Most Days #7: Money Matters Part I

You can do everything right with your budget and still feel stressed, resentful, and on the edge of burnout. That's why I wanted to talk about money as a mindset thing, not just a math thing. Starting with the costs that hit working parents the hardest: childcare and the day-to-day spending that keeps a household running.

I share the reframe that changed my mental health around childcare costs. I stopped seeing childcare as an expense that steals my paycheck and started treating it as an investment. In my career, and in my kids' development, routine, and security.

We also get into a framework for outsourcing at home based on your target hourly rate, and why it can make sense even when you're not replacing those hours with paid work. Sometimes the payoff is time, energy, and patience. Not a dollar-for-dollar trade.

Then we go deeper on the thing that we never price correctly: rest. Rested brains lead better, make clearer decisions, and show up more patiently at home. I walk through what delegating at home actually looks like for us, including how our housekeeper became a house manager, and the little "vacation return" routine we set up that makes coming home actually feel like coming home. 

If you're a high-achieving parent, a default parent, or anyone trying to build a career without losing yourself, consider this your permission to ask for help.

Share this with a friend who needs it. And tell me: what's the one task you'd outsource first if you let yourself?

Transcript

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Why Money Mindset Matters

Courtney 0:00

Hello and welcome back to Most Days. I'm your host, Courtney, and today we're going to talk about money. I am so excited to talk about this. I really believe that our mindset can change our relationship with money drastically. And I think our relationship with money really has a strong effect on how much we like our jobs or if we're going to get burned out or not. So let's dive in. I'm going to do multiple podcasts about money. This is just number one.

Childcare As An Investment

Courtney 0:24

Today I want to talk about the money that we spend on our households, the money that we spend to pay other people to do the things that we would normally do. I've talked a lot lately about childcare costs, and they are crazy expensive, but it's part of life when you're a working parent. So I'll start there. I have a mentality about childcare costs that has really helped me stay healthier, mentally healthier about it. So I look at childcare costs as an investment, not an expense. They're an investment for a lot of different reasons. First of all, I'm investing in my career. If I were to stay home during the five years or so that kids need childcare, I wouldn't be focused on my career. And so I look at the initial, that initial expense as an investment in my career. I also look at it as an investment in my children's education. I know that when they're ages zero to five, they're not actually learning any reading and writing, but they're learning a lot of life skills. They're learning how to get along with other kids. They're learning that mommy and daddy are always going to come back after school. I think that's really important. I think my kids have very healthy attachment to us. They know that we're always coming back because so far we've always come back after school. We always pick them up after school, or Nana does. So I look at that as an investment in my kids' development. It's good for them to be at school. And I know that that's a mentality that isn't shared with every mom. I know that there's definitely a lot of theories about homeschooling or being a stay-at-home mom. And I respect any and all ways that people parent. I have no judgment unless you are abusive. I have no judgment on you as a parent. But when both parents work, this is a mentality that really works for us to think of that as an investment and not an expense. So we spend a lot of other monies on keeping our household running smoothly. And I'm going to share some of those and my mentality behind them.

The Outsource Below Your Rate Rule

Courtney 2:27

So there's this concept that you should outsource anything below your hourly wage. So you can do the math to find your hourly wage, the hourly wage that you want to have, not the hourly wage that you currently have, you ought to be working towards. You take the amount that you'd like to make a year. Let's say you want to make $100,000 a year. You need to figure out your hourly rate then. If you're planning on working 40 hours a week, that's about $50 an hour, give or take. And so then you can look at other tasks around you and decide if they are worth $50 an hour or not. So cleaning your house might fall under not worth $50 an hour. And so if it's under your hourly rate, the idea is you start outsourcing those things. Now, it's a leap of faith because you got to start doing that before you're actually making that hourly rate. But the idea is that you will open up enough free time and enough energy to work towards that hourly rate. Now, at first this idea didn't make as much sense to me because I was thought, well, I'm at work making money and my housekeeper would be at home cleaning the house. I would clean my house on free time. I wouldn't clean my house during work hours. So I'm not replacing, let's say, I want to make $100 an hour. I'm not replacing that with a $25 an hour skill or a task. I mean, what I'm paying for then is leisure time. And for a while, I didn't understand that the leisure, that your leisure time is worth just as much as your working time. This took me a long time to figure out. Um, I for a long time thought you just grind and grind and grind until you make it. And it hasn't been until having kids and really changing my mindset about work that I realized that's not going to work. And taking leisure time actually makes me better at my job. It seems maybe counterintuitive that going on vacation will advance your career. But for me, and I know for a lot of other people, it truly does. The higher you go up an organization, or if you're an entrepreneur, the bigger your organization gets and the more people report to you, the more important it is for your brain to be rested. It is not as important for an organization, for somebody that is doing shipping and logistics on a daily basis. It's not as important for their brain to be fresh and rested. Yes, they need to have accuracy with their job. And I'm not saying their job isn't important, but for the entire health of the organization, the higher up you get, the more important it is that you are okay, that you are mentally healthy, that you're taking care of yourself. So if you're the type that's, you know, maybe you're working for a large corporation and you're a C-level executive and you're working 80 hours a week and grinding. My theory, and it's not a theory, it's fact, is that you would be better off figuring out how to plan your days better and take more time off. And it's hard. I'm not saying that it's easy, um, but having clear boundaries of how much you're going to work, how much you're going to grind is so important for your mental mental health. Now I go through ups and downs with this. I go through times where I remember, oh crap, I have to pull back. Uh, I'm working too much, and I force myself to take a little more time. I go through times where I feel pretty balanced. Right now I'm in one of those times. I feel like I'm taking enough leisure time and working enough. And I'll have times where I really need to ramp up the leisure time. I've I've taken weeks, uh, six months ago, I took a couple weeks barely coming to the office. And guess what? Nothing crashed, nothing burned. The building is still here, the businesses are still here, but I was approaching burnout. And so I took some time to, and I came in every day, but I left early every single day. Um, went and did some stuff around my house, filled my cup, right? And I came back better. If we keep pushing and pushing and pushing, we will not only hurt ourselves, we hurt our family and we hurt our colleagues. So to me, it became mandatory that I do this, mandatory that I take this time.

Why Rest Improves Leadership

Courtney 6:49

Okay, so that's a long rant about why leisure time is worth your same hourly rate. So I might pay somebody $50 an hour to clean my house, even though I would have done it anyway, right? I'm not actually making more money because somebody cleans my house, not dollar for dollar, not hour for hour. But what I do get back is leisure time. And that's critical. After school, after work, I can get home, enjoy my kids. My house is clean, meals are prepped, like a lot is done for me that I would be doing when I get home from work. And that allows me to be a better leader. So to that end, I have a housekeeper that's kind of turned into a house manager who does a lot of these things for me. She cleans the house, she does all the laundry, and she does a lot of errands and checks up on things. Like I was on vacation um over the weekend and I got a text from her hey, I got Larry, my dog, I got Larry a new water bowl because the old one had broke and I had forgotten to order a new one. Um, I ordered Larry a new water bowl, I'll I'll bring it over later. She's thinking about my house, and that is huge. If you are mom or dad, you know how huge that is. We have a third adult human looking out for us, and it's life-changing. It's just frees up so much mental time and energy, and I can ask for favors that you normally wouldn't ask a housekeeper for because we have this agreement. So it's really worked out well for me and my family. And I'm happy to make more content about kind of how we set it up. If that's something you're interested in, let me know. Um, but it has been really helpful. And I think the takeaway that I want you to have here is that it's not a failure to ask for help. If you're trying to build something, or if you're trying to run something and you're trying to be the best leader that you can be and be the best parent you can be, you delegate at work all day long. I hope. I hope you've learned to delegate at work. And so what I'm asking you to do is look at home life more like work and delegate at home also. It is not a failure. It is not a waste of money. It might take you a couple of weeks or months to really notice the change in your energy levels and your work output, but you will notice it if you do it correctly and if you actually delegate some of the mental load to somebody else.

The Coming Home From Vacation Fix

Courtney 9:07

I want to give an example because I just got home from a weekend away. So it's Arizona, it's very hot. We try and leave during the summers. And this weekend, we went out to the mountains for just two days. I had our housekeeper, house manager clean while we were gone. Uh, and then I scheduled our babysitter, who's great, to be there when we got home. So we got home at like 4:30. And if you know, coming home, especially when you're coming home from the mountains where it's raining and beautiful, and you're coming home to the Arizona desert and it's a million degrees, it's the worst. I hate coming home on Sunday afternoons. Like you're stressed for school the next day or work the next day. You're you're behind already because you didn't take the weekend to meal prep. And so I hate it. So I've been trying to fix that. So anyway, house was clean already, laundry was all done. She actually, my house manager actually went through my closet and replaced all my hangers and reorganized my clothes, which was really nice of her. I did not ask her to do that, but we just have an agreement where she just does what needs to be done. And apparently she thought that needed to be done, and I appreciate it. Uh, and then I had my babysitter come over an hour before we got home and she prepped lunches for two days. So that's done. She had dinner ready for my kids when they got home, and she hung out with my kids, ate, had dinner with them while my husband and I unloaded the truck, unpacked all of our stuff, started the laundry, like all those things that would have lingered over the week because you come home tired and then kids are on you, and you're just, you know how it is. And my kids are one and three. So they're not helping. You know, if they were when they're five and seven, hopefully they'll be a little more helpful, but they're not right now. They try. And so I looked at my husband after the kids went to bed and the babysitter left. I looked at Kevin and was like, I think I cracked the code on vacations. Like the worst part about vacation is coming home. And I just made coming home like a dream. The house is perfect, everything's done that I needed to be done, and I had help. It was wonderful. So we're never gonna not do that. Because look, I'm recording a podcast this morning. I got I got up early, got all my work done for the day. I was like, I guess I'll make a podcast about this because I'm not stressed and I'm caught up. It's Monday morning. So I really, really want to encourage you. If you are especially a mom, especially default parent, especially in your high-achieving career that you've worked your whole life for, and now you're feeling burned out, you need to delegate more work at home. Yes, you can delegate some to your husband. And and could my husband take care of some of the things that our housekeeper and our babysitter take care of? Yes, but he works with me. We're both tired. Like just offloading it to him, it's like not really even a break, then, right? Because then he's got to deal with it. So there's so much that our team at home does for us that enables us to come to work feeling great. I'm excited to go home because I get to just spend time with my kids, meals are already prepped, like things are done. Um, it's it's allowed me to be such a better boss and such a better leader and such a better parent. So I hope that helps.

Delegate At Home And Keep Going

Courtney 12:14

If you have any questions about how we delegate stuff in our house, um, I've been thinking about putting together some content of like the lists that we share with them and kind of how we work our schedule. Um, so if you have questions about that, let me know. I would love to dig into it more and hopefully help you get some stuff off your plate. Thanks for listening into this episode of Most Days. I hope to see you back next week. If you love what you're hearing, I would love for you to subscribe. Have a great week.