We are back for another budget strategy session. This time we are talking with Lisa who is struggling with overthinking and perfectionism. She is getting to you railed when things come up, you know, that she has money saved for, but she gets off track because she had to use the savings and then overspent on some other things. It's very, very common and normal to struggle with that when we have this beautiful budget and plan on paper,

and then something comes up and di rails us, it's kind of hard to get back on track mentally. And so we talk about some ways for her to kind of get back on track mentally so that she can keep making progress because she has made tremendous progress this year. And you know, she's not starting from zero, right? She's learned what she's already learned.

She's already has a footing of what is what worked for her. And now she just has to mentally get back on track. If you would like to sign up for a budget strategy session, you can go to budgets, made easy.com/strategy. 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 X 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 seem to possible.

I thought I'd have to stay miserable in a high stress in demanding job, just so I could retire someday. After gaining the confidence in 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 jobs, 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. Hi, Lisa, thank you so much for being here with us today.

Thanks for having me. Absolutely. And today is a budget strategy session. So this is a new thing that we're doing here on the money mindset podcast. And I want to dive into what you are struggling with right now in terms of your finances. So can you just kind of give us a little bit of background, of course, just whatever you are comfortable sharing and let us know kind of like what you feel like is your biggest struggle right Now.

Okay. I started with the program in January. Basically. I kind of was on a free fall. I'm not even tracking like where my money was going once I actually sat down and it was like, oh my gosh, like I was the drag queen, like I told you before, well, we can just get the dry food for dinner, you know?

And then when you go through and you add it up, you're like, I spent $300 this whole month on the fast fit. Plus you're getting groceries on top of it. So yeah, we've had to tighten up a lot. I've learned a lot. My numbers are really, really high because I have a lot of student loans when I was younger,

made some bad choices, start and stop, start and stop. And I hopefully will pay them off this point. Sometimes I look at it and think, oh, I'll never pay all that off. But mainly my struggle is kinda like the mentor, the emotional side of it. I sit and say like, I'm not a perfectionist, but I get so down on myself,

when I made a mistake, making a mistake, like for several months, like I was on a roll, I was paying stuff off as like, oh yes, I can do this. And it was like one mistake, kind of snowball. I overspent on my budget. My daughter's birthday was sent April. She's like a huge hockey fan. So we drove to Columbus and spent the night,

you know, I had everything planned this much for the towel, this, for that. And everything was going good. I didn't take account for the valet parking, which was $30. And like, we kind of went overboard in the gift shop. So that blue, that was the start. Then I had a car issue and I had my emergency fund.

That pretty much, I think all that like a hundred dollars sinus felt like, gosh, why am I trying so hard? Like nothing's worked out. And like, I was really, really down. Then you had the, where you mailed the book and I opened it and I read what you wrote. And I was like, oh, she's proud of me.

May you know, maybe I'm not doing Savannah. We'll just go into hard on myself. And yeah. So I was like, I can, I can do this. I can do this. I've heard other people talk and read a lot of their comments. And like, it really does help us. Cause other people are in the same boat. Like everything's so high gas prices with everything.

But like, it's really easy to blow a portion of your budget in just fine. I've been staying off. Oh God, I was really bad. We looked the Amazon hub. Well, Hey it's prime day. No, no, no, no, no. But it's just mainly like staying in the mindset that, yeah, I can do this.

I've got this and not going so hard on myself. Yes. I agree. You are being very hard on yourself. And as I've told you and told everybody in the group over and over you've I know you've heard me say this you're human. Like of course things are going to come up. Like you're never going to be perfect at it. Like ever,

like there's always going to be things where you overspend or didn't have enough money saved for something. But the more progress you make, the better off you're going to be, you know, especially when those things come up. So if you just give up and revert back then, you're going back to where you started now. Think about when you made all that progress and you had all that,

you know, the money, say the budget for the hockey game and all the stuff. And you had the money saved for emergency. So when your car did break down, you had the money for it. Like that's a huge step like that. You should be celebrating that you had the money set aside for that. Cause imagine if you didn't and you had to use a credit card,

That's happened before and I didn't have it. And I had that wait until payday. And I had to actually catch a ride to work with one of my coworkers. Like, yeah, I don't want to do that. Yeah. So I think something that will be helpful for you is to focus on the progress you have already made. Now, have you made any visuals like a visual tracker,

anything where you can look back and say, where are you started? And then where you're at? Cause we're all going to have bad days. We're all gonna have a bad week, a bad month. But when you look at the overall picture of how far you've come since you started, you can see that you really have done a very good job and you should be proud of that.

So do you have any visuals? Yeah. Well, I actually did like a number punch because it felt like I didn't pay it, but I've actually paid a decent amount just since January. So I was like, oh, it doesn't seem like it. You know? Cause you just look at that huge number and you're like, oh, this is never,

but I did buy a vision board and all kinds of little Snickers. My daughters are artsy, so I'll let her help me, help me put it up and just, you know, setting goals like, okay, I want to do this. Like my car I, because of my divorce. That's what really started everything. My credit score was horrible.

So had to go to a buy here, pay here. I had no choice, but like my car, I don't even have a 4,000 on it. And it was supposed to be a five-year loan. And it's been, it was two years in February and they have it down to 3000 something. Now, as soon as I wiped that out, I'm going to flip that payment towards some of the other things.

So I think maybe once I get something big, a $300 credit card is like almost not lean. But I think once I get that paid off, I'll feel like, oh yeah, you know, I can do this and then start knocking some of the higher interest rate stuff out. Because when you have that bad credit score, like it hurts everything you try to do.

So. Absolutely. But I want you to celebrate those small wins sitting here. I try and encourage that in the group, you know, each week, but you're like, oh, $300 is not that big of deal. Yes. It is celebrating. Give yourself credit for it. Like you paid it off like $300. No, no, no focus on the one thing it's so easy.

I do the same thing. It's like, okay, well that's done now. I gotta deal with this other stuff instead of sitting and taking it in that you did this. Cause I'm sure there's a time that you It's like when you're bought your last podcast, it's not just math. It's you get so emotional with your money and stuff. And it's really,

like you said a mindset you've got to, I got to get out of that. Right. I'm not perfect. I do strong. I had a little, maybe You are, you are it's okay. I am too, You know, you set a plan and I like things to go just, just right. You know? Yeah. But life never does.

Right. Like write something as perfectionists really have to work on. And it's a process to work on. Trust me. I know. But I would encourage you to create a visual. So you've got your vision board and if you ha do you have a visual tracker of your debt payoff or is it just like Some of the principles that you gave? And I mark off like the little color in the little credit card or the car.

I actually am making a new sheet now for the car one. And I'm hoping it'll be the last one. If not, I might have a few lines on the next one, but by the end of the year, I'm hoping the cars paid off. All right. So, and keep those visuals and keep them where you can see how much progress you have made over all.

So, you know, even in the, the debt workbook, if you have that from the debt path made easy course, it has a year at a glance for the debt. So you can see like where you started in January and then where you're at take. Cause it is like when you have a bad month, it's like, you feel like you're not making any progress.

And what's the point I should just quit anyway. But when you can go back and remind yourself, okay, this is where I started. I really have made progress. Maybe it's not perfect progress, but you've made progress. And so we do have to kind of go back and remind ourselves of that a lot and celebrate the small wins. So even when you pay off a $300 credit card,

it felt like, oh, it wasn't that much. It was just $300. Celebrate the win before moving on to the next thing, because I know we just want to get it all done, right? Like we just want to keep going. We want to get the, we want to get it all done, but you've got to really celebrate and give yourself credit for that.

Like not everybody does that, right? Like everybody has debt. Like, and most people don't care about it or they don't care enough about it to really take the time and the focus to do what you're doing. That's a huge step. Like that is big. And you should celebrate yourself for that and what you have accomplished because you know, you're teaching your daughters as well.

They're seeing what you're doing and they are learning from that as well. So, you know, celebrate your wins. So I want you to think about something as we, you know, finish up talking here, what is something that you can do in the next 24 hours to remind yourself of the progress you have made and to celebrate that progress, it doesn't have to be,

you know, big, it doesn't have to be, you know, going out and spending a bunch of money. But what is something that you can do to reward yourself and say, Hey, I'm doing a good job here. You got any ideas yet we can come back to it. So you can think about it too, if you need to.

Well, like you said, with the visuals, the budget worksheets that we print out for the month one, it was in June. I forgot to use my highlighters. It made a big deal. Like I messed up so bad. And like, I actually, I started to write everything on it and kept dragging my feet from using the spreadsheet. I still haven't done it.

That's so bad. I'm going to input my stuff this week. That's my small thing that I'm going to do because I like to write everything down, but it was like, I started it and I didn't write every single, I think I forgot two or three bills. And one of them was an auto-pay. I'm like, wait a minute, this isn't right.

And I'm looking at my shit. I'm like, it's not highlighted. That's why I was like, and I didn't put everything on it. The visual, like, it really does help. I think I might do the year page and just start back from January where I was in high black highlight where I am now, just so I can see. Cause I know it feels like I have it,

but I know I've had to do quite a bit. Yeah. Maybe it'll give me, Hey. Yeah, I can do this. I can do this. You can't cause you have, you have done it. You've done it. So of course you can't do it because you have done it and you know what it takes, it takes practice. And the more that you go and the more that things screw up,

the better you're going to be, remember practices and make perfect. But practice does make better. Right? I can just get out of my head south. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And you're not the only one. That's why my podcast is called the money mindset podcast, because that's what we really struggle with the most. Right? If it was all about the numbers,

we wouldn't be dealing with all of these other things. Right. We would just see what we have spend what we have. And that would be it, right. We'd be robots, but we're not robots. So you have to give yourself Permission. I messed up. Let's go on. And we got this. Exactly. And you can say, okay,

I messed up. I'm human that's okay. I'm allowed to mess up. We're human. We're not robots. So things it's just impossible. It is impossible for you to do this perfectly and for everything to go perfectly forever with your finances. So give yourself permission to be human and brush it off. Just brush it off your shoulders and keep going because you have come a long way and you know,

you are stronger than your mistakes. And if you let those mistakes and they're not even really mistakes. I mean, we forget things, still forget things. I mean, I still, I have everything on auto-pay and I think it was like two years ago, everything is on auto pay. I went in there and manually set payments on accident and pay on two different months to two different bills in a row.

I'm like, what is wrong with you, Ashley? Why are you in there messing with stuff? So I double paid my internet bill and then double paid my power bill. And I'm like, and I didn't have that money in the budget, you know? Cause it's like, what am I sometimes for some of my credit cards, like your payment is due in three days.

And like I paid twice before too, because like I said, didn't have it highlighted or marked off like, yes, this went through, this, went through and it was like, I'm looking, I'm like I paid it, which is good, I guess. But like when you don't plan on some extra. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. I've done that before too.

Even with everything on auto pay. So, you know, you may want to how I do it and I don't know if this is how you have it, but for me, I've got it on auto pay from my bank because I don't like companies taking money out of my account themselves except for insurance, because I never want to have an issue with my insurance.

That's the only thing I let them take the money. But so my bank, I have it set up on auto pay where I send it through my bank automatically. And then you can like set reminders and stuff in there. So, you know, you don't have to think about if you paid it, unless you're going to pay like extra, which for like credit cards,

whenever I have the extra, I just send it or you could change it and add it to your auto pay. So I don't know if that's how you're doing the auto pay, but that might help if you can't remember if you've paid it or not. Cause then you can go in the activity as well. Cause sometimes I'll be like, okay, did I send this payment?

Cause you know, I, I use my credit card for like everyday purchases. And then like every couple of days I send the money to pay it off. Like I don't wait to the end of the month. Cause then I'm like, oh, I don't know if we spend all that money. But it was like regular bills and food and gas and stuff that are like,

oh, how did we spend that much money? So I do it through, you know, through the month and then I have to go in and check, okay, did I go ahead and send that or not? So, you know, depending on how you're doing it, that might be helpful. That might be what you're already doing. I don't know.

But you might, you know, just want to kind of check on that. And I would not worry about using the like writing stuff and using the spreadsheet unless you just like really want to, you don't have to use both. Like I use a combination of the spreadsheet, the planner, and a little notebook that I keep for tracking expenses. So it's really about what works for you.

But if you don't want to deal with the spreadsheet, you don't have to use the spreadsheet. Okay. This is your permission. You don't have to use it. I thought of me feels like it might help. I just, I don't know. I, I was doing really bad with tracking and I have started to put a lot of my stuff.

Most of it's on auto pay now, because look like you were talking about look and say, oh, I've got X amount. Yeah, I got 200 and okay, my bounce is 200. Yeah, I can do this. And then two different things hadn't come out yet. So I really need to like tighten up. I don't have physical checks,

but I thought about maybe this week going up to the bank and seeing if I could get a bank register. But I do have like a little note book and I did just start writing out some of my transactions so I can bender. Yeah. I liked just having a little notebook because when they last forever, but in it's smaller, you know, so I'm not lugging around my big planner and I just keep it like in my purse.

So that, that's what I've always done. And then I made the planner and then, you know, it was like, I tried to, you know, I printed it in the 85, which is the smaller, but then once you get it, it just gets so bulky. So I just like having a small notebook that I can have in my purse.

And then I write, you know, just like the check register. I write each transaction. Then I have my ma my bank balance and I will keep sometimes I'll keep a, a track of what I've spent in the category and what I have left in the car. I don't always, you know, we're not robots, we're not perfect. You know,

it's all about the consistency and the habits and the routines. So, you know, that's another thing that you might want to try if, you know, using the bigger planner, you know, the full size sheets and stuff is harder for you to stick with it, trends the notebook. If you use the spreadsheet, there is an app, you know,

you can just download the Google sheets app. So maybe that would work better for you. Cause then you can just put it straight in there on your phone, totally up to you, you know? And it might be a combination of the things like I do. Like I like spreadsheets because it does the math for you. You know, because believe it or not,

I'm not that great at math. And so I like spreadsheets for that reason, you know, definitely to double check the math and, but it just gets easier and you have to figure out what works for you. But the only way it's going to get easier is if you keep going, right. So when you meet a failure, you have a mess up,

you have something that derails you, you have to keep going because in order to have more success, you have to have more failures. Like they literally go together. Like you can't have one without the other. And as long as you, you know, you can even turn it into something fun, like, oh, okay, I messed up. There's one for me.

Like, and just give yourself a check mark, because that's a good thing too, because that means you're learning. You are continuing the process. And that means you're going to be more successful. You have to have the downtimes to have the uptimes. So subnets to think about. So what is, what's the one thing that you're going to do in the next 24 hours?

That's, you know, it's something small that you can do quickly to help yourself with this. What are we thinking? I have one of the small<inaudible> notebooks as well. So I'm going to balance my balance. My checkbook, make sure everything's on there that I need on there. And then going forward, I'm just going to do a better job of tracking it.

Cause it like, it's so easy to whip the debit card out and you've for you now you've stopped six places and you're like, oh, wait a minute. What did I spend there? So my bank just sent like an email out. They actually have some kind of little budget thing within it. It tracks what you spend on like food. And I never set it up.

But I think when I first got the card from the account, I spent like $34 on restaurants. And it helps because I went the other day when I used it. It's like, you are close to going over budget of the $34. You allotted for restaurants. And I'm thinking that makes me, I was like, I don't need to be at the restaurant.

So I was like, oh my gosh, but I might even actually try that. But just, I figured if I better track it and have that notebook with me and write it as soon as I do it, then it'll work much better. Just keep in mind. Because if you set yourself up mentally to do it every single time, that's not going to happen.

Okay. So cut yourself some slack. If you know, you don't do it immediately. As long as you're doing it, you know, three times a week, let's say three times a week. That's more realistic. If you set a goal to do it every single time immediately, when you spend money, you're setting yourself up for failure. That's not,

that's not realistic. So, you know, we'll, we'll put your 24 hour goal as catching up on your spending and balancing your checkbook. And then for the future, you know, I think it's great to try and get in that habit of doing it every time. But no, you're, you're not going to be perfect, that's it? That's not going to happen.

You know, like The weekly. Yeah, Exactly. Or, you know, at least once a day, if you want to try it once a day, that's more realistic. But you know, I don't know the age of your kids, but you know, you're getting drive through and you know, then you're eating and you're moving on to the next thing.

You're not most likely you're not going to do it every single time you pulled the car over, get the notebook out, write it down and then continue on your journey. Like that's, that's not going to happen every single time. So just know you're, I mean, it's, it's just not like I'm, I wouldn't be able to do that. Like back up my kids screaming back there,

they want their foods. I'm like, wait, I gotta write this down. You know, they'd be like, where's my fries. So, you know, just keep that in mind. We don't want to set yourself up for failure mentally. You know, obviously things are going to happen over time, but let's make it to be a little bit more realistic for yourself so that you can be more successful in that.

But I love that. All right. Do you have anything else that you want to add or any other questions before we wrap up? No, not that I can think of. Alright. Well, thank you so much for being with us today and sharing your story. Cause I know it's helpful for other people because as you said, everybody's struggling with this.

Like we feel like we're so alone in this journey and with these mindsets and things holding us back, but we're not as, I mean, as you know, you mentioned it earlier, you know, we're not alone in it. So thank you for sharing because I know it will help other people as well. Thank you so much to Lisa for being willing to share and being open about her struggles with her budget and her finances,

because I know it's going to help so many other people, if you would like to have your own budget strategy session with me, go to budgets, made easy.com/strategy to sign up today. And I will talk to you next week.