Episode 40: The Power of Financial Intentionality for Creatives

  📍 Welcome to CreativeMind Smart Money, the podcast where creativity and business smarts collide. I’m your host, Samantha Eck, bookkeeper, business coach, and your go to guide for building the creative business of your dreams. Whether it’s mastering your money, streamlining your systems, or growing your business, I’m here to share insights that empower you to thrive.

Plus, I’ll be bringing in industry experts to dive into all aspects of entrepreneurship, so you can turn your passion into profit without losing your creative spark. Let’s get started  

You are listening to the Creative Mind Smart Mini podcast, and today I wanna get into a topic that is a little bit more conversational and a little bit more personal. And I wanna talk about getting intentional with money. A lot of the times on this podcast, I’ve talked about being very intentional and mindful with your spending.

And we even had that episode a couple weeks back where we talked about. Investments and investing with intentionality, but also having those reflections. And I’m a big person who thinks that you should be very intentional with your money. And a lot of people might think, okay, you know, I don’t like that.

I just wanna spend my money willy-nilly, or I wanna have the freedom to spend your money. But being intentional with money isn’t supposed to be restrictive and it’s not meant to be. This sort of strict guideline telling you that you can’t spend. It’s more just saying, I want my money to go here, and it’s giving you that intentionality and purpose so that you’re not spending your money on things that might not serve you.

I. Because money doesn’t magically manage itself, and if you’re really not intentional with it, it’s gonna disappear faster than you realize. So small business owners need a plan when it comes to their finances, whether that’s a really strict budget, whether it’s a flexible budget, whatever it is. You need some sort of plan and I am gonna get a little bit into some budgeting topics today, such as YNAB.

And I’m actually going to create an episode around this because I love YNAB and I just thought about that and I really need to talk about it. And of course you guys know that I’m getting more conversational in these podcasts. The more I do them, the more comfortable I feel and. I just love everybody who’s been talking to me about how they’re such a big fan of the podcast and they really appreciate the podcast, and I just love making this a resource for you.

So I do wanna remind you as well that if you have a topic that you are so excited to hear about or you have something that you’re like, Samantha hasn’t touched on that yet, but I’m really interested in knowing about it. I do have a form in my description box you can fill out and request a specific topic.

So there’s a difference between being reactive and being intentional with money.

If you are someone who has a $5,000 in your business bank account. You know, you have subscriptions coming out, so you make sure you have the money for the subscriptions, but then whatever’s left over, you pay yourself and then you have still some money left over. You’re like, okay, I’m just gonna leave that in my bank.

Here’s what this looks like, especially if you don’t have some way of tracking this or knowing where it’s going. You are going to be what I like to call reactive. Let’s say you saw an ad for a new software and you get that shiny pen syndrome that we’ve talked about before, and you immediately react and purchase that.

If you don’t know if that money is meant for subscriptions or for something else, or you haven’t technically set it aside, you’re being very reactive with your money and you could end up hurting yourself because. A lot of us nowadays, we don’t, we don’t track our subscriptions. We don’t track that stuff.

But if you’re being very intentional with it, maybe you do have $200 set aside and you’re like, Hey, I can afford $200 worth of random purchases this month because maybe I saw a course that just, I absolutely needed it. But for someone like me, I use YNAB, and I’m very intentional with my money. When I put.

When it comes in. So all of my money comes in on the first, and I’ve set it up this way so that my cash flow is airtight. Because a lot of the times, as service providers will have cash flow coming in on the fifth, on the 10th, on the 15th, and it just causes us to have these massive gaps in between our cash where we can cover things.

Whereas if I have all my money coming in on the first, I can appropriately plan my entire month out and then say, okay. This is where all my money is going. This is what I have left over. And that is called being intentional. And within YNAB, I assign all of that money to its categories. And this is where I’m kind of rolling into this next topic that I wanna talk about.

Why every dollar needs a job. So allocating revenue instead of just seeing what’s left is so important. And again, I wanna just mention that especially in this day and age where a lot of us are so distracted, we have a DHD, we have, you know. Neuro minds. We have all those things going on where our brains are just.

They short circuit because there’s so much going on that you really need to think about allocating your money wisely because if you have a place where you can see where everything is going and you know that you have extra money or you know that you don’t have extra money, you’re going to be less reactive and more intentional.

Like I said, if you only have $200 to make on random purchases. You’re going to be more intentional about what you buy. So if you see an ad for a course and you’re like, Hmm, that’s a little bit over my budget, you’re not going to react immediately. And this is where we were talking about that reflection period and looking at those investments.

This plays into that because if you’re intentional with your money, you’re going to reflect and be more intentional about what you’re purchasing and less emotional and reactive because you know you don’t have the funds to get there. Now there’s often common money leaks that we see ourselves having, again, like subscriptions, tracking expenses, underpricing, and if you don’t list these out, you’re never going to see them.

Now, of course, you can just look in QuickBooks and say, okay, here’s what I have every month, and you can use that to formulate a list. But looking in QuickBooks is still being reactive and not being intentional. Whereas if you have a list and you’re like, okay, this month. I have 12 subscriptions that I’m paying for.

I know they’re coming out on this date, this date, this date, and this date. That’s $200 that I need to set aside. Oh wait, this subscription I’m not using anymore. I’m gonna cancel that so that I can save myself that money this month. That’s where that intentionality comes in. And we’ve talked about a lot of these different topics.

We’ve talked about subscriptions, we’ve talked about impulse PR spending. We’ve talked about pricing, but we haven’t talked about the intentionality behind it. And that’s why I’m so excited about this topic is because it’s one of the things that I talked to my clients about being in intentional the most.

Because when you’re intentional with your funds, everything kind of comes into a full circle loop. One of my talks that I talk about often is financial goals, and I always talk about setting certain goals like a pay goal for yourself. Because if you set up a pay goal, and then let’s say you set up an expense goal, you’re like, I wanna spend 20% of my revenue on expenses, but I want to keep 40% of my revenue.

You know that 60% of your revenue is already allocated, so that 60% is already put somewhere. So now if you’re like, okay, this is how much I need to make. Let’s just say it. Throw a number out there. Let’s say it’s 5,000. Between paying yourself and expenses, you now know that in order to have a little bit of a buffer, your pricing needs to be higher.

So this is where I’m saying like all that comes into a full circle moment where it all connects. So when you have that financial roadmap, and I know that sounds. So like goofy when you talk about it that way, the financial roadmap. But when you set those goals, you track those expenses and you plan for all of that stuff.

It is so powerful because it gives you these key elements all over the place. And I know that your brain might not think like that. Trust me. Because again, with this, in this day and age where we’re distracted, there are so many things going on. We have a million different things running through our head.

That’s where people like me come in to be your partner and help you think in different ways that actually matter. So there are simple systems that build intentionality. And if you’re not someone who’s like, okay, I just wanna be reactive with my money, I don’t wanna track it, I promise you, I promise you that a budget is not restrictive.

I am not saying that every single dollar of yours needs to have. In exact place it needs to be. You can make a vague bucket of, Hey, this is random stuff I wanna purchase, or Hey, I wanna purchase coffee, or I wanna have a food budget. That is totally okay because it, the point and purpose of this is for you to be intentional and say, okay, you know what?

I don’t wanna spend more than $300 on coffee this month. I’m going to set up, a pocket in my budget for that so that I can spend for that. So. Simple systems, again, are budgeting and one of my favorites to use is YNAB and I’m now going to do an episode on it, so keep an arrow for that. It’ll be, probably in the next couple weeks as well.

So that we can get into that. The next thing you can do is forecasting. Forecasting is difficult because especially if you have a fluctuating income, it’s very difficult to forecast because you don’t know if you’re gonna make that money next month or if you’re not gonna make that money next month because.

Industries are so volatile, if you know what I mean. Some one month you can have like 20 k, and the next month you can have $200. So forecasting is very volatile. There is a way to forecast, but most of the time the best forecast comes when you have monthly recurring revenue. So if you do have monthly recurring revenue, it’s easy to forecast, okay, here’s what I know I’m going to have, here’s what I think I’m going to have, and then like actually looking.

And then of course, intentionality comes with looking at your numbers regularly. I know I’ve talked about this a lot, but setting up a regular money date and checking in with yourself and being intentional with your money is going to be so helpful because if you’re like, Hey, I wanna be intentional and set aside money for a bookkeeper, then it’s going to be better for you in the long run.

Because you’re gonna actually know that you wanna intentionally set aside those funds. This all kind of ties back into a little bit of my faith as well. You guys know I’m a Christian as well, and you don’t need to be a Christian, but this does tie back to that intentionality and that point of stewarding your money well, because when you steward your money well, it kind of ends up giving you space to grow and space to bloom.

Because like I said, if you have 60% where you are allocating that specifically for expenses and preparing yourself, and then that other 40% you can reinvest back into your business, you again, you can put it into those random categories for things like that, you can put it into a buffer. You can build up the business of your dreams and the fin, the personal lifestyle of your dreams if you just be intentional with your money.

And again, I wanna remind you that being intentional isn’t about restriction. It’s about. Freedom and making sure that your business supports the life that you want.

📍 So I want to encourage you to start tracking and planning today because those small steps will add up. And if you’re like, I’m curious about this yNAB. Samantha, make sure you hit subscribe and leave a review. And then of course share this with a friend because in a couple weeks I’ll come up with a come out with that YNAB episode and we’ll dive into budgeting and all those things. ’cause I’m so excited. YNAB is one of my favorite things and I actually help a couple clients with personal budgeting as well to kind of get that into their game plan because I just love YNAB and I love messing around in there.

So we’ll deep dive into that later. But as always, again. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week. I really appreciate you listening, and I love you guys so much for sticking around with me and listening to my conversational kind of chatty rants and YNABpping all day. But I wish you the best week ever.

We’ll see you next week. Farewell fellow travelers.