From Anxiety To Awareness: A Real Budget Reset

Money fear can feel like static you can’t turn off—especially when bills, groceries, and surprise expenses pile up at once. We decided to stop flinching and start looking, and that choice changed everything: a short year-end audit, a clear monthly snapshot, and small habit swaps that cut anxiety without cutting all the joy.

We walk through a practical breakdown of last year’s spending to spot the real leaks—housing and utilities as the big fixed block, groceries as the silent budget hog, and “convenience creep” from delivery apps and quick clicks. From there, we map a simple inflow-outflow view for the month: set non-negotiables first, give groceries a realistic number, and create a discretionary bucket you can feel. When the bucket’s empty, the decision is made—no guilt spiral, no guesswork. We talk about the tradeoffs that actually help: swapping delivery for pickup, using a discount grocery run, bulk-buying smart staples, and choosing when convenience is truly worth it.

We also get honest about family spending. Kids grow fast; some buys are true needs. Others are just a scroll habit. The trick is reframing money as a tool that supports your season, not a scoreboard that fuels “bigger, shinier” wants. Auto-pay the essentials, set reminders for variables, and keep a “safe to spend” line you check once a day. That tiny routine eases late-night panic and turns planning into calm. Living below your means isn’t grim—it’s freedom. It makes room for savings, debt paydown, and future projects without the constant pressure.

If money talk gives you knots in your chest, start small: do a quick 12-month lookback, pick one leak to shrink by 20 percent, and try two swaps this week that buy back cash without stealing time. Then tell us how it goes. If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs a nudge, and leave a review so more people find these tools. Your next money decision can feel lighter—let’s make it happen.

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Money Nerves
• 0:45 Naming The Fear And Why It Lingers
• 1:32 Year-In-Review Spending Analysis
• 2:35 Buckets, Bills, And Baselines
• 3:38 Groceries, Convenience, And Tradeoffs
• 5:00 Needs Versus Wants At Home
• 6:10 Finding Calm Through Tracking
• 7:20 Mindset Shift To Money As Tool
• 8:20 Living Below Your Means In Practice
• 9:20 Simple Steps To Start And Support

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Good evening, everybody. This is Still Roses Podcast. This podcast was created for women by women to elevate women's voices. I hope everyone is doing really, really well. Um it's January, it's cold, I'm cold, but we must press on. Now, something that I actually wanted to go over with you um is something that I've been tackling. Now, that's a financial awareness. Now, finances is something that I'm not comfortable with. And I like to be upfront about that. I am just not comfortable with it for a multitude of reasons. A lot of it stemming from just feeling anxiety around finances in general. That comes from a whole history, which I'm not gonna go into right now because this is a small episode. It's a mini clip. But there's a reason. There's a reason I have anxiety there. So this year I'm I've decided I need to tackle that anxiety. I can't have that happening. I need to be able to face finances without feeling like I'm gonna scream into my pillow. Now, a lot of folks, myself included, find finances scary because it's almost like tackling the unknown, but it feels a little bit like that. It feels a little bit like, oh my God, it's this huge, scary, frightening thing. I don't, what if there's not enough there? What if I don't have enough money? What if this? What if that? And all of it is alleviated once you start to dive in. And that's where I'm at at this point. Now, what I did to start, and the reason why I want to talk to you all about this is because I think that a lot of us have this problem. Women specifically, I've actually talked to a few podcast guests that have told me that. Women specifically and overwhelmingly are the ones who have anxiety around their finances and then also end up overspending on things because you're not paying attention to what's going on. This is the year that that gets corrected. So the first step that I took that I thought would be educational and help kind of move me into 2026 for what my goals are for the year was to do an analysis of 2025. Where did I spend my money? Where did it go? Because that's a huge important step. You need to see like where are your vices? Like, is it eating out too much? Are you going out too much? Are you spending it on Amazon too much? Raise your hand. I know it's me. Um, I'm basically keeping Amazon alive at this point. It's all me. But the the point is that you look at your financial analysis and determine, okay, I'm looking at this breakdown. Yes, you know, 60% of my finances went to uh house and utilities, okay, right? So it goes to your wherever you live and your utilities and like straight bills that you need to pay, right? That's the majority of it. That's gonna be the big bulk of it. From there, you start to look at the other categories because that's really where you're gonna start to see, where are my patterns and how can I course correct? Because do we need shoes every week? We would love to have shoes every week. I would like to buy new clothes every single week, but you don't, you don't need to. It would be wonderful, it'd be super fun, but you don't need it. We don't need all this. So it's almost like a rewiring of like, what are we doing here? So I went through this whole process of doing a 2025 analysis to see where I was at. It wasn't terrible. Surprise, surprise, by the way. Um, spending outside of the house bills and utilities uh was predominantly on groceries. Ding ding. Prices were so bad, that was where the bulk of my money went. So I did the whole analysis, and then from there, um, then from there, I went through going from the analysis, I then circled back to my current state. How much is my money in? How much is my money out? Now, this is important because you need to have a good understanding of like what is my bucket, and then from there, how much is coming out for each thing. Now you start with your must-habs. You start with your rent or your mortgage, all of your utilities and car payments. Then you go to transportation, if not car payments, do you have to pay for bus pass, that kind of thing, right? So you start breaking it down from there. And then it goes into for me, groceries is a big deal. Spend a ton of money on food for my family. That I don't think is gonna go away. But I can be more mindful of how I'm doing that. I will admit, I was leaning quite heavily last year on grocery delivery services. It's something that really helped, to be perfectly honest. The convenience of it to not have to go and physically spend two hours at the grocery store shopping and then bringing everything home to have someone just deliver it. That was a huge convenience for me and a time saver, to be perfectly honest. Last year I did a lot of things that I did invest it in specifically because I was just trying to save myself some time. Now, this year I'm being much more cautious. And thus, grocery delivery is on the back burner a bit. Granted, it's only mid-January, but I am being very mindful this year. And I'm like, do I really need this? I can go pick it up. Or I can go shop at the discount grocery store and maybe make things a little bit lighter on myself. Because on that note, part of my analysis also was a food analysis, and I was able to calculate that my family eats about 250 eggs a month. That's frightening. Um, it's a matter of going through everything that comes in and out and really seeing like, do I need to do this? Do I need to be spending$20,000 on shopping a year? No, you probably don't. Now, granted, my kids grew like three sizes last year, so I had to spend more money because I had to clothe them all the time. But if there's areas where you can scale back, maybe you're not getting them designer outfits because they do grow so fast and they grow out of it so quickly. There's other ways to think about it. Now, I'm starting to shift the way that I think about things because do I need to buy them clothes every week? No, probably not. Every month, maybe, maybe not. Sneakers, definitely, because I can already see them outgrowing them. But you see what I'm going through? It's more of a what's needed versus what do I want to do. Now, I have to tell you, I've started to enjoy managing this and really taking a look and saying, okay, uh, for the rest of the month, I have X amount of dollars. That's all I'm gonna have. So I can't spend on anything outside of what I think might fit into that X amount of dollars. And on top of that, I'm not gonna spend because I know I only have this bucket left. And so I'm not gonna spend it frivolously on stuff on Amazon. And I keep mentioning Amazon because that's like my that's it. Like I shop on Amazon constantly. And that's really where a majority of my money was going. Now, granted, again, I buy the kids' protein shakes on Amazon, I buy snacks on Amazon, but I don't need to buy those particular items on Amazon. I went this time and I did bulk shopping and I took advantage of some grocery sales that were happening, and I stocked up for what I'm hoping for is the next two weeks. This is kind of that whole budgeting aspect I was talking about. And again, I am actually finding this kind of fun to deal with. One of the bigger things that has always been an issue for me, especially in 2025 at the end of it, my anxiety about not having enough was through the roof. And I was constantly at night before bed having these massive anxiety attacks internally. Now you couldn't, if you just looked at me, it would look, it was looking like I was just laying down. But the reality was inside of my body, I was screaming at the top of my lungs because of the pressure that I was feeling. And after I got through it and I got to the other side and I was able to balance everything out, I made the decision that pressure is not welcome here. How can I alleviate that pressure by making myself aware? How can I make myself aware? Dig in, do your research, make sure you know your money's going, make sure you know where every single dollar is going out, set up your auto payments, anticipate what's happening, do the financial analysis. These are the things that are most important. Now, on the flip side of it, removing the anxiety for money and making sure you're looking at it as a tool that's going to support you and help you is incredibly significant. Because once you change how you feel about money, that's when some other doors are going to open up. I've talked here before about the abundance that I received when I was more in alignment and more in tune with what was going on around me. That fell off quite a bit for me in 2025. And I went down a path that wasn't in alignment. And I started coveting a lot of things that I didn't have, but I just wanted. Wanted a bigger house, wanted to have more luxury, wanted to go on an extravagant, extravagant trips. All these wants are piling up to something that is going to be a bubble that eventually bursts if you're not actually there yet. When you're living beyond your means, you're setting yourself up for failure. So the goal is to live below your means. Live below your means. Can you afford to go out to dinner every Friday night? Yeah, you can, but you shouldn't because you need to save that money and put it to the side for something else. Now, I'm not talking about like saving savings because eventually it's going to go into if you're doing investments or if you're trying to do a business venture. The point is not to think of things as just free spending, but to really start to think critically. Is this the best use of this tool that I've been given? Is this the best use of this money? In some instances, yes. We ate takeout a lot this past weekend because I'm like, I had a little reprieve. I was able to put a little bit extra money there. And honestly, it was nice. It was nice to be able to have a little bit of a break, but it can't be all the time, right? It's something that, like, unless you're really set up that way and you're already financially well off and you're totally fine, then go ahead by all means, enjoy your, your, your means. But for somebody who's middle class and somebody who still does have to look at like grocery prices, which I think is the majority of us, it's important to take those steps. So I do encourage you, if finances give you anxiety, if your paychecks and checking accounts give you anxiety, take a step back. Look at everything you have, write it down on paper, and then you're gonna be able to see a really clear path forward. And that anxiety is gonna start to go away, which is such a beautiful thing. There's a lot of financial tools out there, there's a lot of financial checklists out there. I'm probably gonna add one to my Etsy shop just to help with people with balancing their books and everything because it is tough. It's it's hard to do, but it's important and it's significant to what we're going through. I hope you found this episode informative. I know it's a little bit boring, but again, this is something that's been going on for a little while, and I'm only now really like buckling down and addressing it. Well, not only now, I did it when we bought our house too, but nevertheless, it never hurts to really look at things and make sure you know what's going on. But again, hope you found this informative. Um, I encourage you to take a look deeper at your finances, make sure you know where everything is, and I will catch you on the next one. Take care.