There is a specific kind of shame that comes from being the person who talks about money for a living, and then completely falling apart with their own.
For the last two weeks, I have been pulling money out of every account I promised myself I wouldn’t touch. The gifts fund. The travel account. The beauty budget. All of it. Not because something went wrong, not because of an emergency. Just because I ran out of money and kept going anyway.
And the thing about falling off the wagon with your finances is that it has a momentum of its own. It’s like when you haven’t had carbs for weeks and then you have one biscuit and suddenly you’ve eaten the entire pantry. One dip into the travel account becomes two. Two becomes a habit. And before long you’re so far gone that you start to think, well, I’m already here. Maybe I’ll just do another month of being really reckless and start fresh after that.
That’s the spiral. And I have been fully in it.
On this week’s Curve Weekly podcast episode, I admitted it out loud. And saying it into a microphone, to Vic (and however many thousands of people were listening), was the moment I actually had to sit with it.
Vic asked me what I would say to a friend who had done the same thing. Or my sister.
I said:
The system isn’t broken, you just stopped looking at it.
And then I heard myself say it and thought: I can tell in the tone of my voice that I don’t even believe myself right now.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about personal finance. Knowing what to do and actually doing it are two completely different skills. You can understand the three-bucket system inside out. You can have set it up perfectly six months ago. You can have literally helped develop a course about it. And you can still end up here, on payday, starting again from zero, feeling equal parts annoyed at yourself and relieved that the reset button exists.
The reset button always exists. That’s the part worth holding onto.
Vic said there’s always another bandwagon coming. She’s right. The goal isn’t to never fall off. The goal is to notice when you have, stop making it mean something terrible about you, and get back to the numbers.
Are you in the red or the green this week?
So that’s what this weekend looks like for me. An hour. The accounts open. A cup of tea. A deep breath. Not berating myself for not getting it right. Just step by step, walking through what I know works. When your pay changes, if your expenses change, or perhaps like me you’re going over your monthly amounts - you need to go back to the drawing board and start again. Look at what’s coming in, what’s going out and most importantly - figure out where you keep overspending so you can adjust your numbers. Avoiding, like I’ve been doing - only makes you crawl more into the shame hole.
You feel like you’ve done the work and it should all be working fine, but the truth is - sometimes you have to adjust. Relook at what you set up and make sure the template you’ve created for your monthly spending, saving and investing still works for where you’re at.
If you’re in the same place right now, come with me. We built a step by step pod-class which will teach you the seven easy steps to set up your finances in a way that’s easy, and makes sense (especially if like me you’ve always felt allergic to budgeting and personal finance).
It’s called IOU (The Practical Lessons), and we developed it in collaboration with BNZ, specifically for this moment. For someone who needs a total refresh. Lesson 2 is the one I’ll be doing again this weekend. The three-bucket system that sets up your accounts in a way that (should) for the most part, feel easy and totally manageable.
If you have any questions about it, or want to share if you’ve also recently fallen off the bandwagon I’d love to hear from you in the comment section!
With love,
Soph x
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