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Hey Friend,
For the past couple months, I’ve been working with a millennial couple helping them navigate their finances as a team.
They’re not married. The man has a daughter from his previous relationship. And these two have recently had a child together.
Major life milestones like this are typically cues for people to get on top of their finances.
I take my hat off to them.
They haven’t been getting much sleep with a new born in the household who’s had some health challenges. Yet they committed to this work and always show up to their sessions engaged and ready to learn.
Now, the fella in this relationship LOVES budgeting.
Whereas his lovely partner, she’s never budgeted. Numbers and finances aren’t really her thing.
Personally, I hate the word budget. It feels restrictive.
That’s why I rarely use it when talking about money management. It’s a word that’s loaded with negative emotions for a lot of people.
What does the word ‘budget’ bring up for you?
When this couple have had ‘budgeting’ conversations in the past, they’ve never gone down too well. And so one of my roles as a financial coach in this situation is to be an objective third party who can mediate the challenging conversations.
In our last session, I was really curious to find out from her:
“What does budgeting mean to you?”
She told me, it meant “being purposeful”. I loved that meaning. Because even though budgeting sounds and feels like restriction, it’s actually about being intentional and purposeful.
I probed deeper:
“In what areas of your life are you already being purposeful?”
She was already being purposeful in most areas of life. But the one where she felt most purposeful, was keeping a clean house.
This gave me a vital clue to help her reframe how she sees budgeting. And perhaps a way her partner could change his language to help her get excited about budgeting conversations in the future.
“What if you viewed budgeting as cleaning? But instead of cleaning your physical house, you’re cleaning your financial house.”
Because in essence, that’s what budgeting or money management is – cleaning.
Bringing order to your finances.
And how good does it feel when you’ve got a clean house?
Now, I’ve written about entropy before, which is how a system will move towards chaos without intentional effort put in.
For example,
Your house will turn into a mess if you neglect to clean it and don’t put things away.
Your garden will be overgrown and riddled with weeds if you don’t maintain it.
And your finances if left unchecked will result in your hard-earned money being dwindled away on unexpected expenses, debt repayments, overdrawn fees and subscriptions you never use and don’t even know you’re paying!
But just like with cleaning your house, cleaning your finances isn’t something you can do once and then forget about.
You’ve got to maintain the effort.
Or else the dishes and dirty laundry will start to pile up.
Now, just like your house loves order – your money loves structure and order. It wants to be a good servant. It wants to work for you 24/7.
But unfortunately, if you’re unorganised with your money – then your money will find someone else to serve who is more responsible and organised.
Think about this for a second…
If your boss was unorganised, indecisive, and they weren’t paying you on time – would you respect them? Would you be loyal to them? Would you stick around for the long-term?
So if you’re unorganised with your finances, then I hate to break it to you – but that’s how your money is currently seeing YOU.
So if you want your money to serve you, then serve your money well.
If you want your clients to pay their invoices on time, then pay your invoices to your suppliers on time.
If you want your money to grow, then you must first commit to growth.
Now, if it’s been a hot minute since you’ve given your finances some much needed TLC – then cleaning them up can be quite a daunting and overwhelming task.
So if you’d like some support this month, then book in a 1:1 ‘Financial Spring Clean’ with me.
Simply reply to this newsletter if you’re interested.
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