Sanya’s Success Story | Finding Financial Independence in 2019

Hey, this is Penny with Pennywise Coaching, and I am here speaking with one of my favorite clients, Sonya, and she agreed so kindly to share a little bit about her experience with coaching with my peeps. So Sonya, I just wanted to kind of get some feedback from you. You've been working with me now almost 6 months, 5 months or something like that.

Well, I've known about zero-based budgeting for a long time, and my husband and I had tried various methods of implementing zero-based budgeting and had never been successful. And I just decided that we needed some help, some outside help. So I luckily found Penny Kidd and talked to her about the cost of the coaching. And when I first found out about the cost of the coaching, I felt like— it felt impossible that I wouldn't be able to pay for the coaching, even though I really felt like we needed it. But Penny told me that she would be able to help us put that in our budget and still help us get in a much better spot with our money, and that has been more than true. We didn't have a plan for our money, and we would put money on credit cards when we would run out of money in our checking account, and then we would panic and, and decide that we had to pay it off or get a personal loan to lower the interest rate, and then we would say we would never do it again, and then we always did it again.

Right.

Now, I am very hopeful and I know that we are going to be able to get out of debt and then more than just paying off our credit cards, we are going to be able to pay off our car loan and a personal loan and our house. For the first time ever in our marriage, I feel like we are being really successful at zero-based budgeting. We are definitely working as a team. So, I do all of the finances in our house. And my husband used to, it used to stress him out to be involved or to even talk about it. And now we've started using cash thanks to Penny Kidd, which I've known that we should be doing, but we didn't really know what that looked like and how to do it. Even though I had read books and listened to podcasts, but we just really needed someone that was supporting us individually.

Right.

That's what you have provided to us. And I would say the biggest thing so far, and I know there's much, much more to come just with the process that we're on, but the biggest thing so far is actually having money to pay bills that come around once a year. For example, we had life insurance due in December, and never before have we had money in savings to actually pay that bill. We were always just panicking and trying to figure out how were we going to pay the life insurance. But Penny Kidd helped us put a little bit of money away each paycheck so that when it came time to pay that big bill in December, which December is challenging anyway, just doing this, and, um, but we actually had the money in savings. I transferred the money from our savings to our checking account and I was able to pay the bill without any panic., and it was just a huge stress relief. At the beginning of January, we have our homeowners association dues, and we had money for those. And then end of December, you know, everything seemed to come in a big chunk of payments that were bills that we had to pay. And for my audiology license dues, for example, I owed $250 about, but I had it in savings. I'm like, ever before. I always had just put that on a credit card.

Which is kind of interesting 'cause we only started, I think, in September. And so we didn't really have a long time to get ahead of some of those things. So we had to prioritize that over some other things and try to fit in, oh, Christmas is coming too. So it was a tough maybe season to start coaching and yet, I still feel like you would report things like you're being more aware of the spending and, you know, it's a progress, not perfection kind of experience, right? You don't just all of a sudden start doing it right, but you make little baby steps, don't you think?

A change in habit. And without you before, we weren't able to make those changes. We tried various methods and just, it's like we didn't have enough knowledge to do it. Even though now it seems really easy. At first it didn't seem easy, but you make it look really easy and you helped guide us all along. And now I feel like it's so easy and I can do it and I'll do it for the rest of my life.

So were you concerned when you started budgeting that you would feel like it was really restrictive and that I would tell you no? You can't spend any money.

I definitely was. And you've been— that's what I like about you especially, is that I had, I had listened to Dave Ramsey, for example, and tried to implement his system, which is great. And I know a lot of your philosophy ties in with his, but you also realize that life happens and things happen. And we had to buy tires for both of our cars while you were helping us budget. And And neither one of those went on the credit card.

That's amazing.

That is amazing because before, and that's a good, I think it was $1,500 on tires that we had to spend. One of our cars is bigger and it was about $1,000 and the other one was about $500. But that didn't go on the credit card, whereas before it would have gone on the credit card. And then I would have just felt like we were spinning in circles doing the same thing over and over, racking up credit card debt, trying to figure out how to get rid of it and then racking it up again.

Yeah. I think it is about those little wins over time and not beating yourself up when you don't quite hit the mark, you don't do it as well as you had hoped or whatever.

Like we haven't paid off a lot of debt yet, but we've done a lot of things that are setting us up for being able to do that in the next months.

Yeah.

And the other thing that we did for the first time ever, even though we didn't really stick with it fully, but at least it's starting the habit or starting to think about it is that we started, we did a Christmas budget and we had never done that before. We just kind of spent willy-nilly and we didn't, we didn't do the best job of it, but we at least were thinking about it and again, changing our behavior and we'll just keep getting better and better at it.

I think so. Yeah. And the fact that now you have a year essentially to plan for next Christmas, next Christmas is going to be a whole different ballgame.

Exactly.

The longer you have to set aside the little amounts, so, you know, it eliminates how much you need to set aside for everything from your dues or your HOA or your Christmas or whatever when you have more months to plan for it. And that's part of why maybe you haven't had as much traction on your debt snowball as you would like, because we had quite a few big expenses coming up in a really short period of time.

Another expense we had that we had in savings, thanks to you, that we would not have had in savings was a little, a fairly expensive car registration. So it all happened in December. Right.

And on top of holidays.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Really inspirational to think about the future and what we're going to do to pay off our debt and then just have more freedom to do, to, you know, to meet goals and do things we want to in life.

Right. Well, and I appreciate that you, you have seen that even though I got my training through Dave Ramsey and I, um, you know, did most of that process myself, I don't, I don't do it 100%. I don't expect other people to do 100%. I really want people to learn to be critical thinkers for themselves because not only do I not want you to just think you know, you have to do everything Dave says. You don't have to do everything Penny Kidd says. I want you to do what works for you, and I'm there to support you in making sure that that decision aligns with what you told me your goals were, right? And what short and long-term goals you have. So I don't think any one person out there has all the answers. It's our job to start learning from every source we can to get better at it year after year, right?

So that's what I— we also loved about you is just progress, not perfection, how you say progress, not perfection. And I tend to be a perfectionist, you know, even though that doesn't work well, but right, but I, I have been able to see many changes, um, despite the fact that we haven't, you know, gotten where we want to be. But it's just making the habits and learning what we need to do to change our behavior and, and make it that way for the rest of time, right?

And I always tell people, I think it's behavior more than it's math. Right. You know, it's, we, we, if it was math, we, most of us could have done this a long time ago. Right. We know what we're supposed to do, but putting it in action, that was my biggest struggle for sure. It was like, I knew the concepts, but making it work in my life took a long time. So I hope that now as a Coach, I get to help impart some of my failures so that you don't hit those or you go through them faster than I did, you know.

Exactly.

So, well, thank you so much for taking some time and being willing to share your experience with my, my people here.