The Everyday Awesome Project
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The Everyday Awesome Project
67: Money Talk: Know Your Numbers
TRUTH= avoidance of your own financial clarity is creating more stress (mental, emotional and physical) than the actual numbers themselves!? In this motivation coach conversation, Sam and Polly dive deep into why so many of us resist looking at our finances, both business and personal, and explain the surprising energy drain this avoidance creates in our lives and businesses.
Together we will explore the uncomfortable truth about financial denial—it's not just about missing a few receipts or delaying your bookkeeping. This pattern of avoidance creates a mental and emotional burden that affects your decision-making, relationships, and ability to seize opportunities. As we reveal, most people have inherited dysfunctional money habits from their families, carrying forward patterns of stress and avoidance that don't serve them.
The good news? Simple, consistent habits can transform your financial experience. We share practical systems for tracking expenses, automating payments, evaluating recurring costs, and creating regular check-ins that keep you empowered rather than overwhelmed. You'll hear real examples of how small changes—like spending 30 minutes on a weekly "money date" or using simple apps to track transactions—can prevent thousands of dollars in unnecessary spending and create newfound clarity.
Whether you're managing personal finances or running a complex business, this episode offers a refreshing perspective that moves beyond shame and toward empowerment. Financial clarity isn't about perfection—it's about progress, awareness, and building the muscle of knowledge rather than dwelling in the weakness of denial. What's the one financial habit you could implement today that would start shifting this critical area of your life?
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hey, superstars, welcome back polly here, sam pruitt here.
Polly Mertens:What's up, beautiful humans hey, you guys, this is a topic we don't cover very often, but, man, it was a burning. It was a burning one for me. We're calling it know your numbersbers and Making Simple and Stress-Free Money Habits, right. So I think there's a lot. I think you and I, as habit queens, you know, we have good disciplines and stuff. That's really the bones of what we're talking about here, right?
Samantha Pruitt:Yeah, and you're next level. On the habit queen, to be clear, I'm pretty decent at it and not necessarily is finance my strongest, but, like in life, I believe in habits and disciplines and finances I'm pretty good. I'm pretty good, I've done a few things, you know, but we definitely work with humans on a regular basis around their business finances and even their personal finances, which, of course, these are also interlinked. So this information will be relevant to people who have personal finances which is all of you, by the way, whether you have a business or not. Everything that we're saying. Don't turn this off right now because you're like Bonnie, I got to go. Okay, you're the one that needs to really listen. We're talking to you.
Polly Mertens:We're talking to you right now, calling you out A hundred percent A hundred percent and I and I have to raise my hand and say like, okay, I've been in the place where I, and it was chaotic and messy and embarrassing and all this stuff, and it's like you know what. That's just no way to live, right, and and and really what we want. So we're going to rub on the wound a little bit. We're going to start this call off with, or this conversation off with, a little bit of rubbing in the wound, right, because what I see we call it tough love, like people.
Polly Mertens:It's like why, why don't people do a better job of knowing their numbers, looking at their numbers, keeping track of their numbers, looking at their numbers, keeping track of their numbers, running reports in their business or reconciling their bank account or whatever you know things that we hear is like I don't have time, right, or I might not like what I see. I think that's, I think that's a big one that leads to the avoiding, like I'll deal with it later. You know like, oh, year end is the only time I really need to figure that stuff out, right, because you know, just do it once a year for good old Sam. It's like come on.
Polly Mertens:Exactly. Well, what you and I were talking about before this was like the energy drain that that is.
Samantha Pruitt:It's a freaking chasm. It's like the Grand Canyon. Oh, it's a freaking chasm. It's like the Grand Canyon. Literally, it will suck the life out of you if you are in denial in this area of your life because it's a critical piece to your physical, like actual activity, physical, daily environment and emotional freedom. Yeah, yeah, it's like a straitjacket.
Polly Mertens:So disempowering. When I think about you know people think that oh, like having the habits of discipline around money, like putting your receipts in a folder or looking at your QuickBooks or setting it up right or, you know, setting up recurring payment, whatever it's like. Oh, you know, just, we just have so much BS baggage around it and stuff and it weighs us down. It's like it's. It's such a weight. I don't think people are present to it and what it caused it. Just like. Just like when you bring it up. It's like, oh, like it's just in the background, it's like a leak in the back of the business or in the back of the boat. It's like it's sinking you somehow. You just made it fast or slow and you just don't know. And you get so much more free and powerful. And you know, make better decisions, grow the business faster. Can you do this? I don't. Let me check the bank account. Do I have money for it right now?
Samantha Pruitt:You know what? I had this idea when you were just talking through that that a lot of what we see people have inherited in this really dysfunctional category of life called finances comes from their family and their upbringing. So my parents immigrated here to America with my brother and sister with nothing Okay With whatever was in the suitcase, literally got off the plane, wow. And we're like, okay, let's figure out how to make a living, feed these kids and, you know, build a life here. And that's a lot of people's stories. And even if it wasn't something like that, I guarantee, over the course of a lifetime, the upbringing of the human listening. They saw their family, their parents, their relatives or whatever, go through financial challenges and struggles and maybe some of them were extreme, maybe some of them weren't, maybe there was a lack of resources and a lot of pain and suffering around that, maybe there was too much resource and some dysfunction happened out of that as well. I mean, both of these things are possible.
Samantha Pruitt:And then everything in between and so that the young person growing up in that um experienced that emotionally, that hardship or that whatever, discomfort, dysfunction, and they've just carried it forward with them. Yeah, so let's start first by saying put that shit down, that don't belong to you that is stop.
Polly Mertens:Just because we were raised with chaos and dysfunction and avoidance and stuff doesn't mean we have to carry that out. We don't have to recreate that ever for the rest of our life. Uh-uh, it ends here like it no ends here Right Exactly.
Polly Mertens:Yeah, and you know there's so much to be said about what you just said. I was like re-presencing myself to just the scarcity or the chaos or the lack or the what, if or what's going to happen, right, whether you're on a roller coaster with your family or they were doing well all the time, whatever, but like people don't talk about it. You know, we talked about, like, whether love is expressed in a family or whatever. Like finances are hardly ever. No, no, they're like you feel it, like you know, like you see the fight and my parents, what is it all the marriages? How many of them break up because of fighting and stuff like that it's. It's obviously the tension it creates, but it can also like, if you get real with it, you get present to it, like it can be a power, like I remember one time and this, this was when I was like keenly tracking and knowing that like I took a lot of integrity around my finances.
Polly Mertens:I remember teaching a class and it was uh, I was teaching us starting a business class and stuff and I was it's funny that we're talking about this I was sharing with my students about the importance of setting up good business financials because they were not in business yet and they were wanting a business.
Polly Mertens:I said it's really good. And I said, do you know that I can tell you how much money is in my wallet right now? By looking on my phone, like I know, not just like like, like in my wallet, not in my bank account, but like because I tracked where all the money was going, like I could tell you how many dollars and cents I had in my wallet, and it didn't have to be down dollars and cents whatever, but like I knew it, like I took it, I got integrity with my money instead of. You know, what I saw with my parents was not integrity with their money, it was kind of like my mom's purse was always like money's kind of all. Here they're not in a, some of it's in the wallet, some of it's not, you know, and it's like that just was her and that's still her reality. You know, if I go into my mom's purse, today.
Samantha Pruitt:Well, so a little bit of this is generational. I have older friends and people that I have known that would walk around with a lot of their cash in their wallet or hidden in their house. House, yes, in strange places.
Samantha Pruitt:I had one friend that put it in a sock drawer. I mean, these are real stories. I'm talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Yeah Right, a lot of control issues and concerns around the safety of their money and whatever. And then now I've seen the polar opposite with this next generation and everything going digital. I'm an old schooler, I know you're a digital queen around people having zero clue because it's in the digital space. So it's like they've given it up to someone else, as if it's someone else's money and not theirs. And you know, just trusting in the digital that somehow it's working itself out.
Samantha Pruitt:What a bizarre pendulum to think about in the course of our lifetime, how this has swung. We're asking people not to become neurotic around their money, but like to take ownership and control and ultimately gain freedom through this process, through this knowledge, through habits.
Polly Mertens:You know, it's a lot like we liken a lot of things to because we've done so much with training and nutrition and stuff like that. It's like there's between, yes, the difference between kind of having blood tests that tell you what's going on inside of the physiology of your body, like what's your biology inside it, are your numbers high or low? You know, like you're having symptoms or not having symptoms like how are you doing right? Like we've seen fit people pass away that people just be gone the next day or seemingly fit right.
Polly Mertens:Yeah but numbers don't lie. Your blood number, whether it's your blood pressure measurement, whatever. So this is along those lines. It's like let's get real with the numbers. So we know, we can track it, we can measure it, we can be empowered. So the uncertainty is draining your energy, so let's get certain. That's what we're really wanting to hit home. So I think we covered it, okay. Okay. So why does knowing your numbers matter? Why is that important? Right? What are, what are some of the ways that we see it, helping and helping business owners or individuals?
Samantha Pruitt:I don't see how you can make one decision as simple as like what to have for dinner or in the workspace, who to hire, how much money to spend on marketing, whatever business decisions, okay, decisions that you make on the daily and, by the way, we make hundreds, if not thousands, of them each and every day, consciously or unconsciously. How could we possibly make these decisions with any sort of wisdom, intellect, without having information, knowledge? I'm just confused about that.
Polly Mertens:Yeah yeah, it's, it's getting real. You know, I think about you. One of your clients is a hotelier, you know, and so it's like, are they doing well or not doing well? Like is it? You know, you could kind of like take a temperature from the front desk person sorry, have you seen a lot of people come in the front door? Like that's one way. Or you could like print a report or you could, you know, ask your team to you know tabulate and really give you actual numbers, right, it's like how did we do what I know in hotels? It's about occupancy rate. Right, it's like you want to maximize the occupancy for the price. Like you know you don't want too much occupancy and you're giving the rooms away. But you know it's back and forth. Right, but you make those choice decisions with good data, with the numbers, how the business is doing. Right.
Samantha Pruitt:I mean just setting daily pricing in any business, setting your prices right or understanding. Do we need to have a sale or we don't need to have a sale? Do we need to hire new staff or we can't afford to hire new staff, or whatever? And same for the human at home who doesn't have the business. Should you go out and have steak and lobster for dinner tonight, because that's just what you feel like eating, or should you stay home and make a bean and cheese burrito? Okay, these are really different decisions, yeah.
Polly Mertens:Yeah, yeah for sure. And you know, I think in the the thing that I've seen recently in that maybe this can hit home for business owners as well, and I'm sure people are feeling it, If not seeing it is costs have kind of gone up a little bit.
Samantha Pruitt:Oh, dude, don't get me started. I mean for all of us.
Samantha Pruitt:Yeah it's mind boggling.
Samantha Pruitt:I was traveling recently and I went into a store in a different town than I normally shop in and I've watched in my own local stores, of course as it's crept up but I really was sort of blown away at how much higher the prices were in this other town, and this wasn't in a community of wealthy individuals, and it really was quite disturbing for me because I felt like I live in a pretty nice area, you know, with moderate working class or upper class humans, and I know what they're paying for milk and eggs and bread or whatever and then I go to this community that is not of the same economic level and they were actually paying higher prices and I was freaking, shocked and also furious.
Samantha Pruitt:So everywhere we go, for whatever all reasons the businesses are putting setting their prices, we're all feeling it, and some of us are feeling it at a higher level than others, and it's really kind of a scary time. So even more critical than ever for people to be paying attention that pennies add up, dimes add up, quarters add up and dollars add up.
Polly Mertens:So, really, you know, if you haven't taken a look at what your cost of goods are, meaning, the cost of doing your business, whether it's the product that you're selling, the service that you're delivering, the people that are cleaning your offices, the you know whatever marketing spend, you know all the things, like if it's all sort of creeping up and your numbers aren't creeping up in terms of what you can sell for, what you're selling for, you know who you're selling to, whatever. Like you've got to be evaluating all of this. And only by knowing your numbers you know and one of the other things too too, is like seasonality, right, some businesses have high seasonality, like you know what can you do? You know there's. You know, if you have a retail business, it's very clear. And even in your personal life, you spend more money at a certain time of year. You bring in more money in the fourth quarter, right, like budgeting for that cash flow, managing that cash flow, so and so you know, when you know your numbers, there's just fewer surprises.
Polly Mertens:You know it's like like I know what it takes to run this business. You know it's not like a shock kind of thing. Or you can see when some bills haven't, you know like a bill hasn't been paid, or see, like I I just got a bill that I thought, well, I, I told the person, you know, take it on my credit card or whatever. And they, they sent me a thing and said, oh, it didn't, it didn't run, like I guess I wrote the number down or whatever. And it's like, yeah, that person's not getting the money. If they weren't keeping track of that, you know. It's like, so, you know, I get a reminder about it to two months later. It's like, oh, I just like knowing these things and I budgeted for it, you know, I build for it and whatnot, but and then missed opportunities.
Samantha Pruitt:Right? Well, ultimately that's the biggest cost is the freedom slash, opportunity side of the equation that people are literally robbing themselves of. Business owners are robbing themselves every day of being nimble enough to, on the fly, make decisions and pursue new opportunities and shed ones that are not serving their business model or their business strategy, their outcome goals. Right, yeah, so we wasted three months, six months or whatever opportunities pass. These are fish in the pond. They will swim by. They're not going to sit there and stare at you with their mouth open. Put the hook in me. Put the hook in me every day. Right, Like that's gone now.
Polly Mertens:We lost that opportunity, yeah, and different opportunities, have different value and cost and whatnot, and it's like if you're not knowing, you know. So, for example, I was going to tell a story about you know knowing your numbers from, let's say, a marketing spend, right. So in technical language of marketing, if you do online advertising like a pay per click or you pay for a lead or something like that, we call it a cost per click or a cost per lead or cost per acquisition. You know those different costs. So it might cost you. In the days of Google AdSense you'd spend. It used to be a lot less. But let's just say, $50 for somebody to click, or $5 for them to click over right, and how many of those clicks they come over to our website does it take for us to convert one actually into a sale? So in our former business we, you know, we knew the cost per click for Google was. It was like $2,500 for that person to turn into a sale. So if on the back end we're not making, you know we have to deduct that from every sale. It's like guess what? That's a sunk cost to get that sale, to get that opportunity, if you will. $2,500 in lead transactions, not to mention all the phone calls and all the other work went into like nurturing that lead and all that stuff, but 2,500 hard costs If we didn't keep track of that and know, and then also there would be new lead channels coming out.
Polly Mertens:There's little directories that focus in on, you know, like marketing is. You know, oh, should you advertise? Like I was working with this one client. I was like you know what's your marketing budget? Didn't know. I'm like, oh, for gosh sake, you know, are you doing social media? Yeah, where you spend your money. Well, you know, sometimes I boost my instagram post. It's only 50 dollars to just sort of like throw it at the wind, throw it, it at the wind.
Polly Mertens:I'm like and like. There's a Kenya thing, like you know, to get a couple of like visitors, like if you took some of the, you know, if you did that a couple of times a week, like $50, like, and then they and they weren't spending any money on professional photography, and this particular business was very visual. No money on professional photography, but throwing fifty dollars into the wind every so often to boost the post, I'm like, okay, wow, what, what? What are we trying to do here?
Polly Mertens:you know, so you know, being real specific, so all right. And then let's talk about the fun stuff of getting people in action. Right, like okay, I think we got them a little pissed off at the way they've been behaving and like avoiding, I mean slacking around a little bit, like all right, what can we do? What can we do?
Samantha Pruitt:Solutions. Let's talk about some solutions, shall we? Yeah, well, you've got a whole list of habits there. Maybe we should kind of go one by one and we can talk through them a little bit.
Polly Mertens:Yeah, I think you know I would bucket this into one time things and then recurring things, right. So you're great at the discipline. You know, like, you know the daily taking your supplements. Or you know, get into your gym, you know, whatever. These are very similar. Look at your life and your money. You have discipline. Sometimes there's a one time setup like, oh, you got to get a gym membership right. Or you got to, you know, sign up for that yoga studio or whatever. It is right, like, okay, I got to do that one-time setup, great, I've got a relationship, got this thing In money. It's like, oh, get a software, get an app, get a routine, get a place for you to keep track of things, right. So you're great, like you said, like old school, you know.
Polly Mertens:So we still live in a world where we're gonna get a receipt, whether you keep that receipt. So technically, for tax purposes, every receipt needs to be saved for a minimum of seven years. So you gotta hold on to it or you gotta take a picture of it. You gotta somehow store it. You don't actually have the paper one, but you have to have a visual that that thing happened. It can't just be a transaction in your bank account or your credit card, if you've ever been through an audit. They're like, show me all the receipts, like, show me proof that these transactions like what is that $100 you spent at Home Depot? Or whatever this type of thing. So you know, quickbooks is the go-to. I think it's just one of the best ones. There are specialty ones.
Polly Mertens:Some people might listen to this might have a specialty operation or a CRM or an operating system that they run their business on. Great, it can be whatever it is, but have it and use it. And if you have a bookkeeper or someone that helps you with your business, fantastic, you've invested in your business and the livelihood of that. Keep an eye on that bookkeeper, you know. Make sure they know what they're doing. But it's the one time setup for yourself.
Polly Mertens:You know, like I have a program that I found used to do Mint. Did you ever hear about Mint? Or like Intuit has credit karma, things like that. So when Mint went away, I went to a program called Empower, right, and so it's a free software that takes all my transactions, put it in a little display and I can go in and categorize them as often as I wanted to. I can go to my bank statement, but it's not all categorized. I don't know what was this for. Come the end of the year, when I want to do my taxes, I need to know the category. Did I spend it on health things or the cats?
Samantha Pruitt:So you do that weekly, monthly, quarterly.
Polly Mertens:Yeah, so weekly, weekly, and everybody can have your own whatever. I think if you're running a business, especially a high transaction or high, you know, so like when we were in construction, there's receipts flying around every day, right?
Samantha Pruitt:Oh, definitely.
Polly Mertens:You can't do that on a weekly basis, like you'll just have this pile of it and I mean maybe you can put it into a folder and somebody scans them all. But I mean the best thing is like in that moment, just snap, quickbooks has an app on the phone. These days A lot of these apps are mobile. You can just take a quick picture of it, throw it away like, save that picture, and it'll go. Come up with whatever the tool is that you want to use, get that relationship with something. And then it's the discipline, it's the habit.
Polly Mertens:So QuickBooks for a business or small business or what are the personal ones that you feel strongly about? Well, I use Empower. That's just a free one, but QuickBooks also has Quicken. I believe Quicken still exists for private and there's there's so many these days I don't want to speak because it really depends on what people want to do. Find something, just like I love YouTube. That's how I found Empower. I was like, oh, when I was leaving Mint, it was like best alternatives to Mint, right, as a program, right, just go. You know, the guy came up with five. Or you can chat GBT this stuff. You know, go into chat GBT and say what are the top five most common or best uses for small business owners, which is QuickBooks or or in your industry, your industry specific or personal. So yeah, and then set it up, and then I'm a big fan.
Samantha Pruitt:And if you can't set it up, get somebody to do it for you. Ok, mr, I'm too busy, mrs, I don't have time. Whatever, all the stories are Fine, we'll give you some grace. Find somebody. There are people who live for this, by the way. Find somebody, there are people who live for this, by the way. I've worked with accountants, bookkeepers, cpas, all the people who love this, live and breathe for this kind of stuff.
Samantha Pruitt:I'm like, okay, do it. Yes, and then those people who we love and adore and they're worth every frigging penny that you'll invest in them, the good ones, have them report to you weekly or quarterly. Give me some reports, show me what's going on, let's talk about it. Don't just be like, okay, so I've passed it off to Sally, fred, charlie, whatever's, and then I'm going to walk away now. Oh, no, no, no, no. But they're there to facilitate the tool of reporting and communication.
Polly Mertens:And you know this is just one dimension. If we're talking about reporting of your business, you know I'm hopeful that, depending on the level you're operating your business at or your life at, you know you have check-ins with yourself. You know if it's a sales team, you know you're checking in with the sales team every week. Like what'd y'all do? Like I need to see it, like we need to know right or how are the sales right, whatever right, or how are the sales like whatever, whether it's an executive team or it's a specific sales team or people you're managing like how is the performance? If we're not monitoring and managing it every week, who knows it?
Polly Mertens:gets it's too far to go off the rails. If we're not, we don't take a look at it, right?
Polly Mertens:so yeah I agree the the. You know what we used to do, um, from an accounting standpoint, from a bookkeeping standpoint for business owners is you know, you go out and do all these transactions in a week, right, whether, however high a volume you have maybe it's not every week you need to do this, but like in construction when we were flipping houses. So you get all these transactions, bookkeeper puts them all together and at the end of the week they're like hey, there's a couple I don't recognize, there's these few people that you paid some things to, or whatever. What the heck is this?
Samantha Pruitt:if we waited until december and we would have no idea I'd be like make it up, even if it says charlie's plumbing. What did charlie the plumber do?
Polly Mertens:I don't know yeah, don't know exactly. And which house did you do it on? Because we bought you. We were doing it multiple houses. No-transcript. Charlie worked on house A, oh, and that needs to come off of the profitability of house A. So, yeah, you can micro do it if you have that. But the important thing here is the reporting. Looking at your numbers like what you don't measure, you can't manage.
Samantha Pruitt:Yeah, and from an old school vantage point, or even a more like personal finance slash. Old school vantage point is people a lot of times live within families, so whether they have a partner or whatever, they all have going on. So there's shared resources. Yeah, oh, talk about messy. Okay, because no two people think of money the same way and act and operate their finances the same way. So if you can join money with somebody I mean if you have not, and it's uncomfortable but too bad so is the stinky laundry and the dog poop in the front yard Okay, you've got to communicate. So creating even a basic spreadsheet which is like a budget and where is our money being spent, whatever, and then having regular conversations around that so you can quickly see that one of you maybe is out of alignment before it becomes a huge issue.
Samantha Pruitt:And next thing. You know you have a lot of conflict and strife around the fact that the bank account is dwindling because somebody thought it was a really good idea to go buy a new boat when the other person's over here squirreling away and saving pennies for the summer vacation. I mean these things happen on the regular because, you know again, we coach small business owners and also human beings who belong to families, and we do hear these.
Polly Mertens:These are real stories these things really happen, for sure, for sure, and my favorite one in you know, in this digital age I'll tell a story about um is those I want to call them like the hidden recurring costs right, so I have a great experience with it, yeah so we had a new bookkeeper in our flipping company, um, and I was like, okay, this is a good time, let's take, let's take a real good look at.
Polly Mertens:I want to like run me a report of the last I think it was 90 days or four months of any expense that has recurred every month in those months, like it's not just a one-time thing, right, not that we couldn't look at those too, but I was like, what is recurring?
Polly Mertens:Like, what are our like what's the cost that's going out of the business every month, whether we do 10 sales or two sales, right? And I was kind of shocked. I was like, holy, I found close to $2,000 a month of things that we had discontinued doing and we hadn't turned it off, like. We were like, like you know, like let's say it was a software, and we're like, oh, we're not using that software anymore in our mind, like, oh, we don't go into that program and use it. Guess what we're paying for it, like, even though we're over here in this new one, we're paying it for it too. I had forgotten to turn off the other one, right, and there was multiples of those. And when you have like a couple hundred dollars in software, you know, or like people have a little apps that they sign up for, you know?
Samantha Pruitt:Oh my gosh Streaming subscriptions, apps subscriptions so anything that's subscription based is. You're like number one red flag. All things are flashing right now because you wanted to stream the football game one time for some friends coming over. You had a party, but it doesn't mean for the rest of your life. You need to have this streaming, or the app or the, whatever the thing is. Or gyms people join gyms and they're like all hot and bothered. Well, guess what? It's now spring. Have you walked in the door of that gym for the last 60 days? You know you're still paying for it.
Polly Mertens:Get in there. Yeah Well, this is one for me. I had this little wake up call to myself. You know my, my internet bill, right, like my internet bill. I kind of knew. You know, I was like, oh, this much.
Polly Mertens:And they were sneaky. Like five, like $5 would increase over here, and then another five and like not. Like as soon as the number like went into, like I was like, wait a minute, that bill used to be like 120. All right, and all of a sudden it's like 145. And I was going wait a minute. When did I what? What did I add? What's going on what? What did I add? What's going on? You know those little kind of sneaky things. So you got it, especially the internets, the phones, whatever. So run a recurring, like take a look at your bank statements over the last few months and this might be just I could run a report, because we had quickbooks but just print it out and manually look at it, you know, and, and take a look, is there anything in there that you no longer want to be paying for?
Samantha Pruitt:but you forgot that you are paying for right Things like that, and then quarterly, looking at the bigger things from a business vantage point or from a personal vantage point also. This is all relevant Insurances, other things that are a big cost of business or cost of living in your expense mode, your overhead, so to speak, and you're like well, all this stuff's been creeping up, hence the economy and our dysfunctional situation. So there are many, many instances you can go back, renegotiate with those fools, Otherwise you'll be leaving because it is a competitive marketplace still in many of these arenas.
Samantha Pruitt:So you can go around and get some quotes and just take a little time, or put your bookkeeper, or whomever, on the task. Maybe your spouse loves these projects, I don't know. Find somebody, if you don't want to do it, to be the one to like. Pick up the phone, start making some calls. Oh, next thing, you find that there's an internet offer from another provider. You know, definitely cutting hundreds, if not a thousand dollars a year off of this expense, and you're like A couple of phone calls Hi. Hello. Off of a phone call.
Polly Mertens:Exactly A couple of like you're working way too hard to be letting this money just fly out. You know it's like the boat's leaking out the back and you're not paying attention. You're wondering why you're paddling so hard. It's like, well, good God, let's fill the leak. You know like, okay, so let's stop the money leaking out the back, whatever that looks like. And knowing what your true expenses are Maybe there are some and you know, are you getting real? Are you earning enough for all these expenses? Do you need to make some tough decisions? Are there things you can streamline? Can we cut some things? And then I always do you know saving up for those things that expenses in the future? You talked about a vacation or a big purchase or a capital expenditure in your business. Is there something like you know what we need to like? Do an overhaul of the blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. The website needs to get revamped, the building needs to get painted, whatever you know Kids need, you know new shoes or whatever it is, you know.
Samantha Pruitt:I just want to point out that what I have also found some of the guiltier players are the ones that have good cash flow and are making good money. So it's like, well, I'm fat and happy now, so I'm going to let it free flow, as if this will forever be a thing. Yeah, that's also a mistake. I've seen it's like well, yeah, we're good. I've literally had some people say it's only money, because they're currently flowing in the money.
Samantha Pruitt:And that might be happening for a couple of years and their business might be blowing up or whatever is all going on there. That's not a forever thing. It takes one health crisis, one natural disaster, one big customer that you lose, one called life change. The game will change instantly, and then they'll be doing the oh shit and there's just no way to take care of money.
Polly Mertens:Period, like, just like, oh, it doesn't matter, it's only money. Like money's not going to keep hanging around with you. If that's how you read it, it's like oh fine, if it's come and go for you, I'll see you later then.
Samantha Pruitt:So to me that's a form of denial. From the experience of people I've worked with that have given me that kind of response, that was their form of being in denial, exactly, yeah.
Polly Mertens:Yeah, so yeah, I'm making plenty right While you still get drag of it. So the other thing too is like lots of automations. You know like, have checks go out on recurring things, set up recurring things with your banks, just have those things that can be recurring or automated. I'm a big fan of you know like I don't write a check to my landlord, it's like no, but just, it's always automated Right. Or all my utilities You're a little more old school.
Polly Mertens:I save that time. You know anything that you can. I do get an email to see what you know, every utility bill that comes in, I see it. Okay, great, it's paid. I don't have to spend the time clicking and doing all that so cool.
Polly Mertens:And then one I'll drop here if anybody does mileage tracking, because I, for so many years in real estate and travel, all that you know your, your travel, like if you're traveling to a conference or if you're traveling a lot of times we're traveling to see clients or whatever. That time there's an expense. Either you can keep track of all the little expenses, like your gas mileage, or you know how much you spent on gas, the trip or whatever. But mile, iqq, mile, and then the iq, like I and q um is the app that I love. It's like it's like five bucks and it'll keep track of all my. It's like gps related, and I just go in and I tell it business, personal, business, personal and you can add like real specific things, like this was a trip for you know, going to see a client, whatever, um, and that's perfect for taxes. Like I'm not having to write the old school, like when I was first in real estate years ago, before all these apps, you had to write all your mileage down.
Polly Mertens:Oh, for gosh sakes, it's like it's killing me now. But I look at it. I get thousands of dollars, you know, especially when I was thousands of dollars. So, anyway, my IQ All right. Right, let's break some of the habits down, like daily habits too. You know like, like, like if you had to have it's kind of a volume business um that you get receipts or you know things on the daily, have a daily habit, have an app, have a way of putting it into a folder, just don't you know. It's sort of like if you came home after your gym workout and you just threw things on the floor, like, and you didn't clean it up and put it into a hamper or something like that. Like, eventually you just walk into your room and there's a big pile of smelly, stinky stuff.
Samantha Pruitt:On your bed, where you're supposed to be sleeping. You had a story of somebody you discovered in a situation where stuff was on their bed, literally, and they couldn't sleep properly. Well, what the hell?
Polly Mertens:that's extreme behavior right there yeah, you guys, okay, in flipping houses we didn't go into always the nicest houses, right, and so I liken the houses that had, you know, the common uh, oh, there's clutter in the house and then the garage is full of shit and there's some sheds that have stuff, whatever. That's like one degree, and then next degree is like, oh man, they've been stockpiling stuff in the backyard and whatever. And then there's, yeah, a couple where it was like, um, the house had paths, you know, I mean like it's um, it's unfathomable to me how long it took to get like. It must have started with like a couple things on the floor and then a couple more things and then literally like her bed, half of it, you know, it was like eight feet off the ground. You know, like the whole room was just and there was a place where she slept on half the bed and then a trail like a little tunnel to the, to the bathroom and then to the kitchen, and it was like wow, so that's the extreme like that's that's
Polly Mertens:when you never, you never do anything about it, right? So let's be the opposite of that Like, yeah, take it, do something with it, like, put it in that place, give it, give it a home and have it go in there and then, weekly, you know, like I talked about, you know, maybe you need to review with your bookkeeper, like your categories, or you know you need to just look at oh okay, did I have? You know, maybe you put all of your paperwork, you get your bank statements, you get your credit card, whatever you may, just put it in a folder and then maybe you need to file it. But you know once a week. So just Look at, look at my finances, look at my investments. What are my things coming up? Where's? You know, have my cashflow in out, all of that, right?
Samantha Pruitt:Know what's happening. So yeah, even on the category front, I've frequently and I'll look as an outsider you do this too into someone's business or finances and be like this seems strange, right.
Samantha Pruitt:Because, we have a different perspective than the insiders in the space and many, many times find that things have been miscategorized or things are extremely out of balance. You know, if you're doing comparisons on P&Ls and balance sheets and stuff like that, like whoa, just I'm going to question everything. I love a good highlighter, right, and I'm not. I mean we could be wrong, but we're seeing as an outside perspective of like something here doesn't look right, let's dig deeper.
Polly Mertens:You know what you're pointing out and this is really key that I started learning this, you know, and I love to share this with people. So I want to, if you guys can get a picture of this. And if you're not running a business but I think you can still do this in your personal life right, it's month over month reports, or so you can look at year over year. So, instead of like, let's say, a profit and loss, or like if you looked at this month's bank statement, or like the money that came in, what did I spend it on and how much do I have left at the end of it. But in a business we call it a profit and loss. The top is how much money you're bringing in, how much money went out, and then what are we left with our net profit, right? Well, if you just look at one month, it's kind of like, you know, like just looking a little bit narrow, like okay, how'd we do this month? You know it tells you one picture. But if I, if I can look over the past six months, I have a much better chance of seeing anomalies, like you said, right? So if I look at six months and I see line items. Like I see all the expenses, I see the mortgage, I see the utilities, I see the entertainment, I see the food budget. You know, whatever it is right If something is a little bit higher or lower. You see the anomaly that way. So, doing month over month, so each month, we see it stacked up next to each other. Your eyes can then kind of get a picture like, oh, that's, that's, that's the same amount.
Polly Mertens:Every you know, like heating bills, like we had an Airbnb we were running right, like the heating bills and the air conditioning bills. It was in a hot and cold climate and it's like, you know, we had budgeted a certain amount, what we thought the utility was going to be, and it was like holy smokes. You know, it would just like shoot up $600. It was like, okay, what are we doing about that Airbnb to try and get that number? Like we could look at it and go okay, we know now it's $600. You know, we know the total. If you will, if we invested in, you know, an air conditioning system or we did some sort of insulation or whatever, like could we make an investment in something that would bring that number down so we didn't have these spikes and whatnot.
Samantha Pruitt:Even a controlled thermostat. Yeah, because people are crazy. I'm hot, I'm cold, the windows are open, they're literally like have the signage.
Polly Mertens:Yeah, at one point we just said, yeah, can leave the. Leave the windows closed like we assign it.
Samantha Pruitt:Yeah, turn the lights off.
Polly Mertens:That was free putting a sign up yeah, and then setting it, and then when you know they can do now in airbnbs I can change the temperature from my phone of their it's like they turn it back.
Samantha Pruitt:I'm like nope, nope, nope have a naughty, naughty guest, you're like freezing them. I'm just kidding. I'm sure we don't do those things.
Polly Mertens:But it's kind of funny thinking about it. But noticing the waste, noticing the actual expenses, like we talk about, and are there things. Maybe you need to go, you know utility company, like I did with mine. There's power companies will lower your baseline rate if you use like, so like don't do your laundry when they need all the air conditioning running. I'm sure you get some of this. You know base rates and stuff like that. Right yeah.
Samantha Pruitt:Yeah. Or what makes me crazy is when they estimate and then they're radically off because they're estimating based on, like the area, for example. Well, I live in an area OK, my husband and I live in a large house with three bedrooms OK, we have the grace of that. But there's people around me that maybe have six or eight family members living in that same space Right, so the usage in that space is completely different than mine. We happen to be in the same zip code. But they're like well, a lot of these companies estimate power usage or whatever, and I was like don't be doing that to me, because I don't want to get that giant bill that I didn't use that, and then I have a credit for the next few months, so you're affecting my cash flow. That cash belongs to me. It doesn't belong to you, mr PG&E, or whoever the hell you are, totally.
Polly Mertens:Yeah, good All right.
Samantha Pruitt:Any other habits, any other?
Polly Mertens:habits. So, you know, on a weekly basis, I would just say, like, so, monthly, have a money date, even just 30 minutes, like on the weekend. Look at your bank statements. If you have an app, you know, look at it. If you're a business, oh, please get your bookkeeper, please yourself, on a monthly basis, you know. So bookkeeping is usually like a trailing number, right. So usually, bookkeeping, by the 10th of the following month, they can give you a PNL profit and loss. So, like, demand that. If they're not sending that to you, get that.
Polly Mertens:If you're not doing it for yourself, start doing it. Like, make a commitment. Okay, what do I need to do to start getting the numbers into my QuickBooks, categorizing them? What do I need to learn? Do I need to hire someone? Do I need to get trained? What do I need to do? Like what? What's going to happen here? So this is like, you know, learning to eat better, learn, you know, healthier habits, right, like you and I talked about. It's like, okay, if we want to be in shape and fit and have a life and thriving and energy, it's like, need some movement. You need to plan for that. You need to. You know, shop smart. You know you probably didn't come out of the womb knowing exactly how to navigate that maze of a grocery store with all the junk food right.
Samantha Pruitt:And at first it could be uncomfortable and it might even hurt a little bit. Like I told you, my abs are killing me right now because I realized I hadn't do core work the whole time I was training for Ironman. So apparently I got a fluffy belly and then I went back to do core work and I was like, oh damn, are my abs in there anywhere? Okay, so again, if you haven't used these muscles around finance habits, it's going to be a little uncomfortable at first. Don't worry about it. It's growing pains, like everything else, and you will work through it.
Samantha Pruitt:You're worth it.
Polly Mertens:Yeah, yeah, you're worth it and and it's it's the outcome is worth it. The, the, the, the little bits of time. You know the stress, the anxiety, like we talked about in the beginning, of having these piles of backlogs, of not attention to something whatever see it's expensive taxes, all that stuff. It's draining you, it's absolutely draining you. So the investment of ticking away at it, creating little habits, and that's it's all it is. For most people, it's just some little daily or weekly habit that if they just started small and started doing that. And again, I want to say, like, it's not about perfect, like even if you did it, 10% better right now, like you just said, okay, I'm going to put my receipts in a folder every week so that I have them and I can file them.
Samantha Pruitt:I can find them.
Polly Mertens:I can find them. They're not just all over the house in the drawer in the car, whatever you know, my purse, whatever Right. Or like, choose an app, like investigate on just a little time YouTube, best apps, whatever for your thing, and choose something Right. If it's a business, 90% of you probably going to be a QuickBooks app.
Polly Mertens:If it's something else, great, pick one. Pick one and in the next 30 days, learn how to use it or hire someone to help you use it or figure that shit out. Let's go, let's go. So a couple key takeaways I just want to say is we said this a little earlier it's like if you don't track it, you can't improve it either. Can't get better at that thing, right, can't get better. Like if you're trying to lose weight or get in shape or whatever. Like if you're trying to do speed on your bike or whatever, you don't, you got to know how fast you're going right now. Right, so track it. Knowing your numbers is your business's superpower, like you can supercharge your effectiveness in your business. Make better decisions, take advantage of opportunities. Stop losing money. Get the holes filled in the boat. Right, and I love this one Be a money lady boss, right, yeah, like be a boss or Mr Boss.
Polly Mertens:Mr Boss, be a boss about your money, like don't just like leave it to it's like, oh, I don't know how to do it. No, be a boss with your money, let's get on it. Get some reminders, you know, have a monthly little ceo with yourself. Like, be your own cfo. And then again, like, a little consistency beats a perfectionist attitude, like, oh, if I can't do it perfectly, then I'm not going to do anything. So these small habits, they will transform your business over time. They'll transform you. Over time you will feel better about yourself and anxiety. So just aim for progress, not perfection, please. Yeah, exactly.
Samantha Pruitt:Yeah exactly.
Polly Mertens:How do we do what's what do you have to say?
Samantha Pruitt:What's a one?
Polly Mertens:thing. What do you want to leave them with?
Samantha Pruitt:Mine is not as pleasant as yours Sometimes. I'm gonna give them a good walk Rip the bandaid off. Yes, denial is a a weakness. It is a weak muscle. Living in denial is a weakness, that's a knowledge, knowledge and information is a strong muscle. It's that simple. Like being and living in denial is operating from a weak place. It's not empowered, so I'm not going to tolerate it anymore.
Polly Mertens:And if you're listening to this, you are freaking empowered. You are taking this on, yeah you're one of our people.
Polly Mertens:Yes, do something. So the takeaway is what is the one thing, if you started, that would start to make a difference in this? Is it you getting lazy about receipts, getting empowered about receipts? Is it not looking at your numbers? Looking at your numbers? Is it starting some automations? Is it getting an app? What is it? Getting a little educated, whatever? Just being honest with yourself what is it going to be? And promising it to yourself, like just being honest with yourself, like what's, what is it going to be? And I'm just saying it to yourself, like, okay, I'm going to take that on right now. It's time, it's time to grow up. It's time. It's time. Right on, I love it, I love it. All right, what can we share with our beautiful humans as we wrap up this day, this episode?
Samantha Pruitt:how your life and finances feel are more important than how they look.
Polly Mertens:Yeah, and how it feels is truth. Yeah, and every day is your opportunity to find your awesome.
