Make Smarter Money Decisions That Support Your Retirement
Why Making Financial Decisions Without a System Keeps You Stuck
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Knowing if you’re making the right financial decisions can feel overwhelming, especially when life is pressing in from all sides. As part of the sandwich generation, you’re helping parents, supporting children, and trying to stay on track for your own retirement, all at the same time.
In this episode, I dive into Phase 3 of the Retirement Ready Framework: Your Money Decisions. You’ll learn why making financial decisions based on emotion alone often leads to regret, stress, and feeling stuck, and how having a clear system can help you move from “I have to” choices to “I want to” decisions you can stand behind.
If you’ve ever felt rushed, guilty, or unsure when money decisions are placed on you, this episode will help you slow down, gain clarity, and make financial decisions that truly support your retirement goals.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
Why making financial decisions without a system often leads to regret and ongoing money stress
How to separate facts from feelings when emotional money situations arise
The 3-step decision-making process that turns chaos into clarity
Why Phase 3 can’t work without solid money systems from Phase 2
How to create money rules and boundaries that protect both your present life and future retirement
Real-life examples of making financial decisions around raises, family requests, emergencies, and travel
How confident money decisions lead to better conversations, less guilt, and greater financial freedom
If you’re curious how the Retirement Ready Framework can support you in making smarter money decisions, I invite you to schedule a free Retirement Clarity Call to explore how the full framework can work for your life.
Unedited Transcription of Episode:
Welcome to the episode. We are on phase three of my retirement ready framework. Last three episodes are part one, part two, but also an overview. So if you missed those, please be sure to go. Check those out. Today's part three, today's phase of the framework is your money decisions. So in the intro, I shared events that can happen.
And it's when these events happen that you need to make a decision. The problem with making money decisions, when you don't have a system, you're typically reacting quickly without quote evidence, right? You're using emotion. You're like, I've gotta get this solved. You hurry and think of an option, and then you take, you make the decision.
Which is good. You're making the decision, but more than likely you're gonna regret this decision later or realize maybe it wasn't the best decision, or heck, you may not even know that, but you're just still trying to make your way through your money trying to be like now this is happening. Now this is happening.
Not realizing it could be stemming from that initial decision Now. We are a sandwich generation and we are filling the squeeze, life. Life is really lifeing for us. We are helping parents. We're still helping kids, but we're also saving for our own future. And the problem with emotional money decisions is that we are stuck without that system to support it.
And we are thinking, I have to do this instead of I want to do this. And that's what phase three is all about, is taking us from the move of I have to help my parents, I have to help my children, or I have to save for my future. That have to mentality to, I want to do this and getting really specific for my parents, for my children, for my future.
That is what phase three all is all about, it's a new decisionmaking process. So when you are faced with a financial decision. And the ones I'm specifically talking about right now are the decisions that someone is asking you to do or something is having you do. It's pressed upon you.
It's, it feels like it's an urgency, immediate thing. It's not from a desire within. Okay, let's start there. And so initially there is emotions with that. Parents, children, family members, whatever it is. What you need to do first is work through the emotion. We're not gonna quickly act on making a financial decision.
We've got to understand the request. We've got to understand the person's need. We are dealing with another person, and we need to start separating the facts from the feelings. Now you're probably thinking, I thought you were a financial coach. Yes, I am. And I have been trained as a life coach as well, so I really help.
Clients understand money is more than just numbers on a piece of paper, there is life happening that takes effect on our money. That's what this phase is all about. Learning to separate the facts from the feelings is what I really help clients with. I had a recent client put in a situation.
And when she came to the coaching session, it was basically saying, I have to do this. That is what I'm trying to help individuals realize is that your money is limited. I don't care who you are. Even billionaires, they can't go wild and you're thinking but they can. Have you heard of the lottery winners going broke?
Have you heard of the big NFL players going broke? So money is limited and I really want everybody to move from the I have to, to I want to, and creating that decision that they can stand behind. All right, so step one, we're gonna resolve the emotion first. I had an experience in October when my medical premium raised by, gosh, what was it?
250%. And I went into emotion first. I'm like, we're not gonna be able to do this. I don't know how we're gonna do this. This is just, we're not gonna be able to have medical care. Those are the emotions to me as a person who quote has control of their money. I let emotions run wild with me for two days.
For two days. Now, sometimes you're, it's going to take a while and granted this was a decision I did not have to make immediately. So we have those as well. But I finally resolved the emotion, meaning that I had to accept it was happening. Step two, which is what I did. I turned to my system and tools.
This is why phase three can't come before phase two. You've got to have your budget. You've got to have your systems. You've got to know what is happening. So in phase two, your money systems, I talked about a budget framework. I have one I recreated every year or every time. Some new things create in there.
So I create my framework new. I went to there, there was my answer, that was where a part of my answer was, but the majority of my answer. It's really important to have that framework to know when to update that framework to know what is involved in that framework. That's why I think that is really key.
So you can then go to your budget to help you see options. It doesn't have to be one thing we can really begin exploring. We can begin understanding what this impact of this request decision, whatever is going to have on our long-term effects, that spreadsheet tool I talk about. What is this going to do in 3, 6, 9 months?
If it's a long-term thing, what does that look like? What are my trade-offs? What am I giving up? Am I okay with that? Really exploring that and understanding that without guilt or shame, because again, money doesn't have emotion. Our emotions obviously come with it. All right, so step three is we are building a dual growth system and within the system you are learning how to B, how to balance now and later within the system, within a phase three.
I help you, create money rules. These can be things such as simple as, I'm going to pay off my debt. But I wanna balance my savings along the way, and we create a money rule. I love money rules. They can also be called boundaries with other situations. But if you're wanting to pay off debt, you focus on one.
And once you get it paid off, instead of a hundred percent snowball or a hundred percent avalanche, whichever theory you're wanting to do, you then have a 75 25 or a 50 50 something you've already created. Because those of us that are looking at retiring. We can't just 100% snowball or avalanche, unless that is the better decision,
but typically not. We have got to feed our retirement. We have got to make sure that is still growing and doing and all of those things. So that is one example of money rules. But it's also exploring what the demands of life are asking you to do and begin to build boundaries. I've worked with clients before who send money home to their family in another country, and sometimes this is breaking them,
this can be with anything, donations, being charitable, being, those type of thing. If this is exceeding your money 'cause of money. Ends, I don't care who you are. You've gotta create these rules. You've gotta create these boundaries. If you do so prior to somebody approaching you, it's much easier to say, I can't do that, or I'm sorry, I'm unable to help, or I can help this way.
Being able to be in that situation. This comes as one of the things in your money decisions. So that's when people are asking of you. Now, in the intro, I talked about a raise. Let's talk about something positive here. If you are in a career or you get a promotion right where you're getting raises, what are you doing with that raise?
Do you have a plan ahead? Does it support your goals? This comes in your money decisions. We look ahead at to what that's going to be, how that's gonna fuel your dreams, how that's going to get you to where you wanna go, because quickly reminding you, phase three is your money decisions, which are then going to build into your money freedom.
Getting a handle on these things is what's going to feed phase four. So what does phase three do for us? It helps us to have better money conversations. We talked about this in one of the episodes, I had a client who. She was doing the managing of the money for her spouse, with her spouse. But she said, once I had all of my information there and had my systems, had my tools, and understood it for what we wanted, I was better able to say, we can't do that. Until next month, or we can't do that unless we give up this, being able to have the systems creates the money decisions, which helps support the conversations, which conversations need to happen with certain individuals as we're making these decisions.
She was so grateful. That was one of her biggest, takeaways not only with her spouse, but also with her children. All right, so as I said, your money decisions, real life scenarios are going to, number one, help you know exactly what to do with your raise, how it's going to benefit you. I know a lot of people are like I got a raise, but I don't know where it went.
Let's really look at that. Yes, it can get caught up in employee ex or employer expenses, but really being ready for that and seeing that another real life scenario, a family member needs money. Knowing your limit, that you can help without sabotaging your goals. An unexpected car repair.
Is going to help you avoid buying a new car. I say that, but I've heard it. It depends on the repair, it depends on the, all of the things, but this is where you're building your money decisions. You're growing, you're learning. So it's more than just within your sphere of money, it's understanding all of the other aspects.
And the final scenario is saying yes to a travel opportunity because you know the trade-offs, you know what you can shift to make that happen and say yes. This phase also changes. Emergencies become less chaotic. You trust yourself with money and decisions feel empowering instead of overwhelming. It just becomes that first step towards feeling free with your money, which again is phase four.
So before we dive into that, your action step from this episode, I want you to identify one money decision you are facing right now, or maybe you recently made. And I want you to walk through that three step process quickly. What is that? Think about the emotions or if you're still in the emotions, resolve those emotions first.
If you have a system or tools, I want you to look at that, determine what your trade offs are, determine what that does to the long term effect. And then number three, make your rule, your boundary, your decision. All right. Next episode is the final episode of the Framework series. We are talking about your money freedom.
These phases build upon one after another, and in their core, they grow and grow. They're not exclusive to one another, but they're. In this circle of building and growing and doing, you will still keep using your system. You will still, tweak it, manage it, make off, make it work for you the best it can.
As you're learning to make decisions, as you begin exploring your freedom, that's next week. So just a reminder, better decisions come from better systems. We need to have systems in place that are not only external, but internal as well, and really understand who we are. With money. This is going to be a phase where you explore your values, your goals, your, accomplishments, your wins, your challenges.
This is really a phase where you really start blooming, growing, exploring. And lots of wonderful things can happen. So just like last episode, if you have a big takeaway, head over to Instagram, elevate underscore finances. Let me know what you learned from this, what questions you have. What more do you need?
If you don't have Instagram down in the show notes, there's a link for SpeakPipe leaving me a message. If you leave your email there, I can respond back directly to you. Also, if you're on my email list, you can send me a message there as well. What was your biggest takeaway? What is your biggest money decision you are struggling with now, or that you made and you were wondering, maybe get a little coaching on that.
Reach out. I'd love to hear from you, and next episode we'll wrap up. Our final phase of the framework, and I'll see you next week.
