When Everything Feels Urgent: A Real Coaching Session on Prioritizing Financial Goals

Episode 150 | April 23, 2026 | 1:22:36

Why four income buckets were keeping Lauren stuck

When Lauren shared her financial picture, she listed each income source separately. Serving over here. Coaching revenue over there. Subcontracting in another column. Her husband’s income somewhere else. She’d never combined them into one number.

This is something I see often. When income comes from multiple streams, especially when some of those streams are newer or less predictable, it’s easy to treat each one as fragile on its own. Each bucket feels small. Each one feels like it could disappear. And that scarcity mindset, even when the total actually covers expenses, seeps into every financial decision.

The shift I offered was this: think of each income source as a lever, not a silo. The mix can change by season. When serving is strong, pull that lever more. When things slow down, lean into the coaching revenue. The total target stays the same. The mix is flexible.

Lauren said that felt like a game. Something she had control over. That’s a good sign.

When income comes from multiple sources, thinking of each one separately keeps clients in scarcity. Combine the picture first.

The loop that keeps big goals permanently on hold

Lauren’s IVF journey has been years in the making. She has a friend who wants to be her gestational carrier. She has about $5,000 in an HSA toward the $20,000 they need. And yet the goal felt stuck.

When I reflected back what I was hearing, the loop became visible. She was waiting to do research until IVF felt more certain. But it couldn’t feel certain until she did the research. She wanted to be ahead on all her bills before taking the next step. But waiting for that kept IVF vague and open-ended, and the weight of that unmade decision was leaking into everything else.

This is what happens when we try to do all the things at once. We feel like we’re not making progress on any of them, because we aren’t. The energy is heavy and circular. Nothing gets our full attention.

What choosing actually does

I wanted Lauren to feel the difference between two paths, not just think through them logically. So I walked her through two scenarios.

In the first: all extra money goes toward an emergency fund first. Once it’s funded, everything switches to IVF. Her gut response? Peace. Stability. The feeling of stepping into the IVF process from solid ground.

In the second: all extra money goes toward IVF first, emergency fund later. Her gut response? Unsettled. Too much uncertainty piled on top of uncertainty.
The answer was clear before she could fully explain it logically. Her body knew.

We landed on a target: $9,000 in emergency savings — two months of expenses — before switching focus to IVF. At about $200 of extra margin per month, that’s a long runway. But when Lauren heard the timeline, something interesting happened. Her energy shifted. She didn’t describe pressure. She described motivation. She said it felt too long — and then said she wanted to hurry it up.

By not choosing at all, we’re actually delaying both. Simply by choosing, we make much faster progress on all of our goals.

Prioritizing is not delaying

One of the things Lauren named is that choosing the emergency fund first felt like she was delaying IVF. I get that. When a goal matters deeply, anything that isn’t directly funding it can feel like a detour.

But here’s what I’ve seen over and over: when we don’t choose at all, we delay everything. Prioritizing means we know where each goal fits. We know when it gets our full attention. And when we get there, we arrive with confidence instead of anxiety.

I also reminded Lauren that while she’s building the emergency fund, she can absolutely be in the research phase for IVF. Having conversations with her gestational carrier. Understanding what’s due and when. Looking into payment timelines. That’s still forward motion, just a different kind.

What stability actually looks like before a big leap

Lauren uses YNAB and thinks about her emergency fund in terms of being able to fund all her bills on the first of the month. Her fixed monthly expenses are around $3,500, variable spending adds another $1,000. She already had about $1,200 saved. Two months of coverage came to $9,000. That became the target.

I told her that some months would feel motivating and others would feel like a long road, and that doesn’t mean the process is wrong. That’s just how it goes.

Lauren said something worth holding onto. She’d tried having a total number target before and nothing was happening. But when she shifted to a consistent monthly contribution and let it do its thing, that felt better. The goal stays. The focus shifts to consistency, not the countdown. That’s a healthy way to approach a big financial target.

Why this session mattered

Lauren has done remarkable things with her money. She and her husband moved cross-country twice and cash-flowed both moves. They paid off $58,000 in debt. She bought a car with cash. She navigated a hurricane that cut her serving income in half.

She is capable of making money moves. The friction wasn’t ability. It was the absence of a clear next step. There had been so many moving pieces for so long that she hadn’t given herself permission to choose a direction and commit.

By the end of Part 1, she had a priority, a target, and a way of thinking about income that made sense for how her life actually works.

That’s what a clear direction does. It doesn’t make the timeline shorter. It makes the path feel possible.

This is Part 1 of a two-part session. In Part 2, Lauren and I get into the income conversation: what it would actually take for her to leave serving behind, how to think about her business revenue targets, and how to make serving feel like a choice instead of a necessity.

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