130 | Unintentional Priorities

We unintentionally prioritize things in our lives when we’re not being thoughtful about our choices or the tradeoffs that come along with them.

I see it happen all the time in personal finance.

When you don’t have a plan for your money or don’t follow the plan you DO have, it often leads to not being able to achieve your financial goals.

When you don’t achieve your goals, all the things you spend on end up effectively being prioritized over your goals.

In this episode, let’s talk about how unintentional priorities show up in your finances, some real-life examples of unintentional priorities from my clients, and how to manage your finances to make sure your money goes where you want it to.

• the unintentional way many of us prioritize things in our lives
• what happens when you’re not mindful about managing your money
• client stories about unintentionally prioritizing other things over their goals
• making conscious choices about your finances
• a client story about intentionally prioritizing an experience over a financial goal

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 your financial priorities. So we’ve touched on this topic before in talking about other things, but I want to pull it out and talk about it as a standalone episode. And I think it’s helpful to talk about the same things again, because maybe if I put it a different way, or if you’re at a different time in your life, then it hits you differently and are able to actually absorb what I’m saying and continue to implement it in your own finances. So we’re talking about priorities, and specifically, I’m thinking about the unintentional way that many of us prioritize things in our lives because we’re not paying attention. We’re not being thoughtful with our choices. We’re not thinking about trade offs. When you have a specific goal in mind that you want to accomplish. For example, maybe you wanna pay off debt where you’re building an emergency fund, or save for vacation, or you’re saving for some other special purchase, right? When you have that goal in mind. You wanna be mindful of how you’re using your money to ensure that you’re able to achieve that goal. Often what happens is people are not mindful of how they’re using money and it may just be the end of the month or the end of the year or whatever time period and realize that they didn’t achieve their goals. And when you’re managing money that way when you are just spending however and then realizing that you don’t have enough or you don’t have much as you thought you would to save or to pay off the debt or to whatever other goal you have, then every single thing that you used money on every single thing that you spent, that wasn’t for that goal essentially got prioritized over that goal. Everything you bought got prioritized over the goal that you have. So you basically said the new clothes, the nicer car, the DoorDash, the bars, whatever else you spent money on, were more important to you than the goal. Of course not saying that out loud. It’s not your intentional thought. But that’s the unintentional effect of the way you chose to manage your money. I know I’ve told a story before one of my clients was saving for a large purchase over the course of a few months and did not save as much as planned one month and in that month, he had caught a sale and stuff that he thought was the deal and overspent in one of his budget categories. And we were talking about it. I showed him that all the money that went to buy those things on sale that he wasn’t planning to buy could have gone towards his goal instead. And it was a situation where if he hadn’t bought those things, he would have achieved the goal. Like the amount of money he spent on that sale was about the same as the amount of money he missed his goal by in that month. And he hadn’t thought about that trade off he was making buying those things on sale and the fact that he essentially prioritized the sale over the goal. I was talking with another client recently who is working on paying off two credit cards and what’s been happening for her is she’s been spending more going out than she used to so paying off debt has been going a lot slower than she would have liked. She said she thought it had to do with inflation, which could be true, right? Things are a bit more expensive now than they were before. But I think if we’re looking at the factors that contributed to her increase spending, maybe 10% inflation, but 90% of it is like that she’s just not paying attention to her spending. So she’s spending more than she intends to or more than she’d like because she’s not making a plan for that spending. Like we talked about earlier when you have goals for yourself then every dollar that you’re spending on something that’s not those goals is $1 you can’t use for your goals. So you’re effectively prioritizing the things you’re spending on over the goals. And it’s not always bad. You might want to do that. Sometimes there might be some instances where you’re like, Yeah, this thing’s more important to me. I’m gonna use this money on this thing, even though it means I don’t make progress I wanna make on this goal. But the key there is you want it to be an intentional decision. I’ve talked before about how sometimes my clients will intentionally go over budget in a category because they’re spending on something that’s more important to them. So the one that immediately comes to mind is the client was home for holidays. And he was going out with his mom and he knew that he planned for X in let’s say it was a budget. So he planned to spend X on entertainment but decided to go over that amount because he wanted to do something with his mom. I think that’s perfectly fine, right? That is exactly what I want you to be doing. It’s not that you have to rigidly stick within every single category in your budget all the time and never go over a category if you do that’s bad. You just want to be thinking intentionally about your money and making these conscious choices and not looking at the end of the month like oh crap I wish I hadn’t spent so much or I didn’t save as much as I wanted to or I didn’t pay off as much debt as I wanted. You want to be doing these things consciously not just wondering what happened on the back end so it may be that you look at certain purchases and decide you want to do that is more of what’s needed making progress on my oldest one and so I’m gonna spend the extra to go out with a mom but I’m listening to your or I’m gonna buy the things my friends haven’t got time or whatever it is, it might be more work for you. But more often than not we’re not thinking that way and not making those intentional decisions. We are not thinking about the fact that we’re not gonna be able to achieve this goal. We’re not thinking that we’re prioritizing this thing over the goal. We’re not actually considering the importance of this thing versus the importance of the goal. Because when you do you may find that this thing isn’t as important to you. And when you give yourself that just choice. You will decide not to use your money for that thing to be able to hit the goal because that’s more important. The thing with the client who’s been spending more on entertainment was she was saying that she doesn’t want to go sometimes. She’s going because her friends want her to come out, but sometimes she doesn’t want to go. So she’s spending this money prioritizing what happened with her friends or what her friends want over the goals that she has for herself and her family. When you’re managing your finances, make sure you’re not unintentionally prioritizing things you don’t care about over things that are actually important to you. Make sure that as you’re making decisions, you are being intentional in the decisions that you make, and not just hoping everything works out because it rarely does. If you’re not intentionally deciding to spend less money on x, so you have more money for your goals. More often than not, you’re not gonna magically end up spending less. So this is a reminder to spend on the things that you want, but to make sure that you’re being intentional with funding your priorities. Let’s make sure that we are doing the things that we actually want to be doing with our money and achieving the goals that we set for ourselves. Because when you’re not being intentional, you’re not gonna make the progress you want to make. And listen I will help you intentionally direct your money so that you make sure you’re not unintentionally prioritizing things that aren’t important to you just head to rho thomas.com/waitlist and get on the list to work with me. Alright, that is it for this episode. Connect with me on social media. I am most often 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 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, 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.