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How to Change Your Relationship With Money with Brie Sodano
Brie Sodano is the founder of Sheep to Shark, a financial planning firm that works specifically with women who aspire to succeed financially by overcoming barriers they encounter in the workplace, in personal or family relationships, and often when trying to balancing the demands of time and money.
Brie helps clients:
- accurately assess beliefs about money that affect the way they behave so they can identify and implement solutions to the “where in the heck did money go?” syndrome.
- get their actions to align with their goals.
- embrace habits that build wealth.
For 10 years, Brie worked in the nonprofit sector and although the work was fulfilling, she found herself being overworked and underpaid.
So she decided to become a financial advisor to better understand her situation.
Once she stepped into that new role, she realized people at all income levels were living paycheck to paycheck and that the barrier to wealth is getting your financial house in order.
She believes that anyone can be wealthy if they’re willing to put in the effort to learn how money works.
What We Cover
- How to stop the behavior of being busy, broke and exhausted by eliminating wasteful spending and then addressing the behavior.
- How to get your mental energy before you look at the low joy purchases because you need that energy to change your behavior and habits.
- Why budgets don’t work and what you need to be doing instead in order to get a hold of your finances.
Take a Listen >>
Key Takeaways
- We are not math on paper, our money-saving things is behavior-based.
- If you look at the dollars and cents, it just means you get cheaper stuff but are keeping the same behavior that is causing that purchase.
- People don’t like budgets because they feel like they’re being judged by their money.
- Once you have that self-awareness, it’s easy to adjust. You don’t want to buy something because you genuinely don’t want to buy it. It’s not longer a low joy purchase because you are being intentional.
- You have 3 primary resources that can turn into all other resources: MENTAL ENERGY- the most important. TIME- which is finite. MONEY- is renewable.
Diving Deeper
Your Relationship With Money
- Look at your transactions from a habit-based standpoint, rather than dollars and cents.
- Use a transaction tracker like mint.com.
- Categorize each transaction in broad strokes. Categories like: Bills + Utilities, Working Capital, Food and Dining, Entertainment and Savings.
- Eliminate anything you think is wasteful spending before you change your behavior.
- Make a list of auto withdrawals and ACHs to see if you even want it. This is the lowest hanging fruit.
- Shop cell phone providers, call credit cards, shop insurance. This isn’t news but you just have to do the work. Get cashflow back before having to give anything up, or change behaviors.
Inefficiencies: How to Handle Them
- Look for any inefficiency in how you go about your spending. Things like going to several stores to save on something. The problem with that is if you make one splurge, you’re not saving anything, but have wasted time and gas on going to multiple stores.
- Food and household items are the biggest culprits.
- How many transactions are being used to fulfill the money to feed your family? If it’s too many, you’re not planning well and need to re-evaluate.
- Systemize your shopping to once a week and get it delivered. The same goes with your household items. Sign up for automatic shipments from Amazon so you don’t have to carry that mental load.
Low Joy Purchases
- These are purchases that bring no lasting joy.
- You typically feel guilty about the expense because you jeopardize your goals.
- Often times these purchases are justified because they are on sale.
- Look at your habit of these purchases. What triggers you to make the purchase? Is this a routine that you do? Or do you use it as a reward for something?
- Triggers aren’t going to change. Instead, look at the routine so you can change the behavior to fulfill that trigger.
- If you know you get home late on Wednesday nights and you are spending too much on takeout you’re not enjoying, plan ahead by buying a frozen pizza at the beginning of the week so it can keep you on track.
- Be sure to adjust the routine before the trigger arrives because once it does, it’s too late.
• Brie’s FREE Masterclass •
…Even if you’ve failed every system before, want to drink lattes five days a week and refuse to stick to a budget.
Freebies From Us
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- FREE Masterclass on getting rid of mom guilt when it comes to your finances.
Action Steps For *You*
- Have a question or topic you’d like to cover? Let us know!
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