113: 6 Questions You Need to Ask To Elevate How You Care For Your Money

Transcript

6 Questions You Need to Ask To Elevate How You Care For Your Money

Hello, beautiful human and welcome to another episode of the Money Mindful podcast. I am your host Meaghan Jean Smith. I'm a money mindset and life coach for women. I help entrepreneurial women create their money and life goals. And today on the show, I want to help you think about and formulate how you are going to care for your money this year in 2022, or whatever year it is that you're listening to this episode in. I got an email from a client recently, and I wanted to share it with you. I have her permission, of course, to share it. I actually shared it on Instagram, because it was so beautiful and I found it so inspiring. By the way, if you're not following me on Instagram, and you're on Instagram, I want to invite you to come and hang out with me on my page, my handle is @meaghanjsmith, or whatever it is. But you can find me just by typing in meaghanjsmith.

 

01:34

I am most active on Instagram, I'm not really on Facebook much, I kind of just have a presence there. But that's not where I hang out, I hang out on Instagram, I chat with people in the DMs who talk to me and I do all the latest little bits and pieces on Instagram, like I'll share what's happening in my life, insights that are happening. I also like to do little mini trainings every now and again, I pop on there and I'll do a short five to 10 minute training just on a concept, something that I might work with, a summarised version of what I do with my clients that I share with you. So if you're on Instagram come and hang out, I'd love to know you and connect with you. It's always an absolute pleasure of mine to connect with people who listen on the podcast, because often, I only get to connect with you when you come and become my client. Because you come on a consult, and you're like 'I've been listening to your podcast for years' and  then I meet you and it's so wonderful. And I mean, totally selfishly, it's glorious for me to to know you on the other side. So yeah, come and hang out with me there.

 

02:55

But the email that I shared, and I'm going to read it to you now, it says, 'Hi, Meaghan, I just had to share a win with you, I finished my year end reports. And I built over 120K in 2021, up from 63K in 2020. Also of note, almost 80K of that was built in the last six months since we've been working together. I'm shocked and so proud of myself to thank you again for your support with all of this. And then, it's from my client, who I'm not going to say their name just for privacy reasons. But I wanted to use that as a prompt today to help you with thinking about how you want to care for your money this year. Because one of the things that I do with my clients is get really specific about what sort of relationship they want to have with their money, what their expectations are, what they'd like to have happen. But also, how they want to treat their money.

 

04:08

And an exercise that I did at the start of this year in my own journal prompts for myself, I want to share with you today so you can do it, and I do a form of this with my clients. And this is why you can get results like this, because that sounds pretty incredible, right? That she's doubled her income from last year to this year from working with me. And she's done the majority of that in the time that she's worked with me and there's a reason for that. It's not a coincidence. It's not magic. It's because she has been implementing - I don't want you to think about this in the wrong way. It's not like there's a particular method, like 'Do this and then you will double your income.' But there's a lot of changing the way that you think about money and changing your relationship with money. And I want to share that with you today so you can get an understanding of how she's actually done this. Yes, she's done tangible things like raise her prices, that's going to result in you creating more income. But there's other intangible things that she's done, that have, I believe, had the most impact on this increase in revenue that she's created.

 

05:40

So I want to take you through a little process that I did earlier on this year. And yes, this episode's coming out in February, it's totally not too late to do this work now, none of this work has to be done in January, you're not behind. In fact, a lot of the stuff that I'm doing for this year is only just happening now in February. My daughters are just going back to school. I'm ramping things up in business. Well, I'm actually taking it really easy, I'm ramping things up very slowly. But it's all happening now in February for me, so you're definitely not behind. But the exercise that I did, let me stop rambling and get into it, is this. So first of all, I asked myself the question, 'How do I want to care for my money in 2022?' And before I answered that, the first thing I started with was, well, what worked in 2021? What did I do to look after my money in 2021, that worked, because I want to repeat, right? If it worked, I want to keep doing those things.

 

06:24

So I'll just share a couple of things. I've got nearly a whole page of stuff written down. But a few of the things I'll share, one was distributing my money in percentages. So because I work for myself right now, and also my partner's income isn't always exactly the same amount, I distribute my money when it comes in, in percentages, like you know, I put a certain percentage to my super, a certain percentage to profit, a certain percentage just goes to me that I get to spend, a certain percentage goes to a little fund that we have just for fun stuff, to spend our money on fun things like holidays or activities with the kids. One of the other things that really worked is setting up an account for fun things. Before 2021, I didn't have an account to just spend on fun stuff. I mean, how terrible is that? How miserable is that? Like, we don't just have to use money to spend on bills and essential things or investing, we can use money to spend on things that bring us joy. And we can do that intentionally. And that's something that I did last year that really worked and made a huge difference. Because when we went to spontaneously book a holiday, we just had money sitting there because we'd been putting money in this account.

 

08:19

Another thing that really worked for me was that I did a little experiment and I took my credit card out of my wallet for three months. I'm actually really good at managing my money, I always pay off my credit card. But I wanted to just see what that was like, to live my life without my credit card. And I was actually really shocked at how much anxiety I felt with not having my credit card in my wallet, like it was this security blanket for me. And that really worked, taking it out of my wallet for three months because it's like I cut the cord. And now I've got it in my wallet again, I don't use it very often, just for things when it's handy, you know, to pay for stuff online. But that was something that really worked for me to just cut the cord of that feeling of being dependent on having my credit card, if that makes sense.

 

09:17

I've got a massive list of things that worked but I'm not going to read them all out to you. I want to take you through. So then I went on to what didn't work. I'm sitting here holding my notepad above my head, so it doesn't make a noise. What does this look like? I should take a photo of myself sometimes recording these podcasts. And I'm in the dark because it's really hot outside and I have my whole office closed down. Anyway, you probably don't need to know all of that information. What didn't work? Worrying about money, oh my goodness. Honestly, it's like a bad habit. I found that last year I was still worrying about money and I just identified that that is just something that serves no purpose, and it doesn't work, and it causes me stress for no reason. I mean, I'm just so much more onto myself now about it, but it's just like, oh my gosh, why am I doing this old pattern? Right? And so the next question I asked myself is, 'What do I want to do differently this year?' And the thing that was top of my list was like, stop worrying about money forever.

 

10:31

Like, just never worry about it again, because it's just, it's pointless. And it really doesn't help me generate any more money. It doesn't help me earn more money. It's really a bad habit. So that was that - what will I do differently. The other thing that I wanted to look at was prioritising letting go of some old and outdated beliefs. Because what happens is, when you start working on your money stuff, you make changes. But I noticed that like this worrying about money thing, there's still sort of old stories that hang around. And I just want to continue to prioritise that because I've seen the effects now of continuing to do my own work around money. It's like cleaning the teeth, you know, it's like a maintenance thing. You know, I clean up some thoughts around money, and then I go to a new income level, then clean up some more thoughts around money, and that's a regular thing that I'm going to continue to do. So I guess I'm not really doing it differently. But it's just one of those things that I wrote down. So I hope you're starting to get the idea.

 

11:51

Then the next thing that I asked myself, 'Well, how am I already loving on my money?' You know, what am I already doing that is being really loving towards my money. And I wrote things down. I distribute all my money to different accounts, I'm very organised with how I put money in different places, I send it to places that I want it to go to intentionally. Another thing I identified is that I'm regularly giving it an opportunity to grow by investing it, I always invest a portion of my income into shares and into my super. So there's a few examples. And then the next question I wrote is, 'How am I already being inviting and welcoming to money?' Because I want to identify what I'm already doing that's working, I'm just asking myself this question in another way. And so some of the things that I identified was that I reduced my mortgage interest rate, I updated all my mortgage repayments and reduced the interest rate, and I have increased my prices. So I'm letting more money come in, by doing that way. And I'm holding the space for more money by having savings accounts set up for things that I want, and also having places like containers, like investments for money to grow.

 

13:34

And then the final question I ask is just, 'How can I love and care for my money even more this year?' Right? What can I do to just love it a little bit more? And also, there's one more question, 'How can I welcome in more money?' And then I just brainstorm ideas about that. And one of my answers to loving my money more was spending it on experiences that bring me joy, because that just creates a space for more of a really positive relationship with money, like money isn't just associated with paying bills and survival. Money is associated with beautiful experiences that I can have in my life with my children. So that's something that I feel creates that connection of love and care for my money.

 

14:33

So I'd love to encourage you to answer those questions for yourself. Because this is all in the spirit of creating and improving your relationship with money and creating a positive relationship with money and thinking intentionally, like how do you want to care for it, how do you want to show up for it? And then doing it in a way that suits you. You don't have to do the suggestions that I've said, these are things that work for me and these are ways that I like caring for my money. And notice how I haven't talked about budgets or, you know, restricting myself in any way, none of that comes into the equation. And you may be surprised about what you're already doing, already, that's working. And you might not be focusing on that, because often we don't focus on what's working. So I really encourage you to do this exercise.

 

15:27

Okay, so if you would like to take this work deeper, if you're enjoying what you are hearing on the podcast, and you would like to learn more about working with me and get one on one support, I would love to invite you to come and have a consult with me, the consult is not scary at all. It's just me, I sound the same and everything. It's just an opportunity for me to find out where you're at, what it is that you actually want to create, and then working out a pathway from where you are now to the results that you want. And it's also an opportunity for us to meet each other. Because I work with women for six months. It's an intimate experience. We work one on one. And so, personally, I want to meet you, I don't want people just signing up and being able to work with me without being able to establish 'Hey, do we hit it off? Are we two peas in a pod?' Yeah, so I'd like to invite you to come and meet me and sign up for a consult if you're interested in working with me. You can do that by going to my website, meaghanjsmith.com or the Money Mindful website. All avenues lead to a consult, anywhere that you're following me you can press on a link and it will probably take you at some stage to where to sign up for a consult with me. Until I get in your ears next week, have an amazing week. Bye bye.