If you have struggled with budgeting in the past, you've either tried doing it and you failed, or you just feel like it's really overwhelming and not something you want to take your time doing.

The problem may not be you.

It may be the way that you're looking at budgeting in general, and in this episode today I'm going to break it down for you so that it feels doable and it feels like you can be successful right out of the gate, without having to track another spreadsheet to download another app.

To do it very simply, very easily, and you're gonna be able to save hundreds of dollars just in your first month.

So stay tuned.

Welcome to the Money Mom Podcast, the show where we empower moms to take control of their finances, break free from money stress and build a life of freedom, confidence and abundance for their families.

I'm your host, rachel Koons, mom money mentor and your personal cheerleader on this journey.

Whether you're here to save money, pay off debt or dream bigger for your family's future, you're in the right place here.

We believe that being a mom is already a full-time job, but your role in shaping your family's financial success is just as important.

And the best part, you don't need to sacrifice everything to start winning with money.

Let's get started.

This is the Money Mom Podcast.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Money Mom Podcast.

I'm your host, rachel Koons, and before we dive into today's episode, I first off just want to say thank you for all of the messages, reviews, the feedback that we got from last week's episode.

If you haven't listened to it, you can go listen to it whenever you want.

I broke down my experience with a GLP-1 and how my journey has gone, and it was a scary episode for me to record.

I'm not going to lie, it was something that I went back and forth on.

Do I even share it publicly that I'm on a GLP-1?

Should I record a podcast about this, because I'm not an expert in the field?

But a couple weeks ago I shared on social media that I wanted to show up more authentically online and in doing so, I just had this pause.

I just had this new realization, especially in our world now, where AI is such a prolific experience in our day-to-day life, where we are on social media or we're interacting with people online and AI is such a dominant force in that space, I can tell when someone is being authentic or whether they are scripting themselves or they're using, you know, chat, gpt to create their emails and their marketing.

It feels different.

It feels different and sometimes it's not conscious, sometimes it's subconscious, but I've noticed a change in how I feel like I'm showing up online and, in order for me to really create this connection that I want to with the women in the Money Mom Club and the people that follow me on social media, I just feel like authenticity now, in 2025, is more important than ever before, and in doing so, I kind of feel like I have to take off some masks.

I have to take off the mask that I've been wearing and that I have put on in order to be something that I feel like I'm supposed to be in an online space when I'm running a business, and not to say that I don't feel like it's been a good journey and I've done a business, and not to say that I don't feel like it's been a good journey and I've done a good job of showing up authentically online.

I don't think I am fake online, but I want to go even deeper into my authenticity and who am I truly and what are my unique abilities and what makes me me and why I'm here to help people, and how I'm here to help people and how can I show up authentically online so that the right people follow me, the right people are in my community and the right people choose me to be their coach and mentor, and so that was one of the first masks that need to come off, where it was like I'm just going to be open and honest about my experience on a GLP-1.

It seems silly, but that was a really like scary mask that I've been wearing and once I like ripped that off, it just kind of felt like the floodgates.

Now it feels like I I don't know.

It just feels so freeing and like I can truly be me and I don't care.

I do not give a rat's.

You know the word for what anybody thinks about me and I could not say that about myself two years ago.

I've done a lot of internal work.

I've done a lot of coaching.

I've gone to therapy.

I have truly embraced who I am, what I like, what I don't like, what my talents are, what my gifts are, what my weaknesses are, and I feel like I can show up, be myself, and the people that don't like me and aren't drawn to me, I don't care, it's okay.

It's okay that people don't like me.

One of my favorite books that I read in 2024, or no, it was this year, 2025, was the let them theory and I know Mel Robbins has gotten a ton of pushback on the let them theory Cause it's so simple but it really did change how I feel about other people and myself.

Like I'm going to let other people experience me the way they want to experience me and I'm going to love myself through it and I'm going to be okay and I'm not perfect.

I know that.

I know that I have a lot of things that might turn people off about me, but I also know that when I get the people that do love me and do appreciate me around me, like that's fulfillment in life and that is true honest connection with people, when I feel like I can be myself and other people can be themselves around me.

So I wasn't planning to like dive into that thought here on this podcast episode, but I do want you as a listener to know that, like I'm not putting on any masks.

I am Rachel Coons.

The Rachel Coons you see me on the podcast.

The Rachel Coons you see me on social media.

The Rachel Coons you see in the community at church on Sunday.

It's all the same, I don't change for anybody.

I am truly myself and thank you for being here and for listening to me, messaging me, having conversations with me, like I'm not here to just be throwing my voice out into the world.

I am here to connect with other moms, to help other moms to go on this journey with other moms, and that's.

It's been beautiful so far and I'm excited for the future.

Today's episode is kind of going on the same tangent of like let's take off another mask, let's take off another thought that I have that I kind of feel like maybe I've been sharing honestly.

But also can I be more honest in my viewpoint, and that is how I feel about budgeting and the budgeting world in general.

But also when people really struggle with budgeting, how do I help people through that problem?

I hear it so often and I think you probably have thought this one point in your life or not.

I mean, maybe you've always been a perfect budgeter and it's never been a struggle for you.

But I hear it so often that women really struggle to budget for a lot of different reasons, but one of them being it's time consuming, it's overwhelming, it brings a lot of shame into their life, it makes them feel controlled or restricted with their money and it just is another thing on your to-do list and I'm just going to sit here and say, yes, you're right, I feel the same way.

I don't think most, I mean, people love budgeting for the results that they get from budgeting, but most people wouldn't say like if I had the choice to like go to Disneyland for the day or stay at home and budget my checkbook and my bank account, like most people are going to choose doing the fun thing for budgeting right, budgeting is not I wouldn't characterize it as like a fun, exciting experience.

It sometimes brings up tension with your partner, where there's marriage conflict, because you may have different spending styles or you may have a different way that you wanna approach debt or anything like that.

So I just wanna say budgeting is one of my least favorite things that I have to talk about online.

Because I'm in the money space, because I help women with money in general.

One of those things, one of the many things that I can talk about online, because I'm in the money space, because I help women with money in general, one of those things, one of the many things that I can talk about, is budgeting.

There are so many keys and so many pathways to financial success.

Budgeting is just one of them.

So if you are like I hate budgeting and I will never do it and it's always failed for me, great, that doesn't mean you can't be successful financially.

It is one of the ways to go about controlling your money and really knowing what's happening with your money, especially if you struggle, living paycheck to paycheck, you're stuck in credit card debt.

Budgeting could be one of the answers for you, but it's not the only answer and I think that is what a lot of the budgeting people say is that, like, if you want to control your money, if you want to be able to have extra money at the end of the month, you have to budget.

Yes, and it's not the only way.

That is one of the ways.

So you're sitting there thinking, okay, well, what then?

Like, what else can I do?

First off, budgeting is all about saving money, right?

Budgeting is all about like what can I restrict?

What can I pull back on?

Another way that we can control our money better is have more of it, right?

It's not like if I wanna have extra money at the end of the month, I can either save or I could make more and extra money.

At the end of the month, I can either save or I could make more.

And a lot of moms because they don't want to go out and get a job or they don't know how to bring money into their family, they choose budgeting as an avenue for saving money.

But there's a way to look at budgeting that doesn't feel restrictive, it doesn't feel overwhelming and it doesn't really make you want to pull your hair out, and that's exactly what happened to me back in 2020.

Now, I've always been a very frugal person, right, I've worked a job since I was 15 years old, so I've had a steady income most of my life, and I always had extra money in the bank because I didn't like spending it.

I'm what you would call like a scarcity saver.

No-transcript, that's not everybody.

There's a lot of people out there that have no problem swiping their credit card and buying whatever the heck they want, but for me, I like the security of having a high number in my bank account.

I've always been that way, and so when it comes to like buying the new outfit or like keeping the a hundred dollars in my bank account, I would much rather keep the a hundred dollars in my bank account.

That's just my mentality.

Again, it's not I know that's not everyone but because of that, I never felt like budgeting was necessary and I didn't feel like I was overspending in very many areas.

There are some areas that I felt like I could probably pull back, like we could probably eat out less, I could probably spend less on, like, family experiences, but those are just areas that, like, were kind of important to me.

You know, not cooking every single night of the week is really important to me, because I want to be able to take a night off, and taking my family on family vacations is kind of a non-negotiable for me because I want those memories and experiences.

So in 2020, when I was like, okay, we had, we had just finished dental school in 2018, and dental school is one of, if not the most expensive professional degrees that you can get and we had gone to one of the most expensive dental schools in the nation.

So when I tell you we were in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt from dental school alone, that felt really overwhelming.

We also had goals where we wanted to buy a house.

We wanted to be able.

We had the junkiest cars ever.

We wanted to be able to update our cars, we wanted to be able to stay in California, close to our families, and so we had all these financial goals that we wanted to accomplish.

I was pregnant with my fourth baby and I just felt this push to how can we really lock in with our finances so that we can pay off debt but also just live this life that we had wanted to live, and live it with freedom, with financial freedom.

And so I didn't want to go out and get a job.

That was not the answer for me.

Again, four kids the price of putting them in daycare alone wouldn't make sense for me to go out and get a job, and so I locked in on okay, what can I do at home to help our family financially?

And obviously that's budgeting.

One of the ways to do it is through budgeting, and so I just started to get really keyed in to like where is the money going every month?

I downloaded the app Mint.

It's not Mint anymore, but that was one of the apps that you could download that like automatically tracked your spending and like.

For me, convenience and something that was automated was really important, right, because I didn't want to sit down at the end of the month and like, track the credit card spending.

Okay, this goes into family activities and this goes into household items and this goes into groceries.

Like, I didn't want to do that, I wanted it to be automated, and so mint automated everything for me.

So it would put it up into this nice little spreadsheet, this bar, graph, where it would show what categories we were spending our money on, and sometimes we'd have to adjust payments.

But it was pretty simple and I could log in and see okay, this month we spent this much in rent, this much in health insurance, this much in all these other budgets, and I just let it.

I just let it automate itself for a couple months.

And then, after a couple months, I logged into our account and I just looked at the numbers Okay, where's the spending?

Where are we spending more than we should be or more than we want to?

And where can we squeeze?

Where can we find extra money to like put that money into a housing account?

That was so we could buy a house, or put it into the family vacation fund.

And when I saw that we were spending $1,200 a month on groceries alone for my family of six, I was like that that feels like one of that is one of our highest spending accounts every month.

So highest was rent, second highest was health insurance and the third highest was groceries.

Now, I couldn't change the price we were paying on rent unless we wanted to pack up and move somewhere else.

I couldn't change how much we were spending on health, our health insurance because we were literally on the lowest cost plan that we could be on, and so the third highest budget was the one that I was like, okay, if I don't do anything else, if I don't focus on any of our other spending accounts, what if I just focused on this one budget and I just hyper-focused here to see if I could get our grocery spending down?

Now here's the other thing that I didn't say about at this time was that meal planning, getting dinner on the table, grocery shopping alone with my three and a half children one inside of my belly was a huge task for me.

It was exhausting.

I was spending hours in the kitchen every day breakfast cleaning up, then making lunch, then cleaning up, then doing dinner cleaning up.

Like it was.

Like I was spending hours in the kitchen every day breakfast cleaning up, then making lunch, then cleaning up, then doing dinner, cleaning up, like it was like I was spending most of my day in the kitchen.

I was shopping at least once or twice a week at the grocery store, and meal planning made me want to pull my hair out, like I just didn't want to do it, and so it just felt like I was like running on chaos mode when it came to feeding my family, and so when I looked at that budget, I was like okay, so here's what we're going to do.

I'm just going to focus on my grocery spending.

I'm not going to worry about any of the other budgets, I'm just going to focus on the grocery spending.

I'm going to see what happens.

And so you know, there's a lot of people out there, especially at the time when inflation started to kick on and grocery prices started to raise this was like 2020, 2021, people started sharing a lot of ways okay, this is what you could do to save money.

You can meal prep, or you can buy one protein and cook it and then eat that protein for the rest of the week.

You could coupon if you wanted to and spend hours shopping at all these different stores to save money.

There was a lot of different ways to save money.

But the way that my brain works and I've realized now that not everyone's brain works this way is like I am.

Efficiency is key for me.

I have to be the most efficient or else my brain goes mad.

Like when Brad is driving the car and we're trying to get to the grocery store closest to us.

If he takes away, that is not like the fastest way to get there.

I'm like Brad turn left, like this is faster and he's like chill out, we can take the scenic route.

And like my brain does not compute.

I do not like inefficiency and it's really funny and it shows up in a lot of different areas of my life but efficiency is the most important thing to me, and so when I was saving money on groceries, it was like if it wasn't efficient, no way not doing that.

If it costs me time, no way not doing that.

If it makes me feel like my life is more inconvenient or harder than it is now, nope, not doing that.

I need the easiest, the most efficient, the most cost-friendly way to plan, shop and cook for my family.

And so I tried a lot of things.

Some things worked, some things didn't, but through that process I started to create a routine and I started to create something that felt like okay, I can do this.

I have a checklist of like okay, have I shot my shelf?

Have I made the meal plan?

Have I thought about what food I need to have on hand with my essentials list?

Have I gone online and ordered my groceries?

Have I gotten enough food that's going to last me for two whole weeks so that I don't have to go back to the grocery store again?

That was like one of the biggest things was figuring out how to shop for two weeks at a time.

That was like kind of like over the hump of like, wow, this is easier and I'm saving so much money.

And so through that process, I was like I feel like this is easier, more efficient, more time-saving than it ever has been before.

I don't have chaos at dinnertime.

I don't feel overwhelmed by meal planning.

Like what is this dinnertime?

I don't feel overwhelmed by meal planning.

Like what is this?

And then I log into my account and I see that our grocery spending went from $1,200 a month to I was spending about $700 a month, sometimes $650 a month for my family of six.

And then I was like what is this?

How is this possible?

I don't feel like I've changed what we're eating.

In fact, I feel like we're eating healthier than we were before.

I feel like I have a schedule, I have a routine, my kids know what's going on, my kids eat their dinner and this is magic.

Like, what is this?

And why hasn't anybody taught this before?

So I took it upon myself and I was like I'm going to, I'm going to share this with the world because this works.

And so that was when things took off.

That was 2021, 2022, when it was like hey guys, do what I'm doing, follow this method, follow this system, and not only are you going to save time, but you're going to save money.

Let's see if it works for other people.

And it did.

And it it was like I was getting messages every single day of people that are like I did what you did, I'm now saving $500 a month.

I did what you did.

I'm saving $800 a month.

And these messages started to flood in and I felt like I had hit the jackpot, and I was so excited about what I had created and found that I created a container to teach people in.

Now, the most important thing about what I did in this moment was that I took budgeting where it's really overwhelming and feels really consuming and I just simplified it because so often we try to overcomplicate things.

As humans, our brains are pushed to overcomplication so that we keep ourselves protected.

But what if we could just focus on one budget?

And that one budget alone is going to save you hundreds of dollars every month.

And that's the thing that's so cool about the method that I teach is we call it the shop method.

That's what's so cool about the shop method is not only are you going to save a lot of money the first month you do it, but you're going to save money the third month, the sixth month, the 10th month, the five years in.

I am still spending $750 a month for my family of six.

That's after inflation has risen grocery prices like 50 to 70% still in that ballpark $750 a month.

And that's why I'm so passionate about this work and that's why I want to tell people don't feel overwhelmed by budgeting.

In fact, don't even worry about budgeting right now, that we can get to that.

That can come later.

We can experience, you know all of the numbers and make sure all of the spending is in line later on.

But the fastest and easiest way to have extra money at the end of the month and to not feel financially strapped is just to focus on your grocery spending.

Just that one budget.

Don't feel overwhelmed by all the budgets.

Just focus on that one thing, because I don't think there's another budget that you could find where you're overspending $800 a month For the average American family.

Most people are overspending $800 a month on food.

That's over $9,000 a year that you're wasting on food.

And I know you may be thinking, okay, but we have dietary restrictions.

I have a gluten-free child, or you know, we're vegan, we're vegetarian, we have health priorities, we only want to eat organic.

These are all things that I've heard before and I'm here to tell you it doesn't matter, because the shop method doesn't teach you what to buy.

No one's going to tell you what to buy and if they do, it's not a sustainable system.

What we do is we change the way that you look at planning, shopping and cooking for your family.

We make a routine, we make a system and you may be like I don't understand why this works.

I don't understand.

I don't really understand either.

Okay, but it does, because we've worked with 20,000 families and, on average, a family will save $600 a month using the shop method.

I have my theories as to why it works, but it really is like I could have 20 episodes about the results, the testimonials, the experiences that we've seen from when moms implement the shop method, and that's exactly why I'm bringing back my free live training that I did.

I haven't done it since January of this year.

I've done a couple other live trainings, but I'm going back to my shop method training because I see so many people stuck in debt and I see so many people feeling financially strapped right now, or just moms who want to have some extra money to take their family to Disneyland or take their family to Hawaii family to Disneyland or take their family to Hawaii.

We actually had a mom in the Money Mom Club fund her family's vacation to Hawaii in January of this year with her grocery savings.

She joined Money Mom Club in September of 2024.

She had saved $4,000 and took her family to Hawaii in January of this year.

So, like when I say it works, I know it works and if you are somebody who wants that extra money, wants some extra cashflow, doesn't want to have to worry about budgeting in general or feeling restricted and overwhelmed.

Just focus on this one budget and come to my training so that I can teach you the shop method.

I'm going to walk you through exactly what the shop method looks like and what mistakes you may be making that are causing you to overspend that $800 every single month.

We're going to go through that in the live training that is next week.

It's one session, september 8th.

We're starting at 12 pm Pacific Standard Time.

But if you can't make it live, don't worry, you can still register and we'll send out the replay afterwards.

But you have to register for it, cause if you don't register, I will not send you the replay.

So register for it, get on, get your spot.

We only have 500 spots available and I think we're at like 450 spots right now and we still have a week to go now.

Now, I know not everyone's going to show up live, so I'm going to open up more spots if needed, but you probably should get your name on that list so you have a seat, so you can get the link to the live call, and I'll go through this one budget that I think can change everything for you.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me.

I am here to help and answer any questions you have, and that is all for today.

I hope I'll see you next week.