Welcome to the Money Mindset Podcast, where you'll find a judgment free zone to help you free yourself from overthinking and the fear of doing things the wrong way. It's time to shed yourself of the mom, guilt, procrastination, and perfectionism so you can start doing the things that you really want to do with your money instead of just working to pay bills. I'm Ashley Patrick,

ex detective turned debt free CEO of my very own business and stay at home mom of three. Not too long ago, my dreams of staying at home with my kids seemed impossible. I thought I'd have to stay miserable in a high stress and demanding job just so I could retire someday. After gaining the confidence of my own ability to manage my family's finances and a simple step by step plan to make it happen,

I was able to pay off $45,000 in just 17 months, which then allowed me to finally quit my job, stay at home with my kids and build a debt free business. Now my mission is to help moms like you conquer debt and free themselves from the mental load of handling their family's finances. If you're ready to shed the guilt and shame surrounding your past money mistakes and tackle your debt,

this is the place for you. Let's get started. Today I am going to walk you through the Money Success Roadmap. So this is your step by step roadmap to money success. It is what we follow inside of My Money Success, formerly Coaching Now Club, So Money Success Club, which is my monthly membership group. So we walk through this step by step together.

Now I do wanna give you kind of like the overview and we'll cover stage one today, there are six stages and this week I will, and next Monday cuz there's six. So Monday through Friday and the next Monday there will be an episode for each stage. So make sure you are following the show so that they automatically download and you know, if you really want to start taking action on your money plan and getting started on your money success journey,

come join me inside the Money Plan Bootcamp, which is free this month. So I will be walking you through step by step my five step framework to creating a money plan that you can actually stick to. But for today we are going to cover the Money Success roadmap. So this is your step by step financial journey and exactly what to do for each step.

So what I have found is that my members, my community, you get so overwhelmed when you think about all the things that you have to do, especially with your finances cuz you know you're starting from ground zero where you don't have a budget, you're not even sure where to start and you are thinking big picture, I wanna retire, I wanna pay for my kids' college.

And you have no idea how to get from where you're at to where you wanna be. And that is what the Money Success Roadmap helps you do. So we're talking at the end, you know, you'll be debt free, you'll be able to save for retirement, help your kids as they need it, if you want to anyway, help pay for your kids' college or maybe your college pay off your student loans,

right? Stop playing awake at night, stressed about how you're going to get there because it feels like such a huge mountain to climb, right? But when you break it down into stages, into smaller bite-sized steps and you have a clear action plan for each stage and that's all you focus on, you're focusing on one thing at a time. You can see how you can get there and you don't have to worry about how you're going to get there because you have a step by step plan to get you there and exactly what to do and how and what to follow.

And literally the action steps to take to move from one stage to the next. So let's dive into stage one because that is where the majority of you are going to be. Stage one or stage two. Now I do have a few that are in three and four and moving on to stage five of course. So, but the majority of you are going to be in stage one,

which I call newbie. So you feel like a newbie, you feel so overwhelmed by the big picture, like you know that you shouldn't be this stressed about money, you're tired of living paycheck to paycheck, you do your tax return and you have no idea how you made that much money cuz you have nothing to show for it. You have no idea where it's going.

If the emergency pops up, you don't know how you're gonna pay for it. You're gonna have to put it on a credit card, go further into debt. If you even have those options, you may not even have the options available to you. And so just the thought of getting a flat tire, your battery dying, anything that that when you have the money saved up is really,

it's a inconvenience. Yes, it's frustrating but it's not an emergency because you can pay for it. It's certainly inconvenient and frustrating, but it's not as big of an emergency when you're at the beginning stage, right? When you don't know how to get from where you're at to where you want to be. So in this stage you don't have a budget,

you have no clue where your money is going. Maybe you've created a budget but you can't stick to it because all of these things are always popping up. You don't have a realistic idea of what you're spending on food and other items because in our mind we under underestimate what we're spending on things because that's just how our brain works. But when we sit down and actually do the math,

we're like, oh okay, that's how much I'm spending on food and eating out. So you know, you're likely spending a ton on food and you may or may not realize it or you may not have an accurate number. It may be even worse than you think it is. You're stressed, you're laying awake at night worried about how to pay the bills,

how to get through to the next paycheck cuz you've got a few days left and you need to go to the grocery store, but you know some more bills gotta be paid. You don't know how much you could even spend at the grocery store and your stress. And then your kid comes home and tells you they have a field trip and you need to send cash to the school for a field trip or write a check.

You know, my kids have done that here already. It is at the beginning of October and I've already had to pay for numerous things through the school for several field trips and the yearbook things and just several things that I had not planned to pay for yet. Like I wasn't expecting all these field trips and the yearbook, the sixth grade yearbook page, I was a hundred dollars for a sheet in the yearbook for my graduating my elementary school Graduator.

So you know you when those things come up, you're panicked because you don't know how in the world you're gonna pay for it. And if you pay for it then a bill might be late or you might have to put something else on a credit card or you're gonna have to like really scrape by to get through to the next paycheck and then it just starts all over again,

right? Because you don't have a plan for that paycheck, you don't have a realistic plan on how to manage your money, paycheck to paycheck. You likely have nothing in savings. And if you do have some in savings, it's not much and you just really don't know where your money is going. But you wanna provide for your family and you're busy and you wanna give them what they want.

You hate telling them no. Like you don't wanna tell your kids no because then you feel guilty that you can't pay for those things. And we really have to work on changing that perspective because telling your kids no is a good thing the majority of the time, right? And it doesn't have to be no because you don't have the money like that doesn't have to play into the equation.

But when we tell them no, because we don't have the money, we feel guilty, we have shame and then when we do overspend we feel guilt and shame and it's just this endless cycle, okay? You feel like a failure and that everyone else is doing well so you must be stupid or you're just not good at this adult thing in this stage you don't have a will,

you don't have proper insurance coverage, you may not be paying the proper amount taxes. So payroll taxes, self-employment taxes, all property taxes, all those kinds of things that you have to plan for. And you may not be saving enough or having the right amounts taken out. So you know, you feel just like you can't figure it out on your own and you feel like a failure because of that.

But I want you to know that you're not like it is normal, even if you have a degree. Like I have had accountants come through my program, bookkeepers, you know, other coaches, business people, they don't teach you this in school, they don't. This is different than business is. This is different than running payroll, this is personal finance and it's personal.

So if you are a newbie, if you are in this stage, I have good news for you because we are gonna walk through some action steps for you to take. So some things for you to do in this stage. And of course you get the full roadmap with the workbooks and the trainings and all the things inside Money Success Club. But for now we are gonna talk about some of the things that you can do to move to the next stage.

So remember when you are in this stage, you are only focusing on these things. We're not thinking about all the other things that you need to do, your will and life insurance and saving for college and retirement and all the things, right? We're gonna take it one small step at a time. So in this stage I want you to identify your average income in expenses.

And so you're gonna create just a basic budget, okay? Just a basic budget. This is like just your income minus your regular monthly expenses, okay? Simple. That's all you're gonna do for that, okay? Then I want you to create a monthly meal plan that is around 150 per person in your family up to a thousand if you have a large family.

Now this of course does not take into account where you live or any dietary restrictions, but what I want you to really focus on is making it a reasonable amount. Because if you're in this stage, most likely you are not spending a reasonable amount between groceries and eating out. If you're like the average family and almost everybody in my membership, when you come to me,

including myself, when I first started doing this, I did not realize how much freaking money I was eating because I didn't know where my money was going. So I was eating out for breakfast, lunch, and a lot of times dinner and yet still spending hundreds of dollars at the grocery store. Like that's not reasonable. And it wasn't realistic for the family that I had at the time that whenever I started this journey I had two little kids at newborn and a toddler.

Like there was no excuse, right? As my kids have gotten older and I've had more kids, now I have three and that my family has grown, I've had to spend more, right? So you had, but it needs to be a realistic amount. Now if you are used to spending $2,000 a month, it's not realistic for you to just drastically cut it down to $500 a month overnight,

right? But a thousand dollars is way more realistic and reasonable and doable for you from 2000, right? So I want you to create a meal plan for the month that is reasonable for your family. And when I say create a meal plan, I'm talking dinners. I don't plan out breakfast and lunch and snacks and all those things. I mainly just map out dinners cuz that can be like where we spend the most money eating out.

Because when you don't have a plan, it's so easy to make the excuse to go through the drive through, right? So meal plan dinner at a minimum for one month. And then I want you to create one month of smart goals. So what are you gonna keep working on for the next month? And that's it. Okay? So you gonna move out of the newbie stage when you have created a basic budget,

created a meal plan, and you have a one month of smart goals. So smart goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. So the timely part is one month. So it needs to be very specific and I explain specifically how to do this inside of the Money Success Club. So that is stage one simple, right? That's all you focus on.

You can do that, right? You can focus on the one thing at a time and this will greatly reduce your overwhelm and your stress on getting started. So tomorrow I will talk in depth about stage two because you're not gonna be a newbie for long, right? You can do those things very quickly. You can move from stage one to stage two in a matter of listen a month.

It does not ha, it does not have to be this long drawn out thing. Like I don't want you stuck in stage one forever. You can get through stage one in one month in less other month. You can get through it in like a day, realistically, even realistically a week, right? Two weeks. But I'm, I'm gonna say a month cuz I know you and I know I know my people,

I know how you perfectionist overthinkers cuz you're just like me. I'll give you a month and you move on to stage two and you're already making progress. You've already moved on from this mindset of being a failure. Because keep in mind that once you start taking action, huh? You, your mindset shifts, you realize you can do it. That you can start taking action and you can manage your money better and you realize that it's gonna take time.

You've gotta give yourself time and practice, practice, practice. So once you make a mistake, you can't just quit, you have to keep going, right? That's how people get better. That's how you become successful, is by having failures. They go together. You can't have one without the other. So come back for episode number two or for stage number two that I will be talking about tomorrow.

Let me know on Instagram, tag me on Instagram if you are a newbie. Now keep in mind, I will also mention before I jump off here, that you are not in more than one stage at one time. So you have to complete all the action steps, all the things in stage one before you move to stage two. So that comes up a lot too.

Like you've done a few things in stage one and a few things in stage two. If you have not completed all the things in stage one, you were still in stage one. But the good thing is once you finish stage one and you move to stage two, you've already completed some of the things, right? Then you finish stage two, you move on to three.

So stay tuned for the rest of this stages and tag me and let me know on Instagram if you think you are in stage one. And don't forget, I'll remind you before I jump off here that the Money Plan bootcamp starts next week. Live inside of the Exclusive Money Plan Bootcamp Facebook group. So you've gotta sign up the, there's gonna be giveaways and prizes and a whole bunch of really fun stuff.

And I'm of course I'm gonna walk you through live teaching you the five step framework to creating a money plan that you can actually stick to go to budgets made easy.com/bootcamp and I will talk to you guys tomorrow.