167 | Rewind: The Math and the Drama

Money can be an emotional topic for many people. This can sometimes make it difficult to access the logical side of your brain to make strategic decisions.

The good thing is it’s easy to objectively measure specific monetary goals, which helps to take some of the emotion out of it.

In this episode, we talk about separating the math of your goals from your thoughts and feelings about them and the benefits of this approach.

• • the concept of math vs. drama
  • the neutrality of money and differing perceptions of it
  • how to break down your monetary goal like a math problem
  • client case studies using the math vs. drama concept
  • how to proceed after breaking down your monetary goal

Episode 50: Seriously, Money Means Nothing

You’re listening to Wealthyesque. We are a community of lawyers who believe that true wealth is having control of our time. I’m Rho Thomas, and as a busy wife, mom, and former Biglaw associate, I know all too well the tension between the culture of the legal profession and pretty much everything else you want to do in life. That’s why each week, I’m bringing you the information and tools you need to improve your money mindset and manage your money to create true wealth. Because ultimately, it’s not about the money. It’s about the freedom and flexibility the money affords.

Hey friend. Welcome back to the show. I hope you’re doing well and having an amazing day so far. Today I am bringing you a rewind episode. This episode originally aired about a year and a half ago and the concept has been really impactful for my clients to help them create workable plans to achieve their goals. I think it’d be really helpful for you as you work on your goals too. So let’s get into this rewind episode, the math and the drama.

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Hey friend. Welcome back to the show. I hope you are doing well and having an amazing day so far. So today we are talking about math and drama. Money can be an emotional topic for many people. And when you have a lot of emotion tied to something, it can be difficult to access the logical side of your brain and make strategic decisions. The good thing is money really lends itself to objective measurement. Right? If you have a monetary goal, you can divide out and determine how much you need to pay or save or invest or whatever it is in whatever timeframe to hit that goal. So you can break down your money goal like a math problem. And once you break it down in that way, you have useful data to work with in determining how to move forward. My business coach has this concept of yours talks about the math and the drama of your goal. So there’s a math of it. Right? How much money do you need to make in a month to reach the goal you have for the year? Or how much money do you need to make each month to reach the goal that you have for the year, but then there’s the comma, all of your thoughts and your perceptions and your emotions and all of that about those numbers. And the same is true for your goals in your personal finances as well. So the numbers are just numbers, right? We talked before about the fact that money is neutral. The balancing of bank account the cost of something at the store, how much debt you have. All that is essential. They are simply neutral effects. They’re not inherently good or bad, or big or small or all the other descriptors that you have for money and monetary things. Each of us can have a different opinion about the same bank account or the same price or whatever it is. You might think something portable while I think it’s expensive, and you can think that this bank balance is too low. And I might think it’s more than enough. We perceive money in a particular way and ascribe meaning to it, which lends to the drama that we have about it. So coming back to monetary goals. We can take the drama out by breaking it down like a math problem and looking at the objective numbers. And from there you can see what your thoughts and feelings are about those numbers and then have a plan for how to move forward. What I find with my clients is often their ultimate goal feels overwhelming. They think things like it’s such a big number or it will take too long or that’s too expensive, or I’ll never be able to do that. And all of that basically shuts their brains down, or at least the part of the brain that we use for problem solving. Like we talked about before. When you’re in a situation where your emotions are really high, it’s somewhat harder to access the logical part. of the brain. When we break the goal down at least more accessible for them. They usually see either they’re already on track to hit the goal, or if they’re not, they see that it’s more in return they originally thought and even if neither of those is true, they’re able to better make a plan to get there from a calmer and more logical place. So to give you a few examples, one of my clients had a goal to pay off student loans she had about 100,000 and the amounts are really overwhelming for her. She didn’t see how she could do it. She hadn’t been able to make progress on once at that point. And she didn’t know what to do. So when we looked at it and broke it down, we determined she could pay her loans off in about two years if she were able to pay about $4,000 a month and that’s including the minimum payment she was already making. Right which was like $1,000 or something. So like another $3000 extra month, and she could pay them off in about three years if she were able to pay about $3,000 a month again, including the minimum payment and so looking at that was really eye opening for her and it seems so bad when she realized how close she actually was. And she thought those numbers the monthly numbers were doable, and she was able to move forward with a plan versus spinning out in overwhelm confusion. And that same thing happens all the time. Right like another client saving for a large expense like 40 or $50,000. And the numbers seem so big to him at first until we broke it down across the timeframe. He’s looking at just two years. That’s only $2,000 a month. And that amount felt much more manageable, and it fits within his current budget with room to spare. And that even assumes it doesn’t get any raises or bonuses or anything like that in the next few years. So when you have actual numbers, the math of your goal, right that takes us out of this place of that so much I don’t know how to do it and brings you to this place of how can I do this right, the problem solving side. You can ask yourself, Do I have the capacity to do this? So he’s an example that we just talked about? Do I have $2,000 in my budget that I can put towards full each month? Oh, yes, I do. I can reallocate from this category in that category and come up with $2,000 or no I don’t I have 1500 or 1000 or however much but from there you can ask yourself okay, how am I gonna come up with the extra money to get to $2,000 and you’re working with specific numbers like that. And you can come up with a plan based on the math instead of spinning out in the drama. And it’s not to say that you’ll never have drama about whatever the breakdown of your goal is, but you can at least see what happened to reach a goal and go from there. Again, it goes back to the goal itself being neutral. When you can look at it more objectively and break it down. Then you can problem solve and take yourself out of the overwhelm and I don’t know and all of that and get to work on your plan.

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All right, I hope you enjoyed that rewind episode. Take some time to break down the math and drama of your goals to start making the progress you want to make with your finances. And if you want my help with exploring your goals and creating a strategy to achieve them, you should join my money membership. It’s opening on September 14, so make sure you join the waitlist at rho thomas.com/waitlist so you don’t miss it. All right, that is it for this week’s episode. If this episode helped you please help me spread it to another lawyer. One of the ways podcasts grow and are shown to more listeners is by their ratings and reviews. So if you haven’t done so already, please take a second leave a quick rating and review for the show. I would greatly appreciate it and it will help another lawyer get access to this information. As we close out friend, I pray that you take the information you learned here, apply it in your life and open up to the realization that wealth is available to you. As you do that consistently. Week after week. You’ll continue to take steps to regain control of your time, build wealth and live the life of freedom and choice you deserve. Talk to you later.