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EPISODE 6 SHOW NOTES
Welcome back to Money and Magic, the podcast that combines practical money advice with mystical wisdom to help you create a truly magical life. I’m your host, Chey, the WitchyBookkeeper, and today we are diving into the second part of our three-part series on creating an abundance agenda. In this episode, we will be using the MAGIC acronym to guide us in our journey towards abundance.
In today’s episode, I talk about:
- Unlocking your Magical Life
- Creating your Abundance Strategy
- Growing your money and yourself
- Increasing your income or investing
- Confidently walking through your money journey, head held high
Overview
Before we begin, I want you to envision your magical life. Close your eyes and imagine how much money you are making in this perfect, ideal life. Think about your debt, your sources of income, and the experiences you want to have. From traveling the world to pursuing your passions, your magical life is different for everyone. And the key to success is living that magical life.
In this episode, we will also discuss your abundance strategy, which we prefer to call your “abundance strategy” instead of a budget. We’ll help you understand how to determine what it takes to live your magical life and how to create a plan to get there. We’ll cover topics like knowing your numbers, incorporating a buffer, and being conscious of your spending decisions.
Next, we’ll explore the power of growing both your money and yourself. From investing in high-yield savings accounts to educating yourself through books and podcasts, we’ll provide practical tips on how to expand your financial knowledge and increase your confidence.
And finally, we’ll discuss the importance of confidence in your money journey. Too often, women enter this realm with doubts and insecurities. But we want to remind you that you are capable and deserving of financial success. With the right resources and mindset, you can overcome any obstacles and achieve your goals.
So get ready to dive deep into creating your abundance agenda and designing your magical life. And remember, this podcast is here to support you every step of the way. Stay tuned for more insights, guided meditations, and expert advice to help you manifest your dreams. Let’s make money and magic together.
Transcript
Welcome to Money and Magic, the podcast that combines the mystical with the practical to help you navigate money in the muggle world. I’m your host, shy, remote bookkeeper and judgment free money coach. I hope this podcast helps you create a harmonious relationship with your finances that empowers you to lead your truly magical life. Let’s get started. Hey, magical humans. Welcome back to Money and Magic. Today’s episode is the second in a three part series about creating an abundance agenda. In this part of your abundance agenda, we will be using the Magic acronym to help create your plan.
If you haven’t listened to part one, I definitely recommend you go back and do that because this is going to build on what we learned in part one of creating your abundance agenda. So let’s go ahead and jump right on in. The first thing I want to talk about today is the M in our acronym and the M stands for Magical Life. What does your magical life look like? You’ll hear me say your magical life all throughout this podcast. In my courses on my socials, I’m a huge advocate of working towards your magical life. So just a quick insight here. When I say your magical life, I want you to close your eyes and I want you to think, how much money are you making in your magical life? Your magical life is if everything was absolutely perfect and exactly how you wanted it to be, this is how you would live. The goal is to live your magical life.
What is your debt like? How are you making money? And when you’re thinking about this stuff, I want you to think big. Don’t think small inside the box. We’re dreaming here. We are talking about maybe you want to travel a lot. One of my really good friends loves to travel. She specifically loves to go to England and tries to make it every single year. Maybe part of her magical life is being able to go to England twice a year or being able to go to England for a month at a time. Everybody’s magical life is different and to me, success is living your magical life.
And so I want you to really think about this and try to work through some different thoughts on your magical life. If this is something you struggle with, you definitely want to tune into my next podcast episode because it is going to be a guided meditation deep dive into creating your magical life. So don’t think too hard on this. If you’re not there yet, you can move on to working on some of the other aspects of this and then tune into that next episode where we will definitely dig into your magical life more in detail. The next part of this is your abundance strategy. A lot of people refer to this as a budget. I don’t like the term budget just because society has made it feel so icky. And so I like to call it something different and I call it my abundance strategy.
What is the strategy? To create abundance in my life. And part of knowing your magical life is really going to help you figure out your abundance strategy. So in that case of my friend who loves to travel to England, maybe every single time she travels to England, it costs her $5,000. If she wants to do that four times a year as part of her magical life, she’s going to need $20,000 to make that happen. That is where you can kind of know, okay, just to do those things that I want to do, I need $20,000 or whatever the case might be. You might need half that, you might need double that. Whatever it is, it’s different for everybody. But once you know what your magical life is like, you can start creating your strategy to get there.
The first part of your abundance strategy is what we did in part one, and that is just understanding and knowing your numbers, knowing where you are right now, but also knowing where you are going. Did you know that women pay 7% more on average for female marketed goods like razors, tampons pads, personal care items like deodorant, shampoo, things like that? This is called the Pink Tax and it adds up to about 82,000 or more over a woman’s entire lifetime according to Good Housekeeping, $82,000. So instead of buying razors that are marketed to women or deodorant and shampoo that are marketed to women, buy the men’s because they’re going to be the same thing for cheaper. So when I talk about your abundance strategy, it’s knowing things like this, figuring out different ways that you can save money where it’s important. I also like to do this on a zero dollar based system. So if you have $2,500 sitting in your bank account right now, I want you to give a job to all 2500 of those dollars. That job could be that it is your emergency fund, but that money knows what it is supposed to do. And this really helps living consciously when it comes to your money and making conscious spending decisions.
So let’s say I assigned $25 to my savings, but I really want to go to the local coffee shop today and get me a coffee and a bagel. I know that’s going to cost me $12. So now I’m consciously making the decision to take $12 out of that savings and assign it to coffee instead. Maybe when I think through that, I decide I’d rather that just stay assigned to savings. So I’m not going to go to the coffee shop. Neither way is good or bad, right or wrong. They’re just decisions you make along the way. So this is something as you’re building your abundance strategy, I want you to think about things like that.
I want you to write down how much it would cost for you to live your magical life. You can do this on a weekly biweekly monthly. Obviously, the first step is knowing where you are now because you know that’s how much it costs for you to survive right now. And then we can work on adding different goals to reach those points in your magical life. Something else when you are building your abundance strategy or your budget, is build a buffer into your account. So I normally have about $200 that I literally assign as a buffer because sometimes things come up and I didn’t plan for them originally. So it’s nice to have that little bit of buffer in there. Start with $50 if that’s all you have and just leave that in there as a buffer.
Another thing you want to do is if you’re doing this weekly biweekly monthly, it doesn’t really matter. Check your social calendar. Like right now. This episode is going to come out right before Thanksgiving. So for those of you that are buying more stuff for the Thanksgiving meal, your grocery bill is probably going to be a little bit higher. Or maybe you have friends givings to go to, or maybe it’s somebody’s birthday. When you check your social calendar, you’re more likely to budget for those things rather than, oh no, I have dinner with the girls that I completely forgot about and now I need to use that $50 buffer. Whereas if I would have checked my calendar and I knew I had dinner with the girls and that was going to cost me an extra $50, I could go ahead and assign that $50 to eating out rather than having to dip into my buffer.
So when you’re working through this abundance strategy, think of all of the things that may or may not come up. And if you need even more insight into this, I do have how to create a budget course. It is only $33 and it kind of walks you through every piece of the budgeting process. And when you’re creating this budget or abundance strategy, you can use an app like I prefer YNAB or Monarch Money. You can use a spreadsheet, or you can get a plain old notebook and pen, paper, pencil, whatever. Whatever works for you is what I want you to use. Because if it’s not going to work for you, you’re not going to stick with it. And this is something that you’re going to do regularly, consistently on a set basis.
The next letter in our acronym is G. And G stands for grow. And there’s two parts to grow. First, it’s to grow your money. So we want to take the money that you’re saving and we want to grow it. Putting away money for financial goals is the number one thing that makes women feel more confident and in charge of their futures. So first, I want to make sure any savings account you have is in a high yield savings account. This is going to be for your emergency fund as well as any sinking funds.
I personally use Ally capital one is really good There are several out there. Just make sure that you’re getting a higher interest rate than you’re getting at your traditional bank. The next way to grow your money is to invest in, and if you’re not there yet, that’s okay, you’ll be there soon. And I personally use fidelity. I deposit $100 a month and I invest that. That is all I do right now. You can go a lot deeper, you can do less, but the biggest thing is to start investing now because that money is going to make money on the money that is sitting in there. The other aspect to grow is to grow yourself, whether that is through reading books or listening to podcasts or hiring a coach.
I personally recommend Simple Path to wealth by JL. Collins. It’s an amazing book for beginner investors, super easy to read. The other book I’m currently recommending is we should all be Millionaires by Rachel Rogers because it is absolutely incredible. She started where most of us started, and she’s a woman, specifically a woman of color who has gone through a lot of struggles and is now a millionaire and believes we should all be millionaires. I love everything about her book and I highly recommend that you read it. There are obviously podcasts like this one, Money and Magic, and there are a ton of other podcasts out there that are good for financial literacy as well. So find some of those and listen to them.
They’re definitely going to help you grow your mindset and grow your confidence. The last couple of things is to hire a money coach. I do money coaching. There are plenty of other money coaches out there. There are a lot of financial courses. But just make sure you’re always trying to grow yourself in some way, no matter what form of media you choose to use. You can also grow your mindset. Try to reframe those negative money thoughts.
This is something that you have to work on constantly. It is something that you’re going to have to make yourself aware of consistently. But as you start working on that mindset, you will notice things start to change quicker and quicker and you start to feel a lot less heavy. So definitely work on growing that mindset. Our next letter is I, and this can go one of two ways depending on where you’re at on your money journey. The first, I could stand for income. If you’re at a point where you are not able to cover your expenses, you are not able to save, you are not able to invest, then you need to focus on growing your income, whether that is changing jobs, getting another job, doing some side gigs, whatever that is. To grow your income.
This is where you need to focus on if you’re comfortable with where your income is and you do have the extra money to invest, then this I is going to stand for investments. Less than 70% of women are saving for retirement right now, and that is compared to 81% of men. Studies show that women are actually better investors. We just don’t learn like men do. So we are less likely to get into investing. But I highly recommend starting small. Open an investment account. Like I said, I use Fidelity and put $100 in, see what happens.
The biggest thing is that you start investing now. The best time to start investing was yesterday. The second best time is today. So if you are able to just put $100 a month into an investment account, definitely do that. And I will have a podcast episode early next year that talks all about investing and dives deep into that. But if you have any questions in the meantime, please feel free to reach out because I love helping people get started with investing. And the last letter in our acronym is C and the C stands for Confidence. Sometimes I feel like this is probably the most important because a lot of women go into their financial journey with zero confidence, with the fact that they feel stupid or that they should have known all of this by now, or they should be farther in life than they are.
And I want you to throw all that garbage out the window. You can do this. Studies have proven that women are better with finances than men. We just don’t get the knowledge. You are already farther than you were when you began listening to this podcast. You are already farther than you were a week ago, two weeks ago, whenever your financial journey started, you are already farther than that. So I don’t want you to beat yourself up. I want you to give yourself grace and know that you can do this.
Confidence is really going to help you here understand that there are resources out there to help you. And by listening to this podcast and trying to move forward, you are already doing something absolutely great that so many women will never do. So definitely stand with that confidence when it comes to your money journey because I believe in you and you should believe in you. I know I just threw a ton at you. We talked about what is your magical life, how to build your abundance strategy, how to grow your money and yourself, whether you need to start investing or increasing your income, and making sure you do everything with confidence. Please listen to this episode several times if you need to reach out, if you have any questions and know that there are plenty of episodes coming your way that are going to dig into each of these topics a little more deeper to help you fully understand how to build out your abundance agenda. As always, you can head to the show notes to sign up for my newsletter. The link to all of my courses and digital downloads are there.
All of my socials are linked there. All of the things take time working through and creating all of this. And if you need help understanding more about what your magical life is, tune into the next episode, where we will do a guided meditation on designing your magical life and walking you through more in depth steps of how to create that. And that’s a wrap for another spellbinding episode of Money and Magic. I hope you learned something that can help you navigate money in the muggle world. If you have any questions, topics, or even your own Money and Magic story that you’d like to share, reach out to me on social media. I’d love to hear from you, and if you have found this show insightful, I’d truly appreciate it. If you could take a moment to subscribe, leave me a review, and share money and Magic with your friends and family.
Think of it like casting a spell to help others on their financial journeys. As always, stand tall, shine bright, and stay grounded. I’ll see you next time.
Resources and links mentioned in this episode:
- Connect with me on Instagram and TikTok
- Learn more about how we can work together by visiting my website
Check out my Money Alchemy course 101 HERE
More about Money & Magic:
Welcome to Money & Magic, the podcast that combines the mystical with the practical to help you navigate money in the muggle world. Hosted by Chey, the Witchy Bookkeeper, we explore the emotional and spiritual dimensions of money, as well as provide actionable advice on budgeting, investing, and helping you create a harmonious relationship with your finances that empowers you to lead a truly magical life.
Whether you’re seeking financial freedom, looking to overcome money blocks, or simply want to learn how to make your financial dreams a reality, Money & Magic is here to inspire, educate, and empower you on your journey. Join us every other Wednesday and discover that, with the right mindset and a touch of magic, you can turn your financial dreams into reality.
Subscribe now, and let’s embark on this extraordinary journey of “Money & Magic” together. Stand Tall, Shine Bright, Stay Grounded!
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Website: www.abundancealchemy.co
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