A quick note before we begin
This episode was recorded in 2025, after the phrase feeling safe to hold money had started appearing in client conversations with almost suspicious regularity.
The argument here is based on a pattern I observed in my own finances and client work, not a claim that trauma or nervous-system responses never affect spending and saving. They can. The point is that we sometimes reach for the deepest psychological explanation before checking whether the money has a goal, a timeframe or an actual plan.
Listen to the episode
In this episode
You transfer £500 into savings because saving is apparently what responsible adults do. Three weeks later, you move £180 back for something you want, spend another £70 on an expense you forgot about and reach payday with £250 remaining.
Then you decide you cannot hold money.
But what exactly were you holding it for? How much needed to stay there? When would you need it? Was the £180 purchase a failure, or did money with no assigned purpose get used for something that mattered more in the moment?
In this episode, we’re exploring:
- why saving and being good with money are not the same thing;
- the difference between holding money and giving it a job;
- why a clear target makes saving easier;
- how I saved £200 a month for six years and retained only £2,000;
- the beliefs hiding underneath “how much should I save?”;
- why clients can finish a month exactly on plan and still feel they failed;
- and how to build a spending plan that allows money to be used without treating every transaction as a problem.
Why am I yapping into ChatGPT?
This episode started while I was talking into ChatGPT to draft an Instagram post after a heavy day of client calls. The same phrase had appeared repeatedly, and I realised I had more to say than one caption could reasonably contain.
Why am I yapping into ChatGPT when I could be yapping into a microphone?
So here we are.
The phrase was: “I struggle to hold onto money.” Or sometimes: “I need to feel safe to hold money.”
At this point in the recording, I took my glasses off because apparently that is how you know the rant is serious.
I understand what people mean. Money arrives, they spend it, the savings balance does not grow, and the pattern feels so persistent that it must say something deeper about their relationship with money.
Sometimes it does. But often the issue is much more practical.
You are trying to hold money without deciding what it is for.
Money is not meant to sit still forever
Money comes in and money goes out. That is what it does.
You receive money from a client, then use it to pay software, tax, yourself, the mortgage, food, clothes, childcare, savings and the person who cuts your hair. The money flows through a long chain of transactions, and that is not evidence that anybody in the chain is bad at holding it.
The language of holding money can quietly turn saving into moral goodness. If you keep it, you are disciplined and safe. If you spend it, you are reckless and incapable.
But saving is delayed spending.
You save a house deposit so you can eventually spend it on a house. You build a holiday fund to pay for the holiday. You create business overflow to cover a quieter month, invest in growth or pay yourself while taking time away.
The money is supposed to be used. The important distinction is whether the use is intentional.
How much money you use affects the lifestyle you can afford. Why and how you use it affects whether that lifestyle reflects what you actually care about.
“I save when I have a goal, then spend when I don’t”
Clients say this to me as though they have confessed a terrible financial flaw.
“When I have a clear savings goal, I’m really good. But once I hit it, or when I’m not saving for anything specific, I spend the money.”
Yes. That is how goals work.
If you need £2,000 for a holiday by June, the target gives your saving a purpose, amount and deadline. Once June arrives and the holiday is paid for, you are not required to continue transferring the same amount towards a mysterious future possibility to prove you can hold money.
The problem is not necessarily a lack of safety. It is a lack of intention. Unintentionality, if that is a word. We are accepting it for today.
Without a defined job, the savings balance becomes the most available answer to whatever you want next. Then dipping into it feels like failure, even though you never decided what keeping it would have achieved.
How much should you save?
I don’t fucking know.
It is your life, your goal and your lifestyle.
This is one of my least favourite questions, not because saving is unimportant, but because people ask it as though there is one virtuous number I can hand them. Twenty per cent. £500 a month. Six months of expenses. Enough to be officially Good With Money™.
The amount depends on what the money needs to do.
If you want to buy a house, find the kind of house you are actually aiming for, understand what you may be able to borrow and calculate the deposit and buying costs required. If you want to take six weeks away from client work, calculate the business costs and owner’s pay that need covering. If you are preparing for tax, use actual accounts, previous liabilities and guidance from your accountant rather than picking a percentage because somebody on Instagram uses it.
Use the facts. Use the data. Use the information.
That is more difficult when you do not yet track the money, obviously, but the answer is still to create visibility, not borrow somebody else’s savings target.
Turn the goal into a monthly number
Once a goal is specific, saving becomes a relatively simple calculation:
Amount needed ÷ number of months available = monthly savings target
In Episode 5, the Disneyland Paris goal was £2,000 with eight months available.
£2,000 ÷ 8 = £250 a month
Now you can put £250 into the owner’s-pay calculation or business-overflow forecast, see whether the existing income supports it and work out the additional revenue required if it does not.
Compare that with saving £500 a month “just in case.” There is no finish line, no decision rule for using it and no way to know whether £500 is too much, too little or delaying something else you value.
Then you withdraw £200 and interpret the transaction as evidence that your nervous system cannot tolerate savings.
Maybe. Or perhaps the £500 never had a job.
The goal also needs to be yours
You might have a specific goal and still struggle to save for it because you do not actually want it.
Buying a house is a good example. It is treated as the default marker of adult financial success, so people can spend years feeling guilty that they have not saved a deposit without asking whether home ownership fits the life they want.
If the goal belongs to your parents, your peers or a generic list of things sensible people do, the monthly saving will keep losing to things you care about more.
That does not automatically mean you lack discipline. It may mean the goal has no emotional or practical priority beyond apparently I should.
Ask what achieving it would change. Ask what you would be choosing instead of. Ask whether you want the outcome enough to direct money towards it month after month.
You are allowed to decide no.
I saved £200 a month for six years and ended with £2,000
For years, I believed I would never be able to save enough for a house.
I transferred £200 a month into savings, then dipped back into it in most months. Occasionally I retained the full amount, and after six years the account contained around £2,000.
Let’s look at that maths:
£2,000 ÷ £200 = 10 months of savings retained
Across six years, or 72 months, I had kept the equivalent of ten monthly transfers.
Mental.
At the time, I could have described that as being unable to hold money. But I also did not believe the house goal was possible, so each £200 transfer felt disconnected from an outcome I expected to reach. When something more immediate appeared, the money moved back.
My behaviour kept the goal distant, and the distant goal made the behaviour feel pointless. Lovely little loop.
The way out was not declaring myself naturally good at saving. It was creating smaller, believable targets, getting clear on the real numbers and collecting evidence that I could follow through.
Start with a goal your brain can see
If you have never held £10,000, setting £10,000 as the first and only measure of success can make every smaller balance feel irrelevant.
Break it into stages. The first target might be £500, then £1,000, then one month of essential costs. Give each stage a purpose, so reaching it changes something tangible.
This is the Breathing Fund from Episode 4. A starter £500 to £1,000 creates space between an ordinary unexpected expense and the credit card. Once you experience using the fund for exactly that purpose, saving stops being an abstract performance and becomes a system that made life easier.
Small wins matter because they create evidence. Not evidence that you are now morally superior, evidence that the process works and can be repeated.
Why do you think other people have money left over?
Another belief hiding inside “I cannot hold money” is that other people somehow finish each month with cash remaining because they are inherently good with it.
They pay every bill, buy what they want, and then a tasteful little surplus simply appears on the final day.
Does it?
Some people earn more than their current lifestyle costs. Some have fewer expenses, inherited wealth, a partner covering more of the household, or an income that arrives predictably. Some deliberately assign money to savings at the beginning of the month. Some are also moving the same £200 backwards and forwards while looking extremely organised online.
“Money left over” is not a personality trait.
Question what you think it proves about the person who has it, then question what you think a zero balance close to payday proves about you.
What if your money did exactly what you asked it to do?
In client work, we build a spending plan from the income available. For a business owner, that begins with what the business can actually afford to pay, compared with what her life requires.
Then we map where the personal money needs to go:
- bills and subscriptions;
- groceries, fuel and other necessities;
- named savings goals;
- joyful spending.
Joyful spending is often treated as “whatever is left,” which makes it unpredictable and gives every enjoyable purchase a faint smell of guilt. I would rather decide what is available for it deliberately.
At the end of the month, a client can have paid every bill, bought groceries, funded her savings, used the agreed joyful-spending money, avoided debt and left the business account alone, then tell me she failed because there is nothing left in her personal account.
So I ask: did you need money for anything today? Was some supposed to remain, or has it completed every job in the plan?
A low balance before payday is only a problem if the money still has work to do.
Money fills the container you give it
The phrase that kept appearing during those client calls was what I called container theory. This is an informal analogy, not me submitting groundbreaking financial psychology for peer review.
When we moved from a small two-bedroom flat into a three-bedroom house, the new place felt enormous. Then we filled it, and suddenly there was no room again.
However much space you have, everyday life tends to expand into it. Money can behave similarly. If the entire account is available for general spending, general spending has an impressive ability to find it.
This is not a law of the universe, and it definitely does not mean everybody can magically earn whatever amount they need. Income is affected by market demand, capacity, access, health, care responsibilities and the business model, among other things.
But as a planning heuristic, it is useful: an undefined surplus is likely to be absorbed. A named amount in a named place with a named purpose has a better chance of surviving until the decision it was created for.
You have to tell money where to go
I joked that I was going to write a book called This Is Money. The first page would say:
Money will come in and out. You need to tell it where to go, and it will go there.
That is the whole book. Outstanding value.
Of course financial life includes harder decisions, increasing income, prioritising competing goals, managing debt, investing and deciding how much safety you need. But none of those becomes easier when the starting plan is “hopefully there will be something left.”
In business, the Overflow Formula tells revenue where to go before overflow is declared available. Personally, a spending plan does the same with owner’s pay.
The plan is not there to prevent money leaving. It is there to make the outflow intentional.
It is okay not to save towards nothing
You are allowed to spend money unapologetically. You are allowed to have a period where saving is not the priority. You are allowed to reach one goal and use the amount that was funding it for something else.
Having an emergency fund, buffer or Breathing Fund is useful because life contains irregular costs and income can change. But even that money needs a purpose and a target that makes sense for your circumstances.
Set the goal. Calculate the number. Save towards it. Use it when the thing it was designed for happens.
Then, if your bills are paid, your commitments are covered, the savings you want are funded and there is money available for enjoyment, live your damn life.
Money is there for you to have fun with too.
Continue listening
There was no specific Episode 9 teaser in the original recording, so we’ll add the next step once its written version is ready.
Want your money to fund something specific?
A savings pot can hold money for a goal, but it cannot create the surplus if the business is underpriced, over capacity or relying on frantic sales whenever cash runs low.
Inside Momentum, we calculate what your life and business need, then build the offer, sales system and cashflow structure required to fund it consistently.
Apply for Momentum, and we’ll replace “whatever is left” with a number the business is designed to produce.
