Money Made Human Podcast

Say your goal is to save $500 a month. Then an unexpected expense comes up, and that month you only manage $400. You still saved $400, but because you missed the number, it feels like it didn't count. If you've been trying to figure out how to reach your financial goals and you keep ending up right there, the fix is in how the goal is set up.

Pass/fail thinking is why so many goals fall apart the first time life gets messy. You update your budget every day for a week, miss one day, and you don't restart. You just stop. With Good-Better-Best, you set three goals instead of one. A Good goal is the one you'll hit unless something goes really wrong. A Better goal takes a little extra effort or a little luck. A Best goal feels a bit bonkers when you write it down. You can set these up a few different ways, and you'll hear a couple of examples: saving $400, $650 or $1,000 a month for a vacation, or paying off a debt in 18, 15 or 10 months.

Goals also get harder when only one person in the house can see the whole picture. Nina tracked about 14 recurring expenses in a notes app on her phone and carried every what-if in her head. Rob's take was, "I think we're fine, she just worries." Nina summed up what she wanted in five words: "I want to feel comfortable." When they finally saw everything she'd been carrying laid out in front of them, Rob leaned forward and asked, "So we can actually see all of this? It's not that we're bad at this?"

From there, you'll hear why saying your goal out loud to someone who cares about you makes it harder to let go of, how to fund your goal on payday before anything else, and why every time you do what you said you'd do, even something small, you trust yourself a little more.

What you walk away with is a goal that still counts in a hard month, and the shift from having a goal to being someone who goes after one.

SpendFirst comes out November 11 and you can pre-order now. 

If you want to see where your goal fits in your next paycheck, Your First SpendFirst Paycheck is a free step-by-step guide to splitting it.

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If you've ever looked up how to set financial goals, you were probably handed a number that sounds responsible, and that is usually the problem. A goal you adopted out of obligation runs on willpower and willpower runs out. Once you budget by paycheck, a goal stops being a wish and becomes a line in the plan.

Chapter 14 is where you hear something you do not often hear from a financial professional. Money is not the most important factor in your financial goals. Buy-in is.

Here is the grocery version. Say you are spending $800 a month and traditional advice says cut it to $600. You meal plan aggressively, buy the cheapest options, skip the foods you like to prepare. It works for a while and you feel disciplined. By month three you are miserable, your family is complaining, and you stop. You saved $600 total and you have reinforced a story that you cannot stick with things. Now imagine you had cut to $700 instead. On paper it's the worse plan, but it's one you can actually live with, so you keep going. Twelve months later you have put $1,200 toward your goals instead of $600. Less effort and a better result, because you stayed with it.

Then comes the MeaningFirst Method, which starts nowhere near the numbers: five questions that get underneath the goal you've been carrying around to the reason you actually care about it.

Susan came in wanting out of $18,000 of credit card debt, and when I asked why it mattered, her first answer was, "Because I should. I mean, debt is bad, right?" A few questions later she said what was actually true. She wanted to stop feeling guilty every time she swiped her card and to go out to dinner without a voice in her head. And underneath that, she wanted to start planning for a house and a real vacation, things she had been putting off because she felt like she had to fix this first.

What you will walk away with is a way to tell the difference between a goal that excites you and one that exhausts you, before you spend a year on it.

SpendFirst comes out November 11 and you can pre-order now. 

If you want to run the MeaningFirst Method on your own goal, the full walkthrough is free.

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If you have ever gone looking for how to plan your finances for the year and given up somewhere around February, it probably was not a failure of effort. Traditional budgeting keeps you looking backward, sorting through what already happened and accounting for where things went wrong. After an hour of that, who has the energy to think about the next few months?

Chapter 13 is what becomes possible once the system is running. It works because you already budget by paycheck, so the year is built out of units you can actually see. Planning ahead is what protects the progress you have already made, because the most common way momentum disappears is an unexpected expense going on a credit card or coming out of savings. Plan for 75% of what is going to happen and the other 25% gets a lot easier to handle.

The planning ritual in this chapter is Past, Present and Future. Past is a two-minute glance at whether the last pay period went the way you planned. Present is what you need for the current one. Future is where the real work happens and where most of your time goes. You look at your calendar, you scan your SpendFuture categories, and then you go after the ones that never make it onto a list: the deck that needs staining this summer, the mattress you keep saying you will replace. The things that turn up at 2 a.m., never at a convenient time.

Noah and Chantelle came to Kelsa after years of what they described as doing everything right but never getting anywhere. They would pay extra on the credit card one month, feel proud, then watch a forgotten annual bill wipe it out the next. Once they started planning three months ahead, they could see their daughter's dance recital fees, their car registration and a family trip all in the same quarter, already funded. Then they took a family vacation without putting a single dollar on a credit card. She cried in the airport.

What you will walk away with is a rhythm for making decisions while things are calm, so the version of you who has to handle it later doesn’t have to scramble.

Resources mentioned:

• See the illustration from this chapter.
• The Year-at-a-Glance Planner comes with this chapter. Pull it up when it's time to plan and let it jog your memory instead of trying to hold the whole year in your head.

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Most guidance on how to budget with irregular income assumes a paycheck that arrives the same way every two weeks. Chapter 12 is where the system flexes to meet you where you actually are.

That's anyone self-employed, freelancing, on commission, working overtime, or running a business where no two months look the same. It's also anyone with a perfectly steady paycheck who is living through a season that is anything but.

If that's you, you may be thinking: my paychecks aren't predictable, so how does this work for me? It works. And it may matter more for you than it does for someone whose income never moves.

You have a variable on one side of the equation that you can't fully control. You can influence it; you can hustle, close deals, pick up extra shifts. But you can't guarantee what comes in or when.

So the move isn't obsessing over predicting your income. It's getting so clear on the other side, what your life actually costs, that any check that lands becomes simpler math. The routine does not change, you still budget by paycheck, the checks are just different sizes. There's a real estate agent in this chapter with a $25,000 commission check. Without a number to measure it against, a check that size feels like a windfall. With a monthly SpendFirst number of $7,500, it says something specific instead: this covers just over three months of my life. If her next deal closes in sixty days, she can stop doing math and go do the work.

In this chapter, you'll hear about the Deposit Account, where all your income lands first so you pay yourself a steady paycheck on a schedule you choose. You'll also see how to work backward from your number to your comp plan, and what to do when a lump sum shows up.

Priya taught for eight years, then left to start a tutoring business, and within six months she had more clients than she'd expected and less certainty about anything financial than she'd ever experienced in her life. She came to Kelsa not in crisis, but in the particular kind of confusion that comes from having done all the right things and still feeling unsteady. What the self-made paycheck gave her was the one thing variable income never offers on its own: a rhythm.

Jamie's season looked different. IVF, then maternity leave, her SpendFlex at zero, nothing moving forward for months. "The hardest part wasn't the money," she said. "It was my own brain telling me I should be doing more. But the system held us, we didn't go backward."

What you'll walk away with is a way to make income the only thing in your financial life that moves.

SpendFirst comes out November 11 and you can pre-order now. 

If you earn fine and still feel like you're guessing at the numbers, that's what the Paycheck Quiz sorts out in about 2 minutes.

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Most guidance on how to free up money in your budget starts with a list of things to cut. Chapter 11 starts somewhere else, with the plan you've already built and the small places where it doesn't quite fit your life yet.

By now you've been running SpendFirst for a few weeks or a few months, and your SpendFixed list has stopped being a list of bills. It's a snapshot of your life. This chapter walks through the refinements people actually make once they can see clearly. Things like the phone plan that could be smaller or the due date that always lands on the tighter paycheck and can probably be moved if you ask. And things like the insurance that crept up at renewal and nobody noticed and the SpendFreely number that's been running fifty dollars too tight.

And then the one most financial advice skips entirely, which is whether adding an expense might buy back enough hours to earn more. This is the work that happens after you budget by paycheck, once the plan is real enough to refine.

There's a section on values that isn't an exercise and doesn't require a worksheet. A value isn't the thing itself, it's what the thing gives you. For Kelsa, money gives her choice, and that's what she and Michael were actually buying while they paid off debt.

Then there's Jamie, who has been using SpendFirst for years and will be the first to tell you she still catches her perfectionism creeping in. She used to spend an hour after every reload sorting SpendFreely transactions into columns. Groceries here, eating out there, kids' stuff in a third. One day she realized she was spending more time analyzing her spending than she was living her life. The system was already working, she was just too afraid to trust it.

You'll walk away with a way to look at your own plan and find the money that's already at your fingertips, plus a clearer read on which adjustments are worth making and which ones are perfectionism dressed up as being responsible.

SpendFirst comes out November 11 and you can pre-order now. 

Get the free Quick Start Guide

Subscribe so you don't miss next Thursday.

What if there were a number that told you, honestly, what your money can do for you? Once your bills are handled, your everyday spending is covered and the expenses you know are coming are planned for, whatever is left has a name. It's your SpendFlex. It's the part of your money that gets to go toward the things that actually matter to you, and it's where money stops being about survival and starts being about possibility.

For most people this moment is emotional. Not because the numbers are perfect, they rarely are, but because the fog finally lifts and the question "where do I really stand" has an honest answer. This chapter walks through the three realities you might find when you look at your true margin, and why every one of them is workable and tells you something useful about your life. Your SpendFlex is what shows up once you budget by paycheck and every part of your life is actually funded.

I also share the most personal story in the book: the job that was breaking Michael down, the moment we decided we'd never be tied to both of our paychecks again, and how tracking this one number became the way we paid off $60,952 and bought ourselves real choice. Our money's greatest gift has never been a number. It's the freedom to walk away from something that makes one of us feel small.

Come hear where possibility begins. 

SpendFirst comes out November 11 and you can pre-order now. 

If debt is where your own number is headed, the free Debt Payoff Personality Quiz is a great palce to start.

Subscribe so you don't miss next Thursday.

Resources mentioned: 

• See the illustrations from this chapter. 

Here's what nobody tells you about starting something new with your money: the first time rarely goes perfectly, and that's completely okay. This chapter is the honest reality check for how to plan your first paycheck with SpendFirst, so you know exactly what to expect and don't mistake normal for failure.

When you run it for real the first time, one of two things happens. Either there's money left after funding all three waves, or you realize there isn't enough to cover everything yet. Both are valuable, because both are the truth. If the math doesn't fully work, that's not a verdict on you. For the first time, you're seeing what your life actually costs when you account for everything, including the irregular expenses you used to just scramble for. That clarity is the whole point. The first time through is where you learn to budget by paycheck instead of guessing at the month.

I walk through what to do on day one, what to expect in the first month or two, and why thinking about money more at the start is a sign you're learning, not failing. By the second or third payday, the parts that felt clunky start to feel automatic, and the mental noise finally starts to fade.

If you've tried systems that never stuck, this is the chapter that helps this one actually settle in. Come hear what your first real payday looks like.

SpendFirst comes out November 11 and you can pre-order now. 

Get the free Quick Start Guide

Subscribe so you don't miss next Thursday.

Resources mentioned: 

• Chapter 8, The Number That Changes Everything
• Chapter 7, The Simple Payday Rhythm of SpendFirst

Your bank balance is lying to you. Not on purpose, but it only counts what has already happened. It shows you a number that looks like money you can spend, when a lot of it is already spoken for by bills that haven't hit yet. If you have ever asked how much money you should have left after bills, this chapter is about the number that tells you the truth instead.

There's a different number, the one that shows what will actually be yours after everything committed to this paycheck clears. That number is what makes it possible to budget by paycheck instead of guessing at the month. It accounts for the bills that are due, the transfer for everyday spending, and the savings contributions, whether they've come out yet or not. It's the number that tells you where you really stand, so you can make decisions based on the actual impact instead of a rule someone handed you.

This might be my favorite chapter in the book. It's the one where people describe their money starting to feel like it has a crystal ball, because for the first time they can see what's coming. I even revisit Marcus and Ashley from earlier in the book and show how one number would have changed a decision that set them back.

The first time you see this number, everything changes. Come find out what it is.

SpendFirst comes out November 11 and you can pre-order now. 

Get the free Quick Start Guide

Subscribe so you don't miss next Thursday.

Resources mentioned: 

• Chapter 7, The Simple Payday Rhythm 
• Why Your Bank Balance Lies to You
• See the illustrations from this chapter

What if managing your money came down to one short routine you run every payday, and then you were done? No daily tracking, no checking your balance ten times, no guessing what's left. That is what to do on payday when you budget by paycheck. 

That's what this chapter is about, and it's the point where the whole system starts to feel light. Once the three waves are in place, every payday follows the same three moves. Your paycheck lands:

• your bills stay put, 
• your everyday spending moves to its own account, and 
• your savings for the irregular expenses go to savings. 

Three questions, answered the same way every time. From the outside it looks mechanical. From the inside it feels like: my bills are covered, I know what I have for daily life, and I'm ready for what's coming. 

I also share a story about Diane (a project manager who runs her team's planning with a precision that makes her colleagues nervous) and who still couldn't get her own money to feel handled. What she said when she finally saw the three waves laid out is one of my favorite lines in the whole book. 

This is the chapter that pulls everything together into one repeatable rhythm. Come hear how simple payday can be. 

Preorder the Book: You just listened to a chapter of it. The whole book is out November 11, available now for preorder.

Get the free Quick Start Guide.

New episodes every Thursday. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one.

Resources mentioned:

• Chapter 6, SpendFuture

Here's the wave that makes so many capable, responsible people feel like they just can't get ahead. You have a good month, put a little toward a card, and then the tires and the vet bill land in the same week and it's gone.

In this episode, Kelsa reads Chapter 6 of SpendFirst, about SpendFuture, the money you set aside for the expenses that don't show up every month and always seem to arrive at the worst time. That money is a sinking fund, set aside a little at a time so each expense is already handled when it lands. You build it as you budget by paycheck instead of by the month. You'll meet Rachel, who kept getting close to ahead and then getting knocked back, and hear the reframe at the heart of the chapter: these expenses aren't emergencies, they're predictable, and once you plan for them they stop running your month.

A few things this chapter opens up:

• Why the good-month-then-wiped-out cycle keeps repeating, and how to end it.
• What a sinking fund is, and why the expenses that feel like emergencies almost never are.
• What changes when a whole weekend of big expenses lands and the money is already waiting.

Get the Book: You just listened to a chapter of it. The whole book is out November 11, and SpendFirst.com/book will tell you the day it lands.

Get the free Quick Start Guide and Year-at-a-Glance Planner.

New episodes every Thursday. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one.

Resources mentioned:

• Chapter 5, SpendFreely
• Chapter 4, SpendFixed
• How to Plan for Irregular Expenses