Chapter 14: Setting Your Authentic Goals

If you've listened to all eighteen chapters, you've heard almost every word of SpendFirst. Tomorrow, Wednesday, November 11, it's out in paperback, hardcover and Kindle. It also includes a six-week action and reflection guide you can use on your own, with a group, or as part of a book club.Get your copy: https://spendfirst.com/bookReading your advance copy? Starting November 11, Amazon will take your review. A rating and one thing you enjoyed is all it takes: https://www.amazon.com/review/create-review?asin=B0HDG5Z11CSubscribe: https://spendfirst.com/podcast 

If you've ever wondered whether all your effort with money is actually adding up, your bank balance and your net worth can't tell you. Your financial progress number can.Chapter 18, the final chapter of SpendFirst, is where you hear how to calculate it: everything going toward your future, divided by your income, as a percentage. Savings, extra debt payments and retirement contributions count. Minimum payments, an employer match and mortgage principal are your call, as long as you use the same definition every time, because the number compares you to you.Once you budget by paycheck and plan ahead, checking this number becomes your third rhythm, once a year or once a month. You'll also get rough benchmarks, from below 5% to above 20%, and why the direction matters more than the number.Tasia has $8,000 saved and $15,000 in debt, and her friend Monique has $12,000 and no debt. On paper Monique is ahead, until you see that Tasia made $15,000 of progress this year and Monique made $2,000. Brett lands at 13% on one definition and 27% on another, same person, same year, and both are true.What you'll walk away with is a way to answer "am I moving forward?" instead of "am I there yet?"SpendFirst is out now. Not sure where you'd land? The Paycheck Quiz sorts it out in about two minutes. 

If you've been asking yourself "should I save or pay off debt?", there's a step that comes before either one, and once it's in place the whole payoff feels different.Chapter 17 is where you hear that debt says nothing about whether you're good with money. Some people who are great with money carry debt, and some never use it at all. What matters is your approach, and whether you're running away from your debt or running toward something you care about. The payments can be identical and still feel completely different.Then the order that keeps a paid-down balance from climbing back up: get your SpendFuture categories catching the irregular expenses, save at least one month of your emergency baseline, then speed up. Once you budget by paycheck, your SpendFlex tells you exactly how much you can put toward debt without throwing everything else off. You'll also get five ways to choose which debt goes first: Snowball, Avalanche, Highest Payment, Emotional Baggage, and Custom.Amara had three credit cards with about $5,000 on each, and one of those balances was what she'd paid her divorce attorney. Harvey started with his smallest balances and switched to interest rates once he trusted himself. And the day Michael and I paid off $60,952 turned out to be surprisingly normal, because the real change had happened months before.What you'll walk away with is a payoff plan you chose, for a reason that matters to you.SpendFirst is out now. Not sure which payoff method fits you? The free Debt Payoff Personality Quiz will point you toward one.Subscribe so you don't miss next Thursday.

You finally get some money into savings, and then the car needs a $1,200 repair. The balance drops, and it feels like you just lost all your progress. If you've been trying to figure out how to save for a goal and it keeps getting wiped out, look at how many jobs you're asking one account to do.$5,000 in savings can still feel like nothing when you're counting on it to be your emergency fund, your car repair money, your annual bills, your vacation fund and your medical costs, all at the same time. In Chapter 16 you split savings into three layers, each with its own job: savings that is meant to be spent, emergency savings for the big life-altering events, and savings for Future You.When your emergency fund drops from $5,000 to $3,800 because of a car repair, it feels like going backward. When your Car Maintenance fund drops from $1,500 to $300 for the same repair, it feels like the system working. Same transaction, completely different experience.You'll also hear about the $2,500 vet bill when Kelsa's dog got sick, what she saw on community calls in 2020 from the people who had already planned for a disruption, how to build an emergency number from the emergencies that actually worry you, and why "Can I afford this?" can turn into "How do I make this happen?"What you walk away with is savings that stop feeling like a fight, because you know what every dollar is there for.SpendFirst is out now. The bank recommendations for your savings layers, plus the free Quick Start Guide, are here.Subscribe so you don't miss next Thursday.

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 is out 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.Subscribe so you don't miss next Thursday.

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 is out now. If you want to run the MeaningFirst Method on your own goal, the full walkthrough is free.Subscribe so you don't miss next Thursday.

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.Subscribe so you don't miss next Thursday.

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 is out 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.Subscribe so you don't miss next Thursday.

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 is out now. Get the free Quick Start GuideSubscribe 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 is out 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.