I always know I should have money left over at the month. But she had a little over a thousand dollars to play with in her personal, but she couldn't see it because everything was just getting spent. The thing is, what the separate accounts is doing is allowing your brain to not have to remember anything. Your accountant is not your friend. They think like, I woke up at 5 am, everything's done. Ta-da! I feel really good about my life. Do you make good money but have nothing to show for it? Are you tired of living paycheck to paycheck? Do you have big dreams for your financial future? Do you want to get debt free but you don't want to live on beans and rice? Or you don't want to give up those pumpkin spice lattes? If you don't already know how to budget or if you're using credit cards to get through the month. If you want to seem like you have your finances all together or you're not on the same page with your spouse when it comes to finances. We know what you're doing probably isn't working, but guess what? You're in the right place. We're Shayna and Vanessa. We're best friends, business partners and master financial coaches trained by Dave Ramsey. While we've been in business since 2019 helping hundreds of amazing people like you create budgets, get out of debt, stop living paycheck to paycheck and know exactly what to do with their money. In this podcast we'll share with you everything we know plus everything we're working on with our clients so that you have the best chance at reaching your financial goals. We want to help you take the guesswork out of your budget, improve your marriages and even bring your kids in on the conversation. We can help you no matter where you're at whether you're the single mom who's never had $500 in her savings account or the millionaire who's paid off four real estate mortgages. And we're not going to shy away from the tough love. We'll tell you what you need to hear and encourage you at the same time. This is the Financial Coaching for Women podcast. I have a lovely client who has her personal budget. She has a business budget and she also has a trust from her family and so we have a budget for that as well. So there's a lot going on. When you have more than one budget or more than one situation, more than one business, it's all flowing into one another. And I think that was one of the hardest things for her to understand but for you guys that may have business owners or may have multiple budgets, they all flow into each other and you have to figure out the one that you need to figure out first which is your personal one. You need to look at that first and then figure out, okay, how does everything else fund it? How does everything else fund each other? And she had quite a bit amount of debt payments just over the years, different things for moving, some of it was business, we have multiple vehicle loans and different things like that. And she and her husband made the decision, we made one budget. We had an hour and a half session, we did double session in one and we put everything on paper, got all three budgets done and for her to look at and I said, okay, I need you guys to print this, I want you to go back and I want you to talk about it. Look at it, see right all over it, decide if this is what you want now that this is like rough draft, right? And are there any decisions that need to be made after us putting it on paper for the very first time and them seeing their numbers clearly, like I said, for maybe the first time they've ever done it this way. When she came back to the second session, she said we're selling the truck. And she said, we know we're not using it, we need to do it, the payments are ridiculous and her and her husband had really discussed that is what they wanted to do. And so we realized and they already had a buyer. So by the time she came to this, her next session, she already had a buyer. A plus. Go start a store. I know. I already had a buyer for it which is really great and we realized that was the dominant effect that she needed to start her snowball, not necessarily her debt symbol, but the snowball of paying off debt and it was what she needed to jumpstart everything. And she couldn't see extra money. Okay. So let's just talk about this. When she was running low on personal, she would borrow a little here. When she was running low here, she would borrow a little there because she had three different businesses. It was really easy for her to rob Peter and pay Paul in different areas, not really understand where the money is coming from, why it's coming from there. Is it enough? I'm gonna afford it. All these questions are running through their mind. So when we got everything situated to say, okay, this is non-negotiable. Everything that's happening here, it's consistent. Doesn't ever change. This one is the same thing. Your personal is the one that's gonna be adjusted from here on out. But she had a little over $1,000 to play with in her personal, but she couldn't see it because everything was just getting spent. And she realized that they were living way above their means. That they have a really good income. And they also had a really fun budget. And they just realized that they had to make in this season, this short season of life, they had to make a couple of changes to be able to get and reach the goals that they wanted. If you can get that one thing, what is it, whether it's getting your savings to $1,000 or funding your emergency fund or funding that vacation that's coming up in two months that you have a short period of time, so you have to do a lot, paying off that debt. What is the one thing that you need to do that can literally be the domino effect to start everything else? I want to go back to what you said about them living a little bit larger lifestyle than they actually could. I think that what we've seen over and over is once people see it on paper, it's not that they're not willing to make the sacrifice. Those things just slowly add up and you just add them. But when you can see it all on one paper or three pieces of paper, depending on how many budgets you need, then you have data to make decisions. And it's not. You're not unwilling. I think maybe 1% of our clients maybe have ever been unwilling to make the tough calls if there are any. But you can't do it without the information and you can't do it without seeing and then seeing what could be possible. Okay, Vanessa said if I do this short season, get this all together, I can add stuff back if I want. But the desire to do it is always there. But you can't have that. You can't nurture that if you don't have the data. I think what you said at the beginning from what I was talking about how her or her husband looked at it for the first time. I think that is huge as well. So it's kind of two lessons in one here is look at it on paper, make a rough draft, decide is this how you want to live your life? Can we afford to live like this? And just again, sometimes money going in and money going out, it's digital money, right? If you're not really a cash person. So it's not really like it's there. It's like girl math. Like it's there, but it's not there and you're not really sure what's happening and you can borrow from here to pay for there. It's just it becomes a little wonky. However, put it all on paper, print that baby out. There is something to paper. I will say that. Print it out. Look at it. Bring it to your spouse and make decisions and say, look, this is the first time we've written on paper what our finances actually look like month to month. What do we want to do about this? I think that there's a lot of power in that. Yeah. And then the last thing that I'll say about that is having three budgets. I have a client. She has her personal budget, her business budget, and then they also have real estate. And that's not business. It's like this whole huge thing that they've got going on that needs a third budget. And that might feel more overwhelming or it might feel like it's more work, but it really is so important to separate it out and see what's happening. And when you have separate accounts, you can very clearly go see this is what's happening with my real estate. Here's what's happening with business. Here's what's happening personal. And being able to untangle, it's like a web and it's all like this. That's not helping anybody. And it's not what we say. It's not helping your accountant. Your accountant is not your friend, but it's not helping you. It's not helping you make decisions. It's not helping you get ahead. It's not doing anything. So really, if you have those sort of situations, you want to make three different budgets and there's nothing wrong with that. And as you've heard us say, we're going to help you set it up to be simple and automatic. We're not asking you to be an accountant for three different things. We're going to look at it, make decisions, set it up, get it going. And then you're just managing it, like overseeing it. And it's not scary at that point. When it is scary is when it's like I said all one big mess that you have to slowly. If you have 18 necklaces all whatever and you're like slowly pulling one out and trying to untangle it, that's what you're having to do every month when you're, when everything's mixed up. Let's just have them be three separate necklaces. Okay. Yeah. And I will say you were talking about separate accounts. Her husband wants to go with a bank. I'm not going to say the name that does vaults. Okay. And she's, he's, nope, I don't want separate accounts. I don't want to handle that, blah, blah, which is fine. I get the resistance at the beginning. And I said, okay, great. So the alternative is now you have to transfer money every single time you want to make a purchase every day, every month. So if you want gaps in groceries, you have to make a transfer. You want to get, go to take, take the kids to Chick-fil-A. You have to make a transfer. You want to buy something for yourself. You have to make a transfer. All of that is now going to require you in the budget, in the bank account all the time, multiple times a day. Is that what you want? And she was like, absolutely not. And I said, you need to take that information because maybe he's not understanding what this means. You have separate accounts. You literally have three different debit cards. That's really about it. Unless you have a kid's one. That's all you have to handle. You have labels on them. You said this is for personal. This is for gaps in groceries. This is for out to eat. And that is, it's, so you know exactly how to spend your money. So just when I throw out there, you were talking about separate accounts. It really makes a big difference. The thing is what the separate accounts is doing is allowing your brain to not have to remember anything. And she gets this more than he does because like my husband isn't remembering what time the kids have to get picked up today. I love him dearly. I love him dearly. But is he going to text me and ask me? If he's going to help out? Yes. Am I just going to tell him? Like that's fine. So maybe he's over there. I have the room in my brain to figure out exactly, do a little extra transaction or extra math every time. We're not like that. Okay. I've got no extra room in my brain. Okay. So what I know is that all of the information that I need is stored when I open my bank app. Oh, we got all this money for kids. We have this much for groceries. I have this much. I don't have to think about it. I don't have to remember it. I don't have to transfer anything. It's all there. That's the point of the separate accounts for me. What do you think? Absolutely. And again, we're just taking a cash envelope system from the old school and turning it digital. So it's the same thing. It doesn't matter that you have multiple accounts. Who cares? It doesn't affect anything. It's literally just organizing your money and giving you a couple extra debit cards. Again, we're swapping the credit cards for the debit cards and allowing you to freely see how much you have to spend in all those categories throughout the month. Like that, Timmy, is freedom. It's time to enter your coaching era because making good money should feel like making good money. Imagine six months of private coaching where we'll tell you exactly what to do. No guesswork, no confusion, and absolutely no judgment. It's a done-for-you system that actually works. You don't know what to don't know, and that's not your fault. And that's why we're here. Financial coaching with us looks like two coaching sessions a month, personalized recaps, and after-hour support, you can text an email. So you're never stuck wondering what to do next. Together, we're going to build your budget, set up your system, and tackle any challenges that come up along the way, which, by the way, they always do. If what you're doing isn't working and you're tired of trying to figure it out on your own, sign up for financial coaching at budgetbesties.com forward slash coaching before all of our spots fill up, and we will help you go further faster. Six months from now, you'll wish you started today. So my client, the way that we talked about this was that she, we are going to turn her budget into the forcing function that is going to make her be a good girl. And not that you need to be a good girl, but you, all of us have goals. We have what we want to do with our money, and then we have the actual things that we do, not to compare them, but it's like when Paul says in the Bible, I do the thing I hate. Like I don't want to do it, but I do it anyway, and that's what's happening with your money. You know better. You would rather be like, look at all my savings. I'm so good at saving money, but it doesn't happen that way automatically, like without something happening, right? So the budget is the forcing function. What we want you to do, we've said it before, we want you to bite the bullet, we want you to rip the bandaid, get the system set up as soon as possible. What's happening is your money goes into the spending accounts, and it's forcing you. This is your spending budget. Live over here. This is all, if you just do this, nothing bad's going to happen. All of your goals are going to happen automatically because you've put them on paper, right? The same with your savings. The savings are going to be building automatically. So all, and then my bills are going to get paid on time without fail. All of it, if you set it up to do the transfers into your separate accounts for your spending and your savings, it's forcing you to do the budget that you planned. And unless you decide at like midnight when you're in a bad way to be like, I think I'll just go spend all this money anyway, and you'll have to go add your bill step card and do it, like it's literally doing it, and all you have to do is just spend money in your spending and not go over that, and then everything else works automatically. It's forcing you to do the budget the way that you wanted to do the budget. Yeah. I love when I talk to my clients and I'll highlight the entire spending section column and I'll say, this is where you live. This is you all month. This is what you're doing. If it's not listed over here, it doesn't happen again. I don't care. You go to the grocery store 20 times or you go 10 times. I'm telling you, you've got $2,000 to spend this month on groceries. Have a great time. I don't care if you buy all bond bonds. I don't care if you buy all carrots. It doesn't matter, right? It's just saying, this is what you have to spend in those categories. Don't go over that because then you're going to try to steal from your bills when we've designated enough money. That's the other part is if you feel like you don't have enough money in your spending section, that's when you start to go bleed over and try to go steal from other places. Make a realistic budget that you can sustain, that you know that you can work with throughout the month, and something that you're excited about. You have the permission to spend and like Shannon said, then your bills are working, your savings is working. All of it's happening automatically because you've stayed over here in the spending section of your budget. Yeah, and my client is super smart and very successful and I just saw her write down forcing function when I said it. The conversation started when she said, I always know I should have money left over at the month. I know I should have money, but I don't. I ended up ending the month short and I said, yeah, because you're just spending it out of there because you think you have extra. You do. But that's what I'm saying with the forcing function. If I immediately move all of that money over into the savings, which by the way, it's not really extra, you're going to need that money. That's why you're in debt. Savings for unexpected expenses. Because you have it, but I'm definitely saving it. I can't spend it because it's over here in my savings buckets and I've saved for the things that I know either I want or that I need that are coming up. By moving that money out and then moving the spending out, and we're going to talk about it later, but the spending is helping her, is forcing her to not use credit cards. It's allowing her to know she has money to spend and this is the whole budget. Therefore, I'm not using the credit cards. So it's helping her stick or have that money left over that's extra that she should have because it's all out of the bills account. There's not one big conglomerate money or dollar amount that she can just slowly dissipate because she thinks it's extra, but maybe it's not, but I don't know, but I'll just spend it anyway. That's what the budget's doing. It's separating it all. It's getting it all where to do the job that it's supposed to do. By the way, this is what's different about us. It's doing it automatically. We're going to do that. You don't have to go in there and do it with your hands or think about it or whatever. You can set that up automatically and then you're such a good girl. You're doing all the things on purpose automatically. You didn't have to get out of bed. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I love the husbands that look at the bank account and they're like, oh, but what you have in savings is emergency. So if you need it, you can just use it. And I'm like, so when Christmas comes and you need $5,000 in November or December and you're saying that you didn't need that in January or February and you stole it, so how are we feeling about that in November, December timeframe? So again, just remember like Shannon is saying the money in savings is there on purpose. It's there to save for unexpected expenses that are coming up. It's not your emergency fund. That is a different account. So save that money for future you to be excited to be able to buy whatever you want to buy in those categories that you've designated. Stay in your spending section throughout the month. Let your bills be paying itself and voila. And you can just sip your coffee and Shannon said, you didn't have to do anything because you set the system up to be happening automatically. So you can go to the beach, you can go ride your bike, you can go wherever you want to do whatever your thing is, have a yoga or whatever. And you're done. Yeah. When you said sip in your coffee, I was thinking like how many clients have literally Texas in bed like when they watch their transfers go out and they're like, I did it. Like I woke up at 5am. Everything's done. Ta-da. I feel really good about my life. So when you said that Vanessa also though I wanted to add, this is why we label life as a family. We label our savings and this is going to help whichever one of you is the, we get to spend, this is helping you label an emergency and put like all caps if you're allowed or like emojis. Yeah. I don't think that if you can, like several banks are going to last you as emojis. I'm really, let us know if you know a bank that let you use an emoji in your account name, but or put do not use or only break in case of put a label on it. And yes, that emergency fund is for those things. But then also when you say kids college savings, you're, I'm not saying you won't, but you're just less likely to use that to buy concert tickets. You know what I'm saying? Like just a little bit. It's a little resistant. And so that's why we want you to label the label. Those accounts that really is going to, like all of this is going to help you force you to do better and we're doing everything that we can think of to help you be successful and be your better self. Yeah. There are so many resources on this podcast to give you information like this to help you be successful. The one thing I was going to say was this is why separate accounts is important and not just one conglomerate vault or whatever. And then you have to go in there. That is more work for you later on. We're trying to reduce the amount of friction and reduce the amount of work that you have to do. And that's why separate accounts works and not vaults or buckets. I just want to throw that out there. Yes. Just throw that out there. And I want it. I would like somebody to tell me how many times we said, I'm just going to say this one thing because that's not what we do, but we do say it. That this doesn't mean that's what we mean. So anyway, we hope those helped you. If you make good money but have nothing to show for it, this quiz will help you figure out what's really going on with your money and what your next step should be. You'll get a personalized result and a simple action step to help you feel more organized and less stressed. Go to budgetbesties.com for slash quiz and take the free quiz today. That's budgetbesties.com forward slash quiz to find out what's really going on with your money.
