The Financial Truth You've Been Avoiding S1E10

This is the episode the whole season has been building toward, the one where you actually look at your financial life. Today we put together two simple, honest pictures of where things actually stand right now, not a budget, not a complicated spreadsheet.

We walk through exactly what to gather: what you own set against what you owe, and what comes in each month set against what goes out. Before any of that, there's a guided practice to help your body meet this work from steady ground instead of dread, because the bracing before looking is almost always the harder part, not the looking itself. By the end, you'll have a plain plan for the hour you'll set aside this week to make both pictures real.

A note for anyone joining partway through the season: this episode rests on the ground built in the episodes before it. You're welcome to listen here first, but episodes one and two are a recommended place to start.

If you appreciate this episode, please rate/review the show. It helps the next woman find it, and helps the show itself.

This podcast is for education and reflection, not personalized financial advice.  New episodes arrive every Wednesday. Follow or subscribe so you don't miss what's next.

This is The Rhythm of Money. Living Your True Note.

No financial advice is offered or implied. For guidance specific to your situation, consult a licensed financial professional. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome back to the Rhythm of Money. Today is the episode we've been moving toward all season. For weeks now, we've been building the ground for this. Not rushing into the numbers and math, not forcing yourself to make financial plans before the body feels safe enough to stay present while doing so. Not trying to fix everything before we can even look clearly. But today we do look. Today, with everything you've been practicing, you're going to begin engaging with your actual financial life. And if this is your first time here, I want to say this gently. You can absolutely listen, but this probably isn't the best episode to begin with, as much as I know the algorithms will punish me for saying that. This show has been unfolding in a very intentional way, and today's episode rests on the ones before it. We're doing something here that becomes much easier when you've already built some of the inner tools from episodes one through nine. So if you're new, I want to point you back to those first episodes, especially the first couple episodes. Not because you're behind and not because there's some perfect order you have to follow, but because today asks something of you that you may need the benefits of earlier episodes to feel is possible. For everyone who's been here, let me say where we are. We've arrived. For nine episodes, I've been telling you that we weren't at the part of the show where we look at your actual finances yet. And the very first episode, I asked you to only take an honest first glance, just a glance. And I said you didn't have to do anything with what you saw. Since then, we've been building capacity, piece by piece. We worked with the flinch, we've practiced the reset, we've separated the numbers from the voice that turns them into a verdict, we've practiced receiving, savoring, and beginning the day from something more capable than effort. And each time, some part of you may have known that eventually I was going to ask for more. And that is this episode. But I want you to notice something before we go any further. You're not the same woman who started the show. The woman who started the show may not have been able to look at certain balances or statements without her stomach getting a little queasy, or her mind spacing out, or her breath being held. Now you have the reset for exactly those moments. The woman who started the show may have been accustomed to letting money move through her life without really letting it gather, build, or become something she could rely on later. Now you've practiced receiving and savoring, letting things accumulate. The woman who started this show may have heard a verdict every time she saw a financial number. Now you've practiced noticing the difference between the number itself and the voice that dumps meaning on top of it. The woman who started this show may have not had a daily ground to stand on that supported her sense of financial mastery. You've been standing on it every morning this past week. So when I say today, when I ask you to look at the whole picture, I'm not asking the woman from episode one. I'm asking the woman you've become. And she can do this. That's why we waited. Now let me tell you what we're doing in the actual task at hand because I want to take as much mystery and dread out of this as possible. The review is two simple pictures. That's all. It's not a budget, not a plan, not a system you have to keep up forever, not a spreadsheet with 40 tabs and a bunch of formulas that make you want to close the computer. Just two pictures. Two honest snapshots of where things are right now. The first picture is what you have and what you owe. In the financial world, this is called a net worth statement. And I almost hesitate to use that phrase at all because net worth can sound like it's measuring your worth. It isn't. So let's strip it all the way down. It's just two columns. In one column, what you own, the money in your checking account, your savings, your retirement accounts, your investment accounts if you have them, the value of your home if you own one, a car if it's worth including, anything else you own that has real financial value. In the other column, what you owe. Your mortgage, credit card balances, loans, a car note, anything you owe to anyone. Then you add up each side and you subtract what you owe from what you own. That gap is the first picture. That number is information. It's not a grade, it's not a verdict, it's not a measure of who you are. It's simply where things stand today so that later when we begin making practical choices, we're building from something real. The second picture is what comes in and what goes out. This one is about flow, not totals. You may have heard this called cash flow. It's what income usually comes into your life in a typical month and what reliably goes out. Your housing, utilities, insurance, minimum payments, subscriptions, including the ones you may have forgotten you still have, and then roughly the other spending, the things you initiate as you go through the month that aren't just automatic. We call this discretionary spending because really it's up to you each month whether you do it or you don't, but usually you do. Now you don't need to get this perfect to the penny. You're not building a budget today. You're looking at the shape of your month. What comes in, what has to go out always, what usually goes out most months, and what's left. That's the second picture. And that's the whole review. What you have compared to what you owe, what comes in compared to what goes out. Two pictures. That's what we're working toward today. Now, here's how we're going to do this. And I want to say this up front. This is a bigger ask than I've made before. I'm not going to walk you through pulling every number while this episode plays. Some of you might be able to do that, and if you can, great. But for most of you, the actual review is something you'll set aside time for. Maybe an hour sometime this week, a quiet part of the day, coffee or tea beside you, accounts open, a couple sheets of paper or a blank spreadsheet in front of you. What we're going to do together right now is the part that makes that hour possible to engage with. Because the reason many women don't do this isn't that the math is hard. The math is not the hard part. If you're using Excel or Google Sheets, the math can practically do itself. You're mostly copying and pasting numbers into cells, then adding it up, you know, doing a sum at the bottom of the column and subtracting one from the other. You could do most of that in the second grade. The mechanics are simple. The hard part is the engagement, is choosing to sit down to do it. It's opening the accounts, it's seeing the balances, it's feeling what comes up when you see the debt or the savings or the retirement account or the gap between where you are and where you thought you'd be by now. That's the part we're practicing today. Not the math. The ability to stay present and engage. So take a breath before we begin. Settle wherever you are. And if you're driving or doing anything that needs your full attention right now, let this part just be soft background. For everyone else, let your shoulders soften a little. Let your jaw soften. Notice your breath naturally deepen. Now I want you to imagine the hour ahead. The hour sometime this week when you sit down and do this. See where you are. The table, the room, the cup beside you, the accounts you'll need to open, the tabs. Maybe you've already got all the tabs lined up in your browser ready for you to log into each one. See it in your mind. Now notice what your body does as you imagine that. Imagine yourself doing it and notice how that vision feels. Does something tighten? Does something brace? Does something pull back? Where do you feel it? In your chest? In your stomach? Your throat? Your shoulders. Your neck? Don't try to change anything. This may be the flinch arriving in advance. The body remembering the old pattern around looking at these numbers. Just notice it. Now let's bring everything you've been practicing to this imagined hour. Bring the light of awareness as you look at these numbers and start copying and pasting them into this spreadsheet. You are the one who can see this image. You are not the dread of what's seen there. You are not the story about it. You are the one who can see it. Notice that. Bring the ground of being. When you sit down at that table this week, the same ground that held you this morning will hold you then. You won't be floating outside yourself trying to force your way through panic. You'll be here in your body, held by the same earth that has held you every day of your life. Bring the breath. When the first number appears and your body responds, you'll do what you now know how to do. You won't hold your breath. You won't push past yourself. You'll take one breath, bringing oxygen into every cell, the breath of life. Letting the number be a number before the voice can turn it into a verdict. And bring gratitude for receiving. This may sound strange at first, but even the hard parts of this picture can be received. Because this is your life, your actual life. And looking at it clearly is an act of taking ownership. You're receiving the truth of your own situation. And the truth, seen clearly, is almost always more workable than the story you've been carrying in the dark. This is part of becoming more capable. Not pretending, not avoiding, not making yourself wrong, being capable of seeing more and staying with yourself while you see it. Let yourself feel that for a moment. The dignity of being able to look. The dignity of no longer needing to hide from your own financial life. Now say something quietly to yourself about the hour ahead. Something like, I can look at this. I have what I need to look at this. Looking doesn't change the numbers. Looking only lets me know. And knowing gives me access to my power in the situation. Because that's the truth. The numbers are already what they are. They've been what they are, whether you looked or not. Looking doesn't make them worse. And in fact, it could reveal them to be better than you thought. Looking only ends the not knowing and makes better choices available to you. The not knowing has been costing you more than any number on that screen ever will. Take a deeper breath. Come fully back to where you are. That was the practice for now. Not the creation of the totals itself, but the practice was arriving at the moment of creating that from a clearer, more centered place. So when you sit down this week, you're not sitting down as the woman who flinches and then disappears. You're sitting down as the woman who is capable and present and handling her finances. Now let me give you the practical piece clearly so you know exactly what to do. This week, find an hour. Pick the time right now before you leave this episode if you can. Go ahead right now and put that into your calendar and then come right back. Set yourself a notification reminder as well. And make it a spacious hour, not a rushed one, not a squeezed in-between things hour. Okay. And then before you begin, do the daily receiving practice. Just 10 seconds. Light, ground, breath, water, gratitude. Let yourself arrive in your body before you open a single account. Then create the document you'll use. Paper and pen is fine, a spreadsheet is fine. You don't need special software. You just need somewhere to make two simple columns and put some numbers down. Okay. So for the first one, the two columns, what you own, what you owe, and under what you own, list the balances and values that belong there, checking, savings, retirement, investments, home value, if that applies. Anything else that belongs in that picture. And under what you owe, the debts, mortgage, credit cards, loans, car note, anything you owe. You add them up. You know, in Google Sheets or Excel, you just put a sum formula at the bottom of the column. That's pretty much it. It does the addition, and then you just subtract one total from the other. You know, equal first number minus second number. Enter. That's it. Okay. Then that's the gap. That's the first picture. Again, you can use rounded numbers if you want, or you can just copy and paste. You're not auditing yourself. You're creating a snapshot. So then just save it with a simple name like net worth plus the date. Then you make the second picture. What comes in, what goes out. Again, you're not building a budget, you're looking at the shape of the month. Income on one side, reliable expenses on the other. Add up what comes in, add up what goes out, subtract one total from the other. That's your cash flow picture. And that's it. While doing that, anytime a number makes your body brace or your mind tell you that you should do something else right now and delay the rest of this task until later, pause. Do the reset right there. Pause, breath, two-second body scan. Let the number be just an innocent number before you write it down. And if a number is charged enough that the voice gets loud or you start to freeze, or you feel yourself spacing out or wanting to escape, you already know what to do. You practice this. You let the response speak. You stay with it. You don't argue with it and you don't obey it. You notice how it shows up in your body, the feeling's color, its shape, its texture, weight, whatever you notice. You let yourself be deeply present with it. Then you keep going as soon as you can. And when both snapshots are done, you're done. You don't have to make a plan that day. You don't have to fix anything that day. You don't have to decide what it all means. We're not at that part of the show yet. That's part of the work we'll be moving into next season, which is coming up soon. Budgeting, saving, investing, retirement, financial structures and strategies, the practical decisions that help your money life become more resilient and more secure. But this season was never about forcing strategy on top of fear. This season was about becoming able to see and remain fully engaged in mind and body, able to engage with your financial life without abandoning yourself to fear. And this week, that's the work. But when you finish the review, pause before you get up. Don't immediately close the computer and rush into the next thing. Notice how you feel. Not just about the numbers, about yourself, about having done the thing you may have avoided for years. There's a very particular kind of quiet dignity that can arrive when you finally look. I want you to be there for that. Don't rush past it. Let yourself receive that too and savor it. If you appreciate it this episode, please like it or rate the show. It helps more women find it, and I also appreciate it greatly. Next week is the final episode of season one, and it's the bridge. Because once you've looked at the full picture of your financial life, something changes. You're no longer trying not to know. You're no longer standing outside of your own money life waiting until some future version of you feels ready. You've engaged, you've looked, you've stayed. So next week, we're going to let you start working with what it's like to be on the other side of that. And I'll show you where we go in season two as we begin turning this clarity into practical financial choices. All the structures that help a life become financially resilient, meaning able to bounce back from the inevitable hits of fate, and secure. I'll also have something special for you before the episode ends. It's something I created as a companion to this first season to help your body keep practicing safety, receiving, and capability with money even after this season closes. So come back next week is where seeing what's true now begins to become choosing what your financial life will be going forward. That's next time. This is the rhythm of money. And you are living your true note in this very moment.