Welcome to Good Money Vibes, the podcast designed to help you feel good about money. My name is Emilie, I’m a Money Confidence Coach and a financial expert helping millennial women get unstuck and achieve their life and money goals. This episode is all about learning to spend with joy. Now, let’s uncover what that actually means. How can we actually spend with joy?
Well, the fact is that most of us, when we spend money, there’s usually some sort of emotion tied to that, whether it be an impulse spend, emotional spend, or something you actually really wanted, and how you then think about that spend in the aftermath of, you know, tapping your card. That’s the emotion we want to focus on, and we want to make sure that that emotion is, more often than not, joy.
Because emotions tied with money are so strong, we have to acknowledge something called the negativity bias. So, the negativity bias is our brain’s natural reaction to emphasise the negative feelings above the positive ones. So when we experience something that’s negative, our brain is naturally going to hold on to that a lot longer. It’s going to feel that emotion a lot more strongly than when we feel a positive emotion. Now, that is a bit shitty, but that’s just a fact of life, and it’s probably something you’re familiar with. Let’s think of an example. So, if you’re having a bad day, let’s say you wake up and you stub your toe, uh, you might think to yourself that you’re having a bad day, like it’s, you got out on the wrong side of bed kind of thing. And then you might get downstairs and find out that you’ve run out of cereal, you’ve run out of milk, or there’s no coffee left. And all of these things are going to add up, and eventually, it’s, it’s just going to be a bad day, right? It’s just all going to be negative.
Even if something positive happens in that day, the negative will outweigh the positive. Another way we can see this is if you ever get feedback. You can get thousands of reviews that are all positive, telling you how much they love your service, your business, your product, you know, the cake you baked. But if you get one bad review, like that one bad review stings so much more.
And it’s important to recognise the negativity bias because we have to understand that sometimes when we have these negative feelings, it doesn’t mean that the negative feeling is right. It doesn’t mean that everything is awful. What it means is that’s just the overwhelming feeling. So, how does this relate to money? Well, like I said, money has very emotional, it has a very emotional connection. Money is emotional is the, is the short of it, and if we think about, you know, paying our bills and things like that, like often we don’t feel positive about that when actually, and this is something I’m going to be talking about later on, is we should feel joy about the fact that we are able to have a roof over our heads and food to eat and appreciating the little things like that.
Anyway, let’s get back to what spending with joy actually means. So now we’ve recognised that we need to make sure that the emotions we tie with money and more positive in order to feel good around money, but how do we actually do that? So in order to spend with joy, we need to make sure that our spending is goal-focused, it’s intentional, and essentially, you don’t want to have any regrets around money, right?
Now, going back to the fact that money is emotional, you are going to spend money when you feel bad, when you feel down, when you feel sad, and you might end up regretting that spend. Maybe you, you have had a bad day, so you decide to buy a takeaway, and after that takeaway, you feel horrendously full, and you feel bad, not only because you ate it all but also because you spent what, 20, 30 quid on a takeaway that you didn’t need. So those things are going to happen. It’s just making sure or kind of aiming towards a spending pattern where the emotions tied are more positive and more joyful.
And to do that, we need to make sure that we know what our goal is, what are our intentions with our money. If we’re not clear on what it is our money is doing for us, then we were going to find it really hard to be positive about it. If we have no clear goal with money, we’re just going to be seeing every transaction as often that it comes back to that feeling of like, I don’t know where my money went, you know, I’ve kind of got to the middle of the month and I’ve run out, and I don’t know where that money has gone. Or maybe you’re earning what you see as, you know, a decent wage, but at the end of the month, you know, you haven’t built any savings, or if you did build savings, you’ve ended up dipping into them. And again, it just all comes back to that, I don’t know where my money has gone, and that’s usually because there’s no intention, there’s no goal for the money to work towards.
So, yes, money is emotional, but also, money is just a tool to get you from A to B. And what my job is as a money coach is, is to help women, and to help you find out what that B is. Where’s the destination? Where are we going? You know, how you feel about that. You might actually be like, you know what, going out with friends and socialising is really important to me. You know, that’s one of my values. So, you just create that into your budget. Or you might find that actually, that isn’t that important to me, but I still want to make sure that, you know, there’s a bit aside for it. And when I do get invited, maybe I won’t spend as much as I maybe would have done otherwise. The key is literally just knowing what your goal is and what you’re excited for, and everything else will fall into place.
And like I said, accidents are going to happen. Things are going to get in the way, life is going to happen, things, unexpected things will happen. You will make end up making decisions with money that maybe you don’t feel so good about, and that’s okay. That is life, um, and just while I’m on that, I just want to press the importance of an emergency fund while also creating, so we’ve got Bare Bones budget, whatever is left, if you don’t already have an emergency fund, I would focus any additional income on that, to get an emergency fund set up, all that is is money that is set aside for if anything unexpected comes up or if you ever need extra cash, like that pot of cash is there to help you.
And once you’ve got that in place, so once we have a budget where, where we know that our necessities are absolutely covered, we know that our excess money is working towards our life goals, we know that we have a pot of cash there should we need it in emergencies, that can happen in a couple of months. You can create those three things in a couple of months. You will then have complete financial stability, financial confidence, excitement, all of those things. It is so much simpler and so much closer than you think.
So, feel like I’ve, I’ve covered quite a lot. So, to summarise, spending with joy is a lot easier than you think it is. But, be wary that, or be aware that your brain is going to focus on the negative, and those emotions are going to feel so much stronger. But don’t let it get you down. Don’t let the fact that you have a bad day or something unexpected came, come up, stop you on your way to your goal. No progress is completely like linear, like there are ups and downs, that’s, that’s just natural. We are living, breathing organisms, and things go wrong. So, be patient with yourself, be kind with yourself, get excited for what your life goal is, and, and if you need any help with that, if you feel like this is something you really want to work on, then please do get in touch. I have a 12-week one-on-one coaching program which is designed to do exactly what I’ve talked about in this episode, which is to help you work out what your life goals and purpose are, what your values are, and creating that budget that is in line with all of those.
I also help, you work through any limiting beliefs. I help, help you work with your money mindset, and ultimately building that action plan using my financial expertise to get you from A to B. Another really good tool to use, while I’m just closing, is financial journaling. What that is, is kind of getting a closer look on what your emotions around money are. So, you might, at the end of the day, write down the spends that you made. So, you can go on your banking app, and work out what you spent that day, you could write them down, and then just simply write how you feel about that.
I would recommend Financial journaling in the earlier days of your journey, just because it’s going to help you work out what the emotions around your spending are, what kind of, what feels stronger, like what emotion is more prevalent, what your triggers are, and just overall, it’s going to help you get a better understanding of your spending. And from there, you can, you know, alter it, you could work on improving, or you can work on shifting how you feel about a type of spending to a more positive way, it’s just a really good tool to get on top of the emotions around money.
Because like I said, like money is so emotional, and those negative emotions are going to be so much stronger than the positive. But we need to focus on the positive and reward ourselves and celebrate when we do manage to achieve those things. So, thank you for listening. I’ve done this in one. I’m actually not going to edit this episode because I’ve quite enjoyed just talking. And, oh, sorry, got a bit of a cold.
If you have listened and liked what you’ve heard, please do let me know, on Instagram or pop me an email. You can also leave a review for the podcast, that would be great, but I understand we’re only two episodes in, so that’s also fine if you don’t want to do that, but yeah, like, chat to me, let me know that you’re here, and let me know if there’s anything specific that you want me to cover. And let me know if you’re going to give this a go. I would love to know if you are going to give the idea of creating a Bare Bones budget and then from there creating your goal-focused budget. So yeah, speak soon and thank you for listening.
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