategy” of paying no attention to your finances
  • obsessing over your finances
  • my story of being on both ends of the spectrum with managing my finances
  • the realization that helped me relax and stop obsessing
  • examples of other areas of life where extremes are harmful
  • the experience of being in the middle and taking a moderate approach to managing your money

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 moderation in your finances. Often when lawyers first come to me they are not paying attention to what’s going on with their finances at all. They are spending with no plan. They’re just swiping hoping for the best. Not saving not paying down debt like there’s just no strategy. There’s no real intention. Then sometimes when they first start learning about managing their money, they will take it to the other extreme where they get obsessive with it. And I have been on both of these extremes before my husband and I first started managing our finances better. We weren’t paying attention to our finances other than checking in with our checking account, making sure that we weren’t overdrafting paying off our credit card, that kind of thing. But as far as creating a plan for what we’re going to do with our finances at the beginning of the month, you know, like picking a strategy for how we were going to use the income. We didn’t do any of that. And then when we decided to start working on our finances and pay off our student loans, I started obsessing over it. So we created a budget in a spreadsheet. We had laid out all of our debt in a spreadsheet with all the details. And I was always looking at spreadsheets always analyzing them looking at like how can we cut more? How can we save more? How can we make an even bigger extra payment? How can we best How can we do that? And there was a lot like no, I probably was driving my husband crazy. But over time, I learned to let go and just trust the plan that we had come up with to pay off our debt, just let it ride. I learned to let go of the guilt that I was feeling about the debt that we had and to stop focusing so much on the debt because we had a plan that was working in me focusing on it wasn’t going to make it go faster. Or like me focusing on it as much as I was obviously that’d be some focus right but me focusing on it to the extent that I was obsessing over it was not gonna make the plane go faster. And I realized that our debt wasn’t a bad thing. Like it wasn’t something that negatively reflected on us as people which was how I was looking at it at first. I started looking at the good things that come from our debt, which is something that I have talked about before, like even if you don’t want to be in debt anymore, even if you want to pay it off. There are still good things that have come from you having the debt and looking at those things can help you to shift your mindset about how bad you think that that is. But anyway, extremes with just about anything can be harmful, even if it’s a good thing like managing your money. If you look at just about any area of life, you don’t want to be on those ends of the spectrum right at the extremes, whether that’s fitness or your kids or your eating like extreme just doesn’t tend to work out well. So you don’t want to completely neglect the area. But you also don’t want to obsess over it. You want to be in the middle and practice moderation. One example that I was thinking of here was water but as it says everyone uses this example when they talk about this topic, but did you know that if you drink too much water you can get water poisoning. And of course if you don’t drink enough water you can get dehydrated. Our bodies are mostly made of water. Water is a good thing for us. But even good things in excess can lead to negative consequences. Another example that comes to mind here is medication when you’re sick there is a certain dosage that you need to take that will cure your illness. If you don’t take enough it’s not effective. If you take too much you can overdose. The same principle applies here. So you want to give your finances a certain amount of attention that will be effective for you to reach your goals. You don’t want to give them too little attention and completely neglect or ignore them and just have no plan and hope for the best. But you also don’t want to give them so much attention that you’re obsessing and constantly looking at your spreadsheets and your apps and whatever else and thinking about how you can cut more and what else you could be doing to make this go faster and all of that. Neither of those are a very healthy place to be and it just doesn’t feel good. We want to be in the middle and when you can be in the middle. That is when you have a positive experience of your finances. So you’re checking in periodically, you’re keeping an eye on things, but money is not the predominant thing on your mind. It’s not taking up all your brain space and you’re thinking about your money and worrying about if you have enough or if you’re gonna be able to pay off your credit card or if you’re going to overdraft or whatever. Moderation is your friend so don’t completely neglect your finances. But don’t go so overboard that you are obsessing over them and constantly checking in and just driving yourself crazy. Alright, and listen if you would like help with taking a more moderate approach to your finances. Come join us in Money Mastery you will learn how to think through your finances and create a strategy to move yourself forward without going overboard head to rho thomas.com/join To get started. All right that is it for this week’s episode. If you haven’t done so already, please subscribe to the show and leave a review those things help it get pushed out to more lawyers and having more reviews of course makes it more likely that they will actually listen. So if you could do that, I would greatly appreciate it. As we close out friend I pray that you take the information you learn here, apply it in your life and open up to the realization that will 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.