Welcome to the Money Mindset Podcast. I'm Ashley, the founder and creator of Budgets Made Easy and the Money Mindset Podcast. Now, you may notice that this recording is late and I didn't get my second one done last week. I know it's not perfect. I know we're all a bunch of overthinking perfectionists, but just the craziness of this busy season in life got me a little behind. As you know, if you've been following me on social media, I've been creating lots and lots of gifts and crafts and things with our new crickets. My mom bought it for both of us, but I've kinda taken it over. I am in the car on my way to my last Christmas play for preschool. And so I'm just recording this in my car. Hopefully you can hear me okay if not, don't have to rerecord it. But I was like, you know what? Let's just get it done. It doesn't have to be perfect. I just gotta take action. And the same thing is for you and your finances and your goal planning and all the things that you know you need to do for next year to be one of the best in your financial life and your adult life. You've gotta take certain actions so that you can get there instead of procrastinating, waiting for the perfect time to sit down and do it. Cuz that's never gonna happen. Your kids are gonna constantly be yelling in your face. They're anything like mine. They're gonna constantly have sports to do and activities to do. Plus you have all your other things and you know what, sometimes you just wanna sit down and relax and watch some Netflix, right? But we have to make our finances a priority if you want them to change. So if you wanna get better, if you wanna learn, if you wanna start making better habits and routines, then we have to start taking action. And it actually starts right now, not in January when you make all these big lofty goals and you don't actually plan how to do it or you don't make a realistic goal. And so by February you're already done the, the excitement of the new goal has worn off and you are already moved on to Easter and thinking about summer vacation and you've completely forgotten that you need to start planning and thinking about how you're gonna pay for next Christmas so that you don't spend October, November, December stressed out, worried about how you're gonna pay for it all and not wanting to put it on the credit card, but you're, you don't have the money. So let's talk about how you can actually plan for these things in such a way that you can have the best year ever and not fizzle out in February. And I also wanna preface this by saying that you will have a bad week, you will have a bad month, but the important thing is to keep going. You can't give up in February and then be like, oh, oh, well next year will be my ear. No, keep going. Because small actions, small progress lead to big results whether you realize it or not. You may feel stuck, you may feel like you haven't actually made any progress, but when you are taking small actions and you actually like do the math or make visuals and look at where you started, you've made big progress. So I talked about this with Lisa during her budget strategy session, which I believe, I don't remember the number but I'll link to it in the show notes. It was like 80 something or 90 something. She was one of the early ones of the, their labeled BSS centers with Lisa. And we talked a lot about this because she didn't know that she had actually made a lot of progress. Our session was actually all about how she felt stuck and she was doing so well in the beginning of the year and then some things came up and she just felt like she hadn't made any progress. Well, after our session, cuz she's in Money Success Club, she totaled up what she had actually paid since joining Money Success Club in January. And this was in October. So in 10 months she had paid off $19,000 and didn't even realize it. She thought she was stuck and not making any progress. So that's the kind of thing that I'm talking about. When you feel like you're stuck and you feel like you're not making any progress, that's discouraging. So you've gotta set some things up so that you know that you are actually making progress. Because if you don't, then you're just gonna quit. And what's, you know, do you really want to be stuck in another year doing the same things over and over and feeling like you just can't make any progress? You're just not good with money. You just don't know what to do. You're never gonna be good with money, you're never gonna figure it out. You don't make enough money. All the things that we tell ourselves that just aren't true. And really they blow down to excuses because we're afraid. We're afraid that if we try and do it again, we're gonna fail again. And that just mentally is hard. It's so hard. But if you can plant and you can build those habits and routines knowing that you're not gonna be perfect because you're not going to be, then you can give yourself some grace and you can do the things that you need to do to just keep going. All right, I am in the parking lot. I'm gonna run in watch the play and I will finish this later. Talk to you soon. All right, we are home from the play. Hopefully my little one will let me record this. Nope, here he comes. One second. Okay, let's see if he'll leave me alone long enough to finish this. So where was I? I was talking about goals and what you need to do so that you can have the best year ever next year. And so this is how I want you to lay it out. This is what I teach inside Money Success Club. And this follows the goal planner that will be available next week, the Monday after Christmas through the beginning of January. Or not the Monday. Yeah, it is Monday because Christmas is on a Sunday. Anyway, so December 26th it will be available. And the goal planner comes in the kickstart bundle. That's the only way it's for sale and it follows this method that I'm about to teach you. Okay? So what you wanna do is take your big, so you've got a big financial goal, right? So you wanna pay off debt, you want to, you know, be able to save for retirement, all of those things. Well, it's not gonna just happen if you just wish for it some day. Like you have to plan for it. And we need to make smart goals. So smart goals are specific, measurable, attainable. I forgot, I always forget what the are is attainable. Oh, realistic, timely. So we don't want this to just be someday in the future, right? We want it to be in the next five years, okay? And that may feel like, oh my God, how am I going to get all my debt paid off in less than five years? Most of you can do it in two to three. I know some of you have an enormous amounts of school debt or, and or a low income. And so you know, we gotta come up with ways to make some more money, ways to save money, all the things, right? But that feels really overwhelming and you're like, okay, well I'll just start on it next year. Or you know, you have a bad month and you're like, Ugh, I just can't do this. And so the year just goes by and you don't even realize that you're not any closer to your goal. So it's another year gone, another year wasted of not getting closer to your goals. Now remember that it didn't take, you didn't go into debt overnight, most of us anyway. And it's gonna take time. It's gonna take time to build new habits, routines, mindsets around money and really believe in yourself because you do have to believe that you can do it or you won't do it. All right, sorry about that. I had to finish switching laundry and as you can guess, train to talk and bend over was not in like doing it over and over was making me sound like I was outta breath. And then the little one came in and was bothering me again. So he has the iPad laundry's done. Let's finish up this episode. Okay, so let's talk about the action steps that you have to take in order to start moving toward that big goal. So you know you're not waiting two years and you're like, oh my God, my year was a five year goal. I only have two years left. Like I literally can't get it done now because that will happen if you don't create small action steps along the way that get you in the right direction. And so what you wanna do is take that big goal and break it down into a yearly goal. So if your goal is three years, then you're gonna wanna kind of break it down and say, okay, in the first year I need to do this second year, I need to do this. So what you'll do is then once you kind of have like a year goal and you may not wanna do that all at once, that may feel overwhelming. So just do a goal for this next year, 2023, once you have an idea of what you want to accomplish this next year, even if it feels like a big impossible goal set, a minimum goal, a mid-level goal, and a like, oh my God, this would be so awesome. I would like jump up and down and scream if I achieve this goal. Because what'll happen is a lot of times we set our sites too high and we have this big audacious goal. And when we don't reach that we feel like we failed. When in reality we just set a really big goal, we still made progress. So I've learned this in my business and it works really well for me as a overthinking perfectionist because what I would do is I'd set this big, big goal. And even if I came like almost there halfway there, three quarters of the way there, I still felt like I failed because I didn't reach that big goal. Well, once I started setting like minimum a minimum goal that's way more realistic and should be relatively easy to achieve, Ugh, just mentally it was very freeing. Cause I was like, okay, I was, I didn't get like in this downward spiral of beating myself up and feeling like I just suck at everything and I'm a failure when in reality I just had too big of a goal that was unrealistic for what I had done, right? And so I want you to set a minimum goal, a mid level goal so that once you hit that minimum you have another thing that you're working towards another level. And then if you reach that mid-level goal, then it's like, okay, what else can I do to reach this big, big goal? And so it's really helpful with your mindset if you set those three levels. So make sure that the minimum is like pretty easily achievable, but it's still like good progress. It's not like, oh, I saved a dollar. Like it needs to be something like that you're still gonna be happy about, but that it's not like so out of reach that you have to really, really stretch yourself to reach that you should, if you do the things you need to do, the majority of the time, you should fairly easily get to that goal. Then the mid level is like, okay, more consistency, more habit building, you know, just kind of in between maybe or maybe a little bit more than the minimum. Still good progress. And then the stretch is like, oh my god, this would be awesome. So there could be a bigger gap between the mid-level and the big, big goal. And the minimum and mid might be closer together in your goal. So you know, the minimum goal could be, I wanna pay off $5,000 in debt. The mid-level may be 7,000 in debt. The big goal might be 15,000. You know, so you, you know, those are just the examples. But gives you an idea of what you need to think about in this goal planning. And then you're going to break it down by quarter. Okay, there's four quarters in a year, each quarter is three months. So January, February, March, April, may, June, July, August, September, October, November, December. And when you can look at the year as a whole. So I want you to print off a year at a glance calendar. These are free, just Google it. There's several different ones. I like the one from time and date calendar and I changed the settings. They give you a lot of options on how it looks and what you actually print. And so that's why I like that one for the year at a glance. And I want you to look at each quarter instead of individual months yet. We'll get to that. But right now we wanna take that big goal and break it down by quarter because each month is not gonna be exactly the same and each quarter won't be the same. So quarter four, when you have all the holidays and Christmas, you're prob you may not be able to save or pay off as much debt as you can in say quarter one or quarter two. Quarter three is where we are getting back to school and getting in back into our routines from summer. And we have school supplies and school fundraisers and school pictures and all the things that, I don't know why they came into the first like two months of the school year. And so you know, you have a, we, if you have kids in school, you might have a lot of expenses in quarter three as well. So maybe you front load a lot of your progress into quarter one and quarter two. So I want you to look at the year and kinda think about what sports do you have? Do you have school registration fees? Do you have school supplies? Do you need to plan for travel ball? Do you need to think about vacation that you already have planned that now you only have a couple months left to save for and things like that. So look at the year as a whole, break up the quarters and kind of set your goals based on what is happening in that quarter so that they're more realistic. And so your first quarter goal might be to pay off $3,000 in debt. Your minimum goal was five and maybe quarter two is to do the other two. And quarter three and quarter four are where you can stretch it or coast out the year while you're still building good habits, but you don't have as much pressure on yourself unless you get behind in quarter one, quarter two. That gives you time to catch up. All right, we just got a delivery from Amazon so the dogs were parking, okay, back to what we were planning. So once you kind of have an idea of your quarter goals, that gives you a really good sense of what you need to do each month. And so once you kind of break that down into a month based on what is happening that month, and keep in mind that the quarters, you know, it's a bit flexible because you know, maybe you had big plans for January. Well, you know, some things came up and you didn't reach those goals, well you still have two other months to keep going so it's not over yet, right? And so once you kinda have an idea of what you wanna do each month, then that makes it really easy for you to figure out your weekly focus. And that is where the magic happens because the daily actions, the weekly actions that you take are what is going to move the needle for you. Those habits, those routines. And so it can start out really simple as you're figuring things out and trying to decide what you wanna do and what really works for you. And of course you can change these through the year. You know, I encourage you to do a mid-year check-in, see how everything's going, see how your progress is going, and maybe you need to adjust your yearly goals. Maybe you've already reached them and so you need to set bigger goals for yourself or maybe a lot of things have happened and so you really gotta like change the plan for the rest of the year. So what I want you to do is figure out what your plans are for what your goals are for 2023. Remember smart specific. So specifically, what do you wanna pay off? How much do you wanna pay off in what timeframe? So the timeframe's already kind of done for you with the year. And then I want you to break that down into smaller action steps along the way. So your quarter goals, your monthly goals, and then as you go through the year each week, you know, maybe on Sunday night before you go to bed, plan out your week. Some people do it Friday so they don't Friday afternoon so that they don't have to think about it the rest of the weekend. And so when you kind of take that time, and it doesn't have to be much time, that's the thing guys, it doesn't need to take a bunch of time. It could be 10 minutes, it could be five minutes. If you already have this routine set and these habits built, it could just be making a quick top three for the week that you need to get done. Or you know, it might be writing down the same thing that you wrote down last week, just to keep those habits in routine. So checking your balances, it could be totalling up your transactions, that's good to do on a weekly basis, you know, seeing where you're at with your categories and where your money is going. So gimme those simple things. But once you get in the habit of that, that is really where the magic happens and you're going to get closer and closer to your goals. Now remember we are going to also be doing the Money Plan bootcamp in January. So excited for that. I did it in OC what, September, October. And it was a huge, huge success. And so kind of as you're doing this, know that there's going to be more help for you in about six weeks or so. We're going to, we'll do a lot of this stuff together, kind of get your money playing together so that you can have a very successful year. And of course the bootcamp is free and if you want the Goal Planner, that will be in the kickstart bundle, that will be available on the December 26th through the beginning of the year. And that's only once a year. I do it every year to help you kickstart the year, have the best year ever and includes the goal, the new goal planner. So 2023. The 2023 Money Saving Challenges. So a new challenge every month with a tracker and a principal cash envelope. And then the newly updated Crusher debt workbook. So it's only $29 guys, like if you bought that individually, each of those things, it's like $77 for the retail value. And so I have it on sale once a year for $29. So if you want like more visuals to kind of help you plan this out, that will be available for you in a few days. And of course if you're not already, make sure you're on my email list so that you'll get emails about it. Cuz I'm not always the best about posting on social media about things that I'm doing, but I always, always email. So if you're not sure, if you haven't signed up for my email list, you can get my free debt like debt payoff starter kit@budgetsmadeeasy.com slash debt and that will have some other goodies to help you kind of start making your plan. And let's, let's have the best year ever. But it starts with planning it, then you gotta take action. But first you gotta plan for it. It's not gonna just magically happen, it's not gonna just happen someday because you just are wishing for it. You know, even if you've heard of like manifestation, it doesn't work like you just wish for something and it happens. That's not what manifestation is. It's more about taking, knowing what you want and taking the steps to get what what you want. So really manifestation is just a woo-hoo way of saying you're planning out what you're gonna do and then doing it. So you know, I love goal planning. Let me know. Tag me on Instagram or posting the free Facebook group, whichever one that you are on. Let me know what your big goal for 2023 is cuz I can't wait to celebrate with you along the way. I hope you guys have a great holiday. Happy Hanukkah. Merry Christmas, all the, I know there's lots of other holidays in there too. I hope you get some rest, relax and recharge so we can hit the ground running after Christmas. You guys have a great week.