184 | Out with the Old

What’s not moving you to where you want to be with your finances?

The start of a new year is a great time to reflect on those things so you can let them go and implement new things as we come into 2024.

In this episode, let’s talk about a few things to leave in 2023 and a few new things to implement to move forward with your finances in 2024.

• • the importance of your beliefs about yourself in managing your money
  • money habits that don’t help you achieve your goals and how to change them
  • questioning money beliefs that don’t move you to where you want to be financially
  • filtering financial advice through your own strategy and goals

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. If you are listening to this in real time, we are just a few days away from the end of 2023. So Happy New Year to you. I hope that you are enjoying the end of the year and you’re looking forward to the start of a new year. So I will say I am not big on waiting for the new year to do things that we want to do or to make changes that we want to make. But the new year is upon us and the start of a new year feels like a natural reset point for most people. So today I want to talk about letting go of old things that are keeping you from managing your money better and living a life that you want to live. And let’s also talk about some new things that you want to bring into 2024 This is not an exhaustive list by any means. Just a few things I was thinking about. So the first thing we are letting go of in 2023 coming into 2024 is identities that don’t serve you. Your identity is the collection of beliefs that you have about yourself, and you get to choose what you want to believe. So what are all the negative things that you believe about yourself as related to your money, things like I’m just not good with money. I’m just a spender. I’ll always be in debt. I’ll never pay off these loans. I can’t save. All of that is BS is not true. Those are beliefs that you have. And you’ve just believed them for so long. You think they’re true, but there’s no objective truth to them. And you don’t have to believe any of those things anymore. So I want you to leave those old beliefs about yourself in 2023. And I want you to think about what you want to believe about yourself and your ability to manage money. Make a list, then work on changing those old beliefs to the new ones. And you do that by practicing new beliefs. You do that by looking for all the ways the new beliefs are true so that you can strengthen them. For example, if you had the belief, I’m not good with money, and you want to believe that you are good with money or that you’re learning to do that with money, you will look at how that’s already true. There are so many things that you’re doing with your finances that are good, but we often just overlook them because I didn’t pay off all my debt or I didn’t say $50,000. So it’s not enough. But you did do something, right. You’re always doing things that are good with your money. If you paid your bills, you have some money in your account, even if it’s not as much as you’d like. Like look for those kinds of things that show that what you want to believe is true. What is even the slightest little piece of evidence that supports what you want to believe, practice focusing more on those things than on the stuff that you’re used to focusing on. The stuff that’s not going well or that you think is bad. I say all the time that there are two sides to every story. We’re just used to focusing on the side that says we’re bad with money or that will always be in debt or that will never be able to save or whatever. You can also shine some light on the other side. So let’s leave the old identities in 2023 and start building the evidence to support your new identity and 2024 Okay, next let’s let go of old habits and old ways of managing your money that are not moving toward the goals you have avoiding looking at your accounts or closing your eyes and swiping or tapping or clicking the Buy Now button and hoping for the best not planning how you want to spend your money and then being surprised when there’s nothing left to save, stretching to spend the most you can afford and then trading up as soon as you can to get something even more expensive. I think a really good example of that one is cars where you know you go out you get a new car and then you ride it for a few years but now there’s a better car out and so then you go right back and you get another new car and you just perpetually have a car loan. All of that is old stuff. We are not doing that anymore in 2024. I want you to think about how you can think about your money differently, how you can manage your money differently. And I want you to be managing your money in a way where you are keeping more of it for yourself where you’re not basically making money to give it to these different banks and credit card companies and stores. Let’s change the money habits you have to prioritize you and your family and your goals and the lifestyle that you want to live and not just be lining the pockets of these banks and stores and whoever else. I’m not saying that you have to go from I never look at my finances to I plan every single thing and I save 1000s of dollars a month, right? You don’t do that overnight, but we can start breaking some of these old habits that are not helping you get where you want to be and start implementing new ones. You can start with looking at how much money you spent in the last month and where that money went. You can move to planning how you want to manage your money on the front end. And I have a free training on how to create a budget that you can actually stick to and you can get that at rho thomas.com/training. You can look at how much debt you have and get all the details of it together. You can get the spreadsheet that my husband and I used to organize the details of our debt at rho thomas.com/debt. Having all of that info readily available helped us create and stick to our strategy and ultimately paid off almost $500,000 of student loans. But the point here is let’s look at those old habits of how you’ve been managing your money. And let’s start shifting those coming into 2024. You can take it one step at a time. The next thing I want you to let go of in 2023 is beliefs about money that don’t serve you or the goals you have. I don’t have a whole lot to say here but I will say this question everything you believe about money is probably not true. It may not be right for you or moving you toward where you want to be with your money. One of the biggest ones that comes to mind here is debt is bad. So many people believe that debt is bad, but is it who said what it is not? What if there’s no such thing as bad debt? How does that change how you approach your debt, how you feel about it? We’ve been taught to believe that debt is bad or in this concept of good debt and bad debt for so long that a lot of people feel really bad about having to end and beat themselves up over it. But that feels terrible. It doesn’t change your debt balance. And usually it just results in you avoiding your debt which is not gonna help you pay it off. The main point is I want you to question beliefs like this and let them go if they are not getting you to where you want to be with your money. The final thing that I want us to leave in 2023 is advice that doesn’t fit how you want to live your life and manage your money. And one of the recent episodes or it may be coming out after this one, but in one of the episodes we talked about not taking advice from people who aren’t where you want to be in life. With any advice you received. I think you have to filter it through your own financial strategy and your goals. So some examples here are the advice to save a percentage of every dollar you make or to put 20% down when you buy a house or to max out your 401 K. All of these things are common advice that we hear, but they don’t always fit with how we want to manage our money and live our lives. You know your personal situation, you know what goals you’re working on. So make sure that the advice that you’re taking and the strategies that you’re using fit your lifestyle and that what somebody else wants you to do. Find somebody who’s doing what you want to do. Look at what they’re doing, look at how that fits with your situation and your goals and then go from there. Let go of following advice just because it’s what people say you’re supposed to do. All right, those are just a few things I want us to leave in 2023 Let’s flip some things. Let’s develop some new habits, some new mindsets and some new ways of approaching our money coming into 2024. And if you know that you want my help with letting go of old stuff that’s keeping you stuck and not moving forward as we come into 2024 Make sure you join us in Money Mastery get started at rho thomas.com/join. That is it for this week’s episode. Thank you so much for being here. If you haven’t done so already, please subscribe to the show. leave a review both of those help us get this episode this podcast pushed out to more people so we can spread this information to more lawyers and I appreciate your support. 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 wealth is available to you. As you do that consistently. Week after week. He’ll continue to take steps to regain control of your time, build wealth and live the life of freedom choice you deserve. Happy New Year. I’ll see you later.