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Budget besties, what do you do when more money finally starts coming in…but you also have debt, vacations, savings goals, and about 47 other things competing for those dollars?
In this episode, we’re sharing real coaching situations that show why there usually isn’t one “perfect” answer.
One client had been dealing with significantly smaller paychecks for months while her husband went through recurring pilot training. Their lifestyle wasn’t outrageous—but their income had dropped by thousands of dollars some months, and credit cards became the way they filled the gap.
Then the regular paychecks came back.
And a lump sum of money was coming in.
Cue the question we hear all the time: What do we do with it?
They wanted to refill savings buckets, but they were also carrying around $50,000 in credit card debt with interest rates hovering around 28–30%. Sometimes the exciting answer is funding all the things we want to do. Sometimes the answer is a little more boring: create breathing room by knocking out expensive debt.
But we’re not stopping there.
Because if you already know a lower-income season is going to happen again in five years? We can start preparing for it now. Figure out how much income was missing during that six-month period, divide that amount over the years ahead, and start building a savings bucket for Future You.
Then we’re flipping the situation and talking vacations.
One of our coaching clients is working aggressively toward paying off debt—but she already had trips booked before coaching started. And budget besties, buying the plane ticket does not mean the vacation is paid for.
We still need to think about:
- Food
- Transportation
- Activities
- Entertainment
- Souvenirs and spending money
- And yes…maybe the spa, cabana, champagne, or whatever else we know we’re realistically going to want
When we mapped out one client’s trips honestly, her original vacation estimate was about $2,000 short.
That’s why we would rather put the real number in the budget upfront than pretend we’ll suddenly become completely different people once we land in Paris.
And if funding an already-committed trip means pausing extra debt payments for a minute? That doesn’t automatically mean you’re going backward.
You can fund the expense in cash, avoid adding new debt, and then keep moving toward your bigger goal.
The same goes for deciding how quickly you want to pay debt off. One former client made it very clear that vacations were staying in his life. So the agreement became simple: future vacations get paid for in cash while he continues paying off the old debt.
Could he have paid everything off faster without traveling? Sure.
But that wasn’t his priority.
And that’s the point.
Your budget needs to reflect your actual life, your priorities, and your goals—not somebody else’s timeline.
Sometimes we need another set of eyes to help us decide what gets funded first, what can wait, and how to create guardrails without making life miserable. That’s where ongoing accountability through financial coaching, office hours, and a supportive budgeting community can be so helpful.
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This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and is not personal financial, legal, or tax advice.
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