Careers Done Write’s Debra Wheatman shares her best tips for Grownups to level up their careers in the new year. 

Career Tips for 2022

• Write down a list of these things so that you can visualize them.

• Think about what you would like to achieve in the coming year.

• Create a plan for getting there. Perhaps you’re looking to be promoted, switch industries, or change careers altogether.

• Do you feel like you’re too busy to focus on managing your career and your brand?

• Another thing that will help you in the coming year is single-tasking.

• How are you at building relationships?

• Challenge the status quo.

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Full Transcript:

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey, grownups. Before we start the podcast, I want to talk to you about keeping things in perspective and remembering sometimes we just have to laugh it off. We need that. Life is full of grownup choices and it can be a lot so it's important to keep things in perspective and have a sense of humor. That's why I created Grownup Gear. It is super fun merch to celebrate adulting; t-shirt, sweats, mugs, I even have kitchen aprons for cooking. It lets everyone know that you are a grownup, or at least a grownup in progress, or at least you know someone who's a grownup. We even have the cutest baby gear from onesies to bibs that say things like, "I can't believe you are the grownup." The best gifts for new parents, birthdays, engagements, graduation, pretty much any occasion, even a great gift for yourself. Check it all out at grownupgear.com.

Debra Wheatman:
If you don't take charge of your career now and you don't prioritize the things that are important about your career and your ability to be financially independent, then you will likely suffer some of the consequences of those decisions later on in your life.

Bobbi Rebell:
You're listening to Money Tips for Financial Grownups with me, Certified Financial Planner Bobbi Rebell, author of How to be a Financial Grownup. And you know what, when it comes to money, being a grownup is hard. But together, we've got this.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey friends, as you may have guessed from the opening sound bite, we're going to talk about careers. I have been having a bit of the career blahs lately. I sense a lot of people do as we are entering year three of the pandemic, which was supposed to be staying home 15 days to stop the spread. Yeah. Well it is what it is. So here we go.

Bobbi Rebell:
I decided we should do a little miniseries of career episodes for financial grownups starting with this week's guest, who's amazing. Her name is Debra Wheatman. She runs a company called Careers done Write, and Write is spelled W-R-I-T-E. Her genius is in the fact that Debra helps people not just figure out what they're good at and what they should be getting paid for, she also helps kind of package it all up so that your best attributes are front and center and help you land that dream job.

Bobbi Rebell:
Highlights of our interview included talking about the mistakes that we make when we're choosing a career. It was interesting because she has a very different perspective from what I think a lot of parents tell their young adult children. She also has a lot to say about the urge to multitask and some their very interesting suggestions there that you are going to want to hear. She also shares her take on the whole work from home thing, how it's evolving, what we should sort of make ourselves do in person maybe, but also some things that may be better off, I don't know, remotely. It's all okay. You'll love to hear what Debra has to say, so here is the interview with Debra Wheatman.

Bobbi Rebell:
Debra Wheatman, you're a financial grownup. Welcome to the podcast.

Debra Wheatman:
Thank you so much for having me. It's nice to be here.

Bobbi Rebell:
You are a human capital management strategist. Your company, by the way, is called Careers Done Write. What does that mean?

Debra Wheatman:
Well, we're a writing company and we're a branding company. We work with our clients to help them define, manage, maintain, and grow their brands so they can be successful in their careers.

Bobbi Rebell:
Which is so much more relevant than ever with all the changes going on in the workplace. We don't know what is going on for 2022 in terms of how things will evolve with work from home, with working in the gig economy, how companies are evolving. So this is something that everyone needs to pay attention to, especially our grownups. Let's get into your tips for 2022.

Bobbi Rebell:
The first thing is just to write things down so you can visualize them. That's something we hear a lot, but you have a different spin on it.

Debra Wheatman:
Yeah. If you write things down, you're obviously going to be more inclined to not only remember them because there's a lot going on upstairs, we don't retain information just by saying, "Well, I'm going to do this. I mean, how many times have you said, "I'm going to do this," and then you forget about it. People do that all the time. If you write things down, you're not only more than likely to then commit to getting them done, crossing them off your list, but also that sense of accomplishment that you get when you write them down, when you complete them, and it allows you to move ahead with purpose. I like to say that because that's an important part of job search, it's an important part of your professional, your personal life, and gives you a feeling of accomplishment when you write things down and then you check them off as you go.

Bobbi Rebell:
You also say that you have to think about what you want to achieve in the coming year, but also very specifically create a plan for being there and be specific. Are you looking to be promoted? Are you looking to switch industries? Are you looking to just change careers altogether? And this is an opportune time because so many different industries are open-minded about maybe mentoring somebody and bringing someone into the fold that they might not have looked at before, but now they need people. So this is kind of a good time, right?

Debra Wheatman:
Yeah, this is definitely a job seekers market. If you are in the middle of the opportunity to do something different, something that maybe has driven you in the past or something that you want to get involved in, now might be a good time to do that because there's been a lot of upheaval. And as a result, because it is a job seekers market, you have more of an opportunity to spread your wings, explore new things and do something perhaps that maybe inspires you in a new and different way.

Bobbi Rebell:
Now, a lot of people listening to this might say, but, but, but, somehow I'm just so busy. When the pandemic started, we were home and we had so much time. We were baking bread. I did that. We were doing all kinds of home projects. We were having little wine, coffee hours, wine happy hours, whatever you might call it, because we suddenly felt like we had so much time, and now I don't know where the time is going. I mean, we're all so busy. So what do you say to people that just say, I feel like I'm so busy, I don't have time to manage my career or my brand?

Debra Wheatman:
I say to that, that you don't not have time to do it. That is a thing that should be a priority for you because your career, your brand, while I like to think that people are altruistic, there's no altruism when it comes to your ability and the need to make money. You have to support yourself. Maybe you have a family, you're beholden to other people. Whatever it is at the end of the day, the ability to make money and have a life that you want to lead, and take a vacation even, is predicated on your ability to make money. You also, at some point in your life, you're going to retire. You're not going to be working well into your 90s. What does that look like for you? If you don't take charge of your career now and you don't prioritize the things that are important about your career and your ability to be financially independent, then you will likely suffer some of the consequences of those decisions later on in your life.

Bobbi Rebell:
It's interesting that you say that because we also do have this movement, especially stereotyping a little bit, but maybe not too much, especially among young people that really want to follow their passions and do good, and they get told, well, sometimes that's not going to pay as much. It's a delicate balance because people feel like it's the right thing to do to take these sometimes jobs that don't pay as much in money, but pay a lot in feel good, but they're doing themselves a disservice sometimes when they don't prioritize money.

Debra Wheatman:
That is true. I would say there's more than one way to make yourself feel good and get that gratification that you're looking for. Maybe you don't necessarily do it in your "day job". Maybe you volunteer for an organization that is close to your heart, where you have a really strong connection. Instead of looking at it like I have to do work in this particular area, there are other ways that you can actually give back and get that same thing while still making money that supports you.

Bobbi Rebell:
Another misconception is that people feel like if they can multitask, they'll get more done. You are against multitasking for sure.

Debra Wheatman:
Multitasking is not always a great thing. I do like to call it single-tasking instead. You should do one thing, try to complete that and do it properly. If you multitask, you're not going to do any of the things that you have on your list in a way that is either completed or satisfactory to you. If you focus on the one thing and get that thing done, it will be done properly. It will be done on time. It will be done according to the specifications that you hold yourself accountable to, and then you can move on to the next task. And that goes back to my earlier point, what you were asking me about prioritizing and making lists. This is why writing things down is important because then you could check it off, and the single task that you completed, victory is yours.

Bobbi Rebell:
The multitasking, you get sucked into it when you work from home. I mean, I definitely have gotten to the like, oh, I should be doing this, but I'm also doing the laundry and I'm also making lunch for my child, and I'm also doing all this because I have to get it all done. It's really dangerous. We really need to get that under control because we don't know if and when we're going back to the office full time, and we have to find ways to kind of settle in and create new ways to work at home, right?

Debra Wheatman:
Yes, absolutely. Of course feeding your child and doing the laundry and cooking dinner so that everybody has something to eat, all of those things are very important, but if you don't finish the one thing that you had to do that you said I'm going to finish this and then I can move on to this next task, that's an interrupt-driven work style. And I know, because I'm sometimes guilty of that. You'll never get any of them done. And you'll find that instead of getting this thing done and then being able to go and make dinner, if you will, neither of those things will be complete. And the thing that you had to get done that was sort of for traditional work, you're going to be doing that at 10 o'clock at night. How are you going to feel about that? Versus getting it done and finishing it and then saying, okay, once I'm finished with this, I'm now going to go do this other thing that I need to accomplish over here.

Bobbi Rebell:
It's really hard, but we do have to learn to set those boundaries because it felt temporary at first, but now a lot of us if we're not going to work from home all the time, it's still going to be a part of our life. One of the hard things also about working from home or even in a hybrid environment is building relationships. Can you talk a little bit about your advice for that and how it pertains to sort of up-leveling your career in 2022?

Debra Wheatman:
Sure. Building relationships is difficult in an online world because while you can see people, the connection that you get from being in person is just not the same thing. The other thing is that you're scheduling these meetings, you're scheduling a Zoom call. It seems sort of disingenuous in some way. I'm going to speak to you today. I'm going to see you on Zoom at 4:00 PM. Versus saying, you know what, meet me at the restaurant. We're going to have some coffee, some wine and some dinner and just get together in person. People like to be around other people. This situation in particular has proven challenging for a number of people because of that.

Debra Wheatman:
Now given the situation that we're in, this is a good way to still connect with people and build those bridges as long as you use the time wisely, as long as it's meaningful for you, with the understanding that when it is safe to go back and meet in person, and when it's feasible to do that, we're going to resume those activities because again, people do like to be around other people. And proximity to other people, not just through a screen, it's important. It's good for our mental wellbeing. It's good for our physical wellbeing. To be able to give someone a hug is an important thing.

Bobbi Rebell:
The last point I want to bring up, I can't believe this, we're entering year three. Debra, I remember when they said 15 days to stop the spread. Now we're entering the third year of 2022. We have a new status quo. You say challenge the status quo.

Debra Wheatman:
Yes, challenge the status quo. You don't have to continue to do the same things the way you've done them in the past. The pandemic has taught us if nothing else, that life is fleeting. It has taught us that we can work from home. We can do these things successfully. I know a number of people, a number of my clients who are far more efficient, far more effective working from home than they ever were in the office. And their bosses have said, you know what, stay at home. You're doing great. We love having you there. You're so efficient. Continue to do what you're doing. This is working out wonderfully.

Debra Wheatman:
That doesn't mean that you don't want to show up in the office because you want to show up at some point, out of sight, out of mind, and you want to have a little bit of a balance, but if you're effective working from home and that works for you, then you should pursue that path. And the state of the market the way it is today, the jobs they are showing us online, hybrid, fully remote, in-office, so we're having the opportunity to see what that looks like.

Bobbi Rebell:
Where can people learn more about you and be in touch?

Debra Wheatman:
Thank you. Yes, if people want to learn more, they can find me debra@careersdonewrite.com. That is my email. You can also go to my website, careersdonewrite. And that's like writing; W-R-I-T-E.com.

Bobbi Rebell:
Thank you so much.

Debra Wheatman:
Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay friends. One of my favorite things about getting to know Debra in that interview is that while she had a definite point of view about things like not taking a low paying job to quote, follow your passion and instead, maybe taking a higher paying job and using that to support your passion or support a cause that you really care about. She's totally nonjudgmental, and it's tough to walk that line. So I think it was pretty cool the way that she approached it. By the way, she is working on a book called Help! To Hired, which will help all of us find meaningful work, but in a way that also helps get you to your financial goals. So keep an eye out for that.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay. Speaking of books, my book, Launching Financial Grownups, is on presale. You can buy it in all the usual places. If you go to my website, which is bobbirebell.com, you can learn more about it. It is a huge help if you order it in advance because it helps with algorithms, and it lets the places that sell books know that people are interested, and then those places in turn will make the book more discoverable.

Bobbi Rebell:
I'm not doing a bunch of elaborate pre-order giveaways. That would take a lot of time and money and effort and all that kind of stuff, but I'm putting my effort into things like keeping this podcast super high quality and free for all of you, but it is something that takes time and money. I also put a lot of money and time into my newsletter, also free to you. So your support with the book pre-orders is truly appreciated.

Bobbi Rebell:
The next two weeks of this career video series are going to be incredible. I have Whitney Johnson. She is huge coming up next. Her new book is called Smart Growth. We're going to be talking with her more directly about those career blogs that I mentioned at the top of this show and how to get motivated again. And then I'm going to be speaking with Jill Duffy. She wrote The Everything Guide to Remote Work. So please make sure you are a subscriber or are following the Money Tips for Financial Grownups podcast. And please tell your friends to do so as well. I really appreciate your support of the podcast as well.

Bobbi Rebell:
With that, big thanks to Debra Wheatman. Check out her blog at Careers Done Write. She also has a great newsletter, so I encourage you to get on her list as well. And truly grateful for her advice to help us all beat financial grownups. Thanks guys.

Bobbi Rebell:
Money Tips for Financial Grownups is a production of BRK Media, LLC, editing and production by Steve Stewart, guest coordination, content creation, social media support and show notes by Ashley Wall. You can find the podcast show notes, which include links to resources mentioned in the show as well as show transcripts, by going to my website, bobbirebell.com. You can also find an incredible library of hundreds of previous episodes to help you on your journey as a financial grownup.

Bobbi Rebell:
The podcast and tons of complimentary resources associated with the podcast is brought to you for free, but I need to have your support in return. Here's how you can do that.

Bobbi Rebell:
First connect with me on social media @bobbirebell1 on Instagram, and @bobbierebell on both Twitter and on Clubhouse, where you can join my Money Tips for Grownups Club. Second, share this podcast on social media and tag me so I can thank you. You can also leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Reading each one means the world to me. You know what, it really motivates others to subscribe. You can also support our merch shop, grownupgear.com, by picking up fun gifts for grown up friends and treating yourself as well. And most of all, help your friends on their journey to being financial grownups by encouraging them to subscribe to the podcast. Together we got this.

Bobbi Rebell:
Thank you for your time and for the kind words so many of you send my way. See you next time. And thank you for supporting Money Tips for Financial Grownups.

Our grownup lives sometimes take a turn for the worst at the time we least expect it. Jennifer Grimson experienced it all from filing for bankruptcy twice, becoming AirBNB pro and making some tough decisions to downsize her family's lifestyle in order to become a millionaire. 

Jennifer’s Money Story + Money Tips To Handle Financial Chaos

Jennifer Grimson:
Well, yes I have. So have many people. So my story is that I lost everything twice. So no job, no car, no place to live, two kids to raise, and chapter 13 bankruptcy. And that happened to me twice, once at the age of 29 and once at the age of 41, and the second time that it happened, I realized that I needed to do something to rebuild in a way that would protect me. So for me, that meant building small pockets of wealth, finger quotes, and security. And that's what the show that I have, which is called Micro Empires, is about, is just basically creating these small pockets so that if anything is taken away, you aren't left completely empty handed and at a loss of what to do.

Bobbi Rebell:
Those two bankruptcies, different stories each time, give us just a little sense of what caused those, because a lot of people go, well, how did that happen? I mean, the first time you had a one and a three-year-old. What happened?

Jennifer Grimson:
Well, the bankruptcies were are actually caused by the same thing, but how it happened to me was that I was in a very contentious divorce. So my ex-husband sued me twenty-five times in 10 years, and I amassed over $500,000 in attorney's fees. And I can go into great detail about that, but I don't think we have time for it, but in my case, it wasn't that I purchased a home and went in upside down, or I bought expensive cars, or had terrible spending habits. It's that I was running from somebody who was punishing me financially through the court system, which is another entire story altogether.

Jennifer Grimson:
But chapter 13 was a way for me to escape the lawsuits, and the first one helped me preserve the home that I lived in. So it was probably the first lesson I got in there are tools out there for you to use to help you financially. Now, chapter 13 bankruptcy is no fun. You pay your creditors back. Your credit is ruined for 10 years. You have to live on cash. It is not a great existence, but it did release me from lawsuits. So I did that not only once, but twice. But on top of everything, the second time I found myself without anything, no car, no job, no place to live. What I had done then was to turn my financial wellbeing over to someone else, namely the person that I was in a relationship with, so that when that relationship ended, I was really left with nothing.

Jennifer Grimson:
And as shameful as I felt that was, I decided a year ago, when I decided to start the show, that I would share the story because I knew I wasn't the only one. I think women do it more than men. I think it happens a lot, and there's a lot of shame in it when really the shame should be honestly on the other person, who's kind of not being fair about that. But at any rate, it taught me a hard, hard lesson and I really didn't get the message until I was about 41, that no matter what I did, I was going to have to rebuild in a different way than I had done in the past.

Bobbi Rebell:
And now it is a decade after that second bankruptcy. Just to catch people up, you became a real estate investor.

Jennifer Grimson:
Yes, I did. So from 41 years old, the following three years it took me to correct my credit, which is a journey in and of itself. And then the first thing I did was to purchase a home, which was a miracle. And I walk through how I made that happen. And then through house hacking and short term rental, in four years, I created $1.4 million in income producing investments.

Jennifer Grimson:
And there's a reason they're called income producing investments. I didn't have $1.4 million. I had mortgages, I had overhead, I had all of the things, but what I had done was created, I actually had three properties that were Airbnb. And those properties all had their own incomes, their own empires, on top of a corporate job. So that way, I had at least four areas of income, and then I created other areas of income, as well. So I kept creating these little pockets of income.

Jennifer Grimson:
And then that's morphed. I've moved into investing into multi-family and other things. But again, by using tools, tools that I had at the ready. So I didn't realize, when I rebuilt the second time, I did it with a W-2 really and some grit. So other than that, I mean, I didn't have a great investment that I made a ton of money off of or anything like that. I simply just used the tools at hand, which are part of why I want to do the show, to share what's available to all of us.

Bobbi Rebell:
I know you don't do Airbnb investing right now, but just quickly, give us some insider secrets and tips for getting started with Airbnb. What did you learn there?

Jennifer Grimson:
Well, I learned a lot. So first and foremost, I started doing it in 2014 in Nashville, Tennessee, where no one was doing it at the time. And that was a great time to do it. So my advice to anybody is anytime you see an opportunity, and maybe it's something new and edgy, and you're willing to take the risk, and risk, you know, I talk about risk a lot, it has to be a risk that you're comfortable with, I say, go for it. I needed to do everything in micro steps. Also part of why I do the things the way that I do. I'm not a huge risk taker.

Jennifer Grimson:
So I had my home. I started renting it out on the weekends through Airbnb and quickly realized that this could be a real way for me to not only cover my mortgage and expenses, but a way for me to create an income. My best advice for people, if you're getting involved in Airbnb and you're just starting out and you're just a normal person, like you're not a person who has hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank or millions to lose, I say, go find an emerging market and buy a really, really affordable home. Your money in real estate is made on the purchase. So if you purchase high, you're not really probably going to make a lot of money off it, no matter what your plan is with it. You've got to find a way to purchase low.

Jennifer Grimson:
So I purchased in evolving neighborhoods. I took a chance in that. And I went ahead and lived in the properties, which allowed me to get in there for very little money. I furnished them myself. I managed them myself, until such time that they were up and running and I was able to hire other people to do that. Those would be my basic tips on Airbnb. I could talk about that forever, but those are sort of the basics.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hands-on first, then hand it off. Okay, so that was a nice little bonus tangent for everybody. But the real reason I asked you to come on was to tell us your tips on how to handle financial chaos, which of course has to start with actually recognizing financial chaos. Like, there was a cereal incident in your car, with your children.

Jennifer Grimson:
Yeah. So financial chaos is a really sad, scary place to live and to be. And I lived in it for many, many years, and I didn't know what I was living in. I like to describe it to people, I have this metaphor, like imagine you're living in a home, there's no lights in the home, and it's a hoarder. You're living in a home with a hoarder, and there's all this stuff piled up, but you don't know it's there, but you feel like something's wrong. You're not really sure what it is.

Jennifer Grimson:
And one day, someone turns the light switch on and you see all of the chaos, all of the mayhem, and that person who's creating it, whether it's you or potentially your partner, runs over and shuts that light off, and says, "Oh, never mind, never mind." You can't unsee it. So in my case, I lived in a situation where I was, to simplify it, I was a saver and my ex-husband was a spender. He had a lot of emotional attachment to money and how it made him feel. And we were living in absolute dire straights, things like he would get angry if I bought the generic brand cereal. We were so broke, I was bouncing checks to buy groceries. I would go to three different grocery stores to find the best deals.

Jennifer Grimson:
I took my children shopping one night, like I did normally, so I had them with me in the evening, little babies in diapers, in and out of the car. We'd go to three different grocery stores to save the money. And then on the way home, we're in California on Highway 101, I pull over on the side of the road, I pop open the back of my SUV, and I'm standing there pouring the cheap cereal, the generic cereal, into the name brand boxes on the side of the freeway, as the cars are whizzing by, with my babies in the car. And there was a tiny voice in my head saying, "You know this is not normal, right? You realize this is crazy, don't you?" But I wasn't awake enough to hear it. The light switch had not gone on. I look back on that, and I think that's insane. That's chaos. You're risking your entire life to keep someone happy about something that has to really do with money and your relationship with money. So that's financial chaos.

Jennifer Grimson:
And when I talk to people about their money, and it's very, very personal. People will tell you about their sex lives before they'll tell you about their money, which is kind of crazy, but they'll explain things to me that they've become accustomed to because they've been living in it for so long. But that is sort of the truth of it, and recognizing it, as well. My advice is to look at, do you have a shared approach to money? Do you and your partner have a shared approach? Do you find it really difficult to go without the nice to haves? Or does your partner? Do you feel sick whenever you have to talk about money? And then examining what wealthy might mean to you, also a good tool in figuring out where you are on the money spectrum.

Bobbi Rebell:
Once we've identified that we are in financial chaos, which probably more of us are in than we realize, give us some tips to calm that financial chaos.

Jennifer Grimson:
Yeah. I mean, I think the first thing, if you're in a partnership with someone who is creating the chaos, and it's not yourself, because sometimes it could be yourself, and there's a little test that I offer in the episode that I did this week, but probably the first thing is to sit down and have a conversation with that partner. Chances are, that may not go well if you've never had a conversation before, and there are therapists and books and things that can help you with that, but it's really taking a hard look at your own relationship with money. I happen to call it money culture, and I have a free ebook, as well, that walks you through like where are you with money and how do you feel and why do you do the things that you do?

Jennifer Grimson:
Hopefully if you can sit down and have a conversation with a partner and that person is able to come to grips with their own relationship with money, perhaps saying, "Yeah, I do these things because it makes me feel loved," or, "I didn't get this as a child," or, "It makes me feel like a better person when I have expensive things," you can start to work through that and come up with a plan together about how money is tied directly to identity and security. And so examining that and looking at it as a whole and saying is our identity more important than our security? Do we have to have a Mercedes-Benz outside and a really expensive house that we can't afford? Or is it better for us to have a little bit less and feel safe? That's what it is for me, anyway. I have to feel safe when it comes to money.

Bobbi Rebell:
I think a lot of us feel that way. So that's if a partner's involved. What if it's on you? What if there is financial chaos in your life and you just need to do something about it? What are your tips?

Jennifer Grimson:
So one of the things I say is try to go 30 days without purchasing anything above food and shelter, and see if you can do it, see how it makes you feel, write it down, those sorts of things. I think the root of it, if you're in it and you're causing it, is that you've got to figure out why you're doing it. So for me, my money lessons, my money culture, has been based in fear because I've been in these really extreme situations twice.

Bobbi Rebell:
You also sometimes give people some very tough love that they do not want to hear about big life decisions about their lifestyle overall.

Jennifer Grimson:
Yeah. I say a lot that you have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. This is interesting to me. Met with a woman recently and she said, "I'm really struggling. I've been out of work." She's somebody I knew years ago in the corporate world. She'd been out of work for a long time. She was struggling to find a new corporate job, and let's face it, age-ism is a real thing. And there isn't much I can do to help her with that, other than networking. But I said, "Well, let's take a look at what you've got." And she's got this amazing home in a phenomenal location here in Nashville. She's got an outbuilding, an apartment. She already has an apartment.

Jennifer Grimson:
I said, "Well, you could turn that into an Airbnb." This is just an example. And obviously with all the experience I have, I was even willing to help her with the marketing and tell her what works best and all the tips. And she was like, "Well, I don't want people at my house." And okay, you don't want people at your house. That's okay. But you're choosing your identity, I think, over your security. I didn't want people at my house, either, Bobbi. I was tired of people using my bathrooms and sleeping in my beds, but I cared more about my security.

Jennifer Grimson:
So maybe you don't want somebody living in your house. That's fine. Maybe you don't want to give up the expensive purses. That's fine. But are you going to be able to give up the travel, or are you going to be able to give up eating out, or are you going to be able to give up, or are you willing to live basically on the fringe of complete financial ruin day in and day out?

Jennifer Grimson:
So for me, the second time I lost everything, my kids were in private school. I was living in this beautiful neighborhood. My first thought was, how do I keep them in private school? How do I get an apartment in this neighborhood? How do I keep this lifestyle that I've been creating for them? And the truth was, I wasn't going to keep any of that. I needed to move out. I needed to live with my sister, on her generosity, for four months. I needed to look at different areas for them to go to school.

Jennifer Grimson:
And so grappling with the fact that you may need to give up what you've become accustomed to, to achieve freedom, is just a really important topic that we go into over and over again. Clinging to what you had may not be your path to freedom.

Follow Jennifer!

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• Website - http://www.micro-empires.com/

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Full Transcript:

Bobbi Rebell:
I hope you guys are all celebrating some big adulting milestones this season, and you know what? Finding the perfect gift for those celebrations can be kind of tough. I have the solution over at grownupgear.com. We have adorable hats, totes, mugs, pillows, tees, and seriously, the most cozy and comfortable sweatshirts. They're all on grownupgear.com, and all at affordable prices. We even now have digital gift certificates if you can't decide. Use code GROWNUP for 15% off your first order. Buying from our small business helps to support this free podcast. And you know what? We really appreciate it. Thanks, guys.

Jennifer Grimson:
We're in California on Highway 101. I pull over on the side of the road. I pop open the back of my SUV, and I'm standing there, pouring the cheap cereal, the generic cereal, into the name brand boxes on the side of the freeway, as the cars are whizzing by, with my babies in the car. And there was a tiny voice in my head saying, "You know this is not normal, right? You realize this is crazy, don't you?" But I wasn't awake enough to hear it. The light switch had not gone on. I look back on that, and I think that's insane. That's chaos.

Bobbi Rebell:
You're listening to Money Tips for Financial Grownups, with me, certified financial planner, Bobbi Rebell, author of How to Be a Financial Grownup. And you know what? When it comes to money, being a grownup is hard, but together, we've got this.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey, grownup friends. As you heard, there was a point when Micro Empires podcast host Jennifer Grimson's life was truly in financial chaos. She can talk about it now, but literally pulling over to put generic cereal into brand name boxes so your husband won't know you saved money, that's really bananas, right? Jennifer talks candidly about her decisions to file for bankruptcy twice and the consequences of that tough decision. But she also gives some priceless tips on how we can first recognize when our financial lives are in chaos, because very often we are in the dark.

Bobbi Rebell:
And while it's not the primary focus of our interview, I did manage to sneak in some questions about maximizing your Airbnb properties and what makes a good investment. And you'll also hear why that's so relevant to Jennifer's story. Here is Jennifer Grimson. Jennifer Grimson, you're a financial grownup. Welcome to the podcast.

Jennifer Grimson:
Thank you so much for having me, Bobbi.

Bobbi Rebell:
I am looking forward to speaking with you about your tips to handle financial chaos. That's why I brought you on, because it was a recent episode of your podcast, Micro Empires. But first, I want to hear a little bit more about your backstory because you have been through it all.

Jennifer Grimson:
Well, yes I have. So have many people. So my story is that I lost everything twice. So no job, no car, no place to live, two kids to raise, and chapter 13 bankruptcy. And that happened to me twice, once at the age of 29 and once at the age of 41, and the second time that it happened, I realized that I needed to do something to rebuild in a way that would protect me. So for me, that meant building small pockets of wealth, finger quotes, and security. And that's what the show that I have, which is called Micro Empires, is about, is just basically creating these small pockets so that if anything is taken away, you aren't left completely empty handed and at a loss of what to do.

Bobbi Rebell:
Those two bankruptcies, different stories each time, give us just a little sense of what caused those, because a lot of people go, well, how did that happen? I mean, the first time you had a one and a three-year-old. What happened?

Jennifer Grimson:
Well, the bankruptcies were are actually caused by the same thing, but how it happened to me was that I was in a very contentious divorce. So my ex-husband sued me twenty-five times in 10 years, and I amassed over $500,000 in attorney's fees. And I can go into great detail about that, but I don't think we have time for it, but in my case, it wasn't that I purchased a home and went in upside down, or I bought expensive cars, or had terrible spending habits. It's that I was running from somebody who was punishing me financially through the court system, which is another entire story altogether.

Jennifer Grimson:
But chapter 13 was a way for me to escape the lawsuits, and the first one helped me preserve the home that I lived in. So it was probably the first lesson I got in there are tools out there for you to use to help you financially. Now, chapter 13 bankruptcy is no fun. You pay your creditors back. Your credit is ruined for 10 years. You have to live on cash. It is not a great existence, but it did release me from lawsuits. So I did that not only once, but twice. But on top of everything, the second time I found myself without anything, no car, no job, no place to live. What I had done then was to turn my financial wellbeing over to someone else, namely the person that I was in a relationship with, so that when that relationship ended, I was really left with nothing.

Jennifer Grimson:
And as shameful as I felt that was, I decided a year ago, when I decided to start the show, that I would share the story because I knew I wasn't the only one. I think women do it more than men. I think it happens a lot, and there's a lot of shame in it when really the shame should be honestly on the other person, who's kind of not being fair about that. But at any rate, it taught me a hard, hard lesson and I really didn't get the message until I was about 41, that no matter what I did, I was going to have to rebuild in a different way than I had done in the past.

Bobbi Rebell:
And now it is a decade after that second bankruptcy. Just to catch people up, you became a real estate investor.

Jennifer Grimson:
Yes, I did. So from 41 years old, the following three years it took me to correct my credit, which is a journey in and of itself. And then the first thing I did was to purchase a home, which was a miracle. And I walk through how I made that happen. And then through house hacking and short term rental, in four years, I created $1.4 million in income producing investments.

Jennifer Grimson:
And there's a reason they're called income producing investments. I didn't have $1.4 million. I had mortgages, I had overhead, I had all of the things, but what I had done was created, I actually had three properties that were Airbnb. And those properties all had their own incomes, their own empires, on top of a corporate job. So that way, I had at least four areas of income, and then I created other areas of income, as well. So I kept creating these little pockets of income.

Jennifer Grimson:
And then that's morphed. I've moved into investing into multi-family and other things. But again, by using tools, tools that I had at the ready. So I didn't realize, when I rebuilt the second time, I did it with a W-2 really and some grit. So other than that, I mean, I didn't have a great investment that I made a ton of money off of or anything like that. I simply just used the tools at hand, which are part of why I want to do the show, to share what's available to all of us.

Bobbi Rebell:
I know you don't do Airbnb investing right now, but just quickly, give us some insider secrets and tips for getting started with Airbnb. What did you learn there?

Jennifer Grimson:
Well, I learned a lot. So first and foremost, I started doing it in 2014 in Nashville, Tennessee, where no one was doing it at the time. And that was a great time to do it. So my advice to anybody is anytime you see an opportunity, and maybe it's something new and edgy, and you're willing to take the risk, and risk, you know, I talk about risk a lot, it has to be a risk that you're comfortable with, I say, go for it. I needed to do everything in micro steps. Also part of why I do the things the way that I do. I'm not a huge risk taker.

Jennifer Grimson:
So I had my home. I started renting it out on the weekends through Airbnb and quickly realized that this could be a real way for me to not only cover my mortgage and expenses, but a way for me to create an income. My best advice for people, if you're getting involved in Airbnb and you're just starting out and you're just a normal person, like you're not a person who has hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank or millions to lose, I say, go find an emerging market and buy a really, really affordable home. Your money in real estate is made on the purchase. So if you purchase high, you're not really probably going to make a lot of money off it, no matter what your plan is with it. You've got to find a way to purchase low.

Jennifer Grimson:
So I purchased in evolving neighborhoods. I took a chance in that. And I went ahead and lived in the properties, which allowed me to get in there for very little money. I furnished them myself. I managed them myself, until such time that they were up and running and I was able to hire other people to do that. Those would be my basic tips on Airbnb. I could talk about that forever, but those are sort of the basics.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hands-on first, then hand it off. Okay, so that was a nice little bonus tangent for everybody. But the real reason I asked you to come on was to tell us your tips on how to handle financial chaos, which of course has to start with actually recognizing financial chaos. Like, there was a cereal incident in your car, with your children.

Jennifer Grimson:
Yeah. So financial chaos is a really sad, scary place to live and to be. And I lived in it for many, many years, and I didn't know what I was living in. I like to describe it to people, I have this metaphor, like imagine you're living in a home, there's no lights in the home, and it's a hoarder. You're living in a home with a hoarder, and there's all this stuff piled up, but you don't know it's there, but you feel like something's wrong. You're not really sure what it is.

Jennifer Grimson:
And one day, someone turns the light switch on and you see all of the chaos, all of the mayhem, and that person who's creating it, whether it's you or potentially your partner, runs over and shuts that light off, and says, "Oh, never mind, never mind." You can't unsee it. So in my case, I lived in a situation where I was, to simplify it, I was a saver and my ex-husband was a spender. He had a lot of emotional attachment to money and how it made him feel. And we were living in absolute dire straights, things like he would get angry if I bought the generic brand cereal. We were so broke, I was bouncing checks to buy groceries. I would go to three different grocery stores to find the best deals.

Jennifer Grimson:
I took my children shopping one night, like I did normally, so I had them with me in the evening, little babies in diapers, in and out of the car. We'd go to three different grocery stores to save the money. And then on the way home, we're in California on Highway 101, I pull over on the side of the road, I pop open the back of my SUV, and I'm standing there pouring the cheap cereal, the generic cereal, into the name brand boxes on the side of the freeway, as the cars are whizzing by, with my babies in the car. And there was a tiny voice in my head saying, "You know this is not normal, right? You realize this is crazy, don't you?" But I wasn't awake enough to hear it. The light switch had not gone on. I look back on that, and I think that's insane. That's chaos. You're risking your entire life to keep someone happy about something that has to really do with money and your relationship with money. So that's financial chaos.

Jennifer Grimson:
And when I talk to people about their money, and it's very, very personal. People will tell you about their sex lives before they'll tell you about their money, which is kind of crazy, but they'll explain things to me that they've become accustomed to because they've been living in it for so long. But that is sort of the truth of it, and recognizing it, as well. My advice is to look at, do you have a shared approach to money? Do you and your partner have a shared approach? Do you find it really difficult to go without the nice to haves? Or does your partner? Do you feel sick whenever you have to talk about money? And then examining what wealthy might mean to you, also a good tool in figuring out where you are on the money spectrum.

Bobbi Rebell:
Once we've identified that we are in financial chaos, which probably more of us are in than we realize, give us some tips to calm that financial chaos.

Jennifer Grimson:
Yeah. I mean, I think the first thing, if you're in a partnership with someone who is creating the chaos, and it's not yourself, because sometimes it could be yourself, and there's a little test that I offer in the episode that I did this week, but probably the first thing is to sit down and have a conversation with that partner. Chances are, that may not go well if you've never had a conversation before, and there are therapists and books and things that can help you with that, but it's really taking a hard look at your own relationship with money. I happen to call it money culture, and I have a free ebook, as well, that walks you through like where are you with money and how do you feel and why do you do the things that you do?

Jennifer Grimson:
Hopefully if you can sit down and have a conversation with a partner and that person is able to come to grips with their own relationship with money, perhaps saying, "Yeah, I do these things because it makes me feel loved," or, "I didn't get this as a child," or, "It makes me feel like a better person when I have expensive things," you can start to work through that and come up with a plan together about how money is tied directly to identity and security. And so examining that and looking at it as a whole and saying is our identity more important than our security? Do we have to have a Mercedes-Benz outside and a really expensive house that we can't afford? Or is it better for us to have a little bit less and feel safe? That's what it is for me, anyway. I have to feel safe when it comes to money.

Bobbi Rebell:
I think a lot of us feel that way. So that's if a partner's involved. What if it's on you? What if there is financial chaos in your life and you just need to do something about it? What are your tips?

Jennifer Grimson:
So one of the things I say is try to go 30 days without purchasing anything above food and shelter, and see if you can do it, see how it makes you feel, write it down, those sorts of things. I think the root of it, if you're in it and you're causing it, is that you've got to figure out why you're doing it. So for me, my money lessons, my money culture, has been based in fear because I've been in these really extreme situations twice.

Bobbi Rebell:
You also sometimes give people some very tough love that they do not want to hear about big life decisions about their lifestyle overall.

Jennifer Grimson:
Yeah. I say a lot that you have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. This is interesting to me. Met with a woman recently and she said, "I'm really struggling. I've been out of work." She's somebody I knew years ago in the corporate world. She'd been out of work for a long time. She was struggling to find a new corporate job, and let's face it, age-ism is a real thing. And there isn't much I can do to help her with that, other than networking. But I said, "Well, let's take a look at what you've got." And she's got this amazing home in a phenomenal location here in Nashville. She's got an outbuilding, an apartment. She already has an apartment.

Jennifer Grimson:
I said, "Well, you could turn that into an Airbnb." This is just an example. And obviously with all the experience I have, I was even willing to help her with the marketing and tell her what works best and all the tips. And she was like, "Well, I don't want people at my house." And okay, you don't want people at your house. That's okay. But you're choosing your identity, I think, over your security. I didn't want people at my house, either, Bobbi. I was tired of people using my bathrooms and sleeping in my beds, but I cared more about my security.

Jennifer Grimson:
So maybe you don't want somebody living in your house. That's fine. Maybe you don't want to give up the expensive purses. That's fine. But are you going to be able to give up the travel, or are you going to be able to give up eating out, or are you going to be able to give up, or are you willing to live basically on the fringe of complete financial ruin day in and day out?

Jennifer Grimson:
So for me, the second time I lost everything, my kids were in private school. I was living in this beautiful neighborhood. My first thought was, how do I keep them in private school? How do I get an apartment in this neighborhood? How do I keep this lifestyle that I've been creating for them? And the truth was, I wasn't going to keep any of that. I needed to move out. I needed to live with my sister, on her generosity, for four months. I needed to look at different areas for them to go to school.

Jennifer Grimson:
And so grappling with the fact that you may need to give up what you've become accustomed to, to achieve freedom, is just a really important topic that we go into over and over again. Clinging to what you had may not be your path to freedom.

Bobbi Rebell:
This has been so wonderful. Tell us where people can follow up with you. Of course, everybody needs to subscribe to the Micro Empires podcast.

Jennifer Grimson:
Yeah, the podcast, of course. My website is micro-empires.com. I'm on all the socials, either by Micro Empires or Jennifer Grimson. I have a free book. It's 28 pages. You can download it at my website. And I'm also creating a course called You Don't Have to Be Wealthy to Build Wealth. So I hope that will be really helpful for people. It's really for folks that are just kind of starting out, because I get asked the same questions over and over again. You know, I may not be the only person who's gone through this, but for a lot of folks who I hear, it's too late to start over, et cetera, et cetera, I think I'm a good example of somebody who went through it more than once, and later in life.

Bobbi Rebell:
Thank you so much.

Jennifer Grimson:
Thank you, Bobbi. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay, my friends, let's review some of Jennifer's tips from the interview. First of all, look, bankruptcy is a serious decision, but it can be a tool to help in the most dire financial situations. So think about it carefully, but know that it might be right in some extreme situations. Don't turn your financial wellbeing over to someone else completely, even if that is someone that you are in a relationship with and you love and you believe will last forever. And I hope it does. But sometimes when a relationship ends, you can end up like Jennifer, with nothing. Just think about it.

Bobbi Rebell:
Jennifer set up her real estate as income producing investments. She had three Airbnbs with their own incomes that were separate, in addition to her W-2 job. So think about that when you are working on different side hustles or other ventures.

Bobbi Rebell:
If you find yourself in financial chaos and it involves a partner, make sure you sit down and try to have a conversation about it. Think about having them come to grips with their relationship with money and what is driving their decisions that are impacting both of you. Come up with a plan together. If you and you alone are the cause of the financial chaos, well, Jennifer suggests trying, for example, to go 30 days with just the most basic expenses. We're talking food and shelter, and maybe write down any time you stray. See how it makes you feel.

Bobbi Rebell:
Also, figure out why you are doing it. Is it about identity, security, validation from others? Figure out what is your money culture based on? For Jennifer, it's based on fear of having to start over financially yet again.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay, my friends, I'd love to hear what you think of this episode. Have you ever found yourself in financial chaos? I would love to hear your reaction to this episode and maybe your stories. DM me on Instagram at @BobbiRebell1, and for previews of upcoming episodes and news that is relevant to our grownup lives, please subscribe to my newsletter. You can do so on my website, bobbirebell.com. Big thanks to Micro Empire's podcast host Jennifer Grimson for her fantastic advice and for helping us all be financial grownups.

Bobbi Rebell:
Money Tips for Financial Grownups is a production of BRK Media, LLC. Editing and production by Steve Stewart, guest coordination, content creation, social media support, and show notes by Ashley Wall. You can find the podcast show notes, which includes links to resources mentioned in the show, as well as show transcripts, by going to my website, bobbirebell.com. You can also find an incredible library of hundreds of previous episodes to help you on your journey as a financial grownup.

Bobbi Rebell:
The podcast and tons of complimentary resources associated with the podcast is brought to you for free, but I need to have your support in return. Here's how you can do that. First, connect with me on social media at @BobbiRebell1 on Instagram and Bobbi Rebell on both Twitter and on Clubhouse, where you can join my Money Tips for Grownups club. Second, share this podcast on social media, and tag me so I can thank you. You can also leave a review on Apple podcasts. Reading each one means the world to me. You know what? It really motivates others to subscribe.

Bobbi Rebell:
You can also support our merch shop, grownupgear.com, by picking up fun gifts for your grownup friends and treating yourself, as well. And most of all, help your friends on their journey to being financial grownups by encouraging them to subscribe to the podcast. Together, we've got this. Thank you for your time and for the kind words so many of you send my way. See you next time, and thank you for supporting Money Tips for Financial Grownups.

The best-selling author reveals what happened when her dad opened her mail and saw her credit card debt, and the surprising result when she and her husband cut their budget by 90 percent. Plus a preview of her new book: Your Turn: How to be an Adult. 

Julie’s Money Lesson:

Okay, the recliner. I'm starting to make a lot of money. I'm making enough that my husband is like, "How would you feel about me being a full-time artist?" And I was like, “Yes!”. I was supporting a family of four. My husband became a full-time artist and we started spending money. We're buying the nicer table. We're buying the nicer artwork. We're buying the nicer recliner. We realized that our set point of what we could just spend money on, in terms of discretionary spending, had just increased as our salary increased. We're looking around like we're making far more money than we ever had, but we're not saving a darn thing. What is up? And we realized that set point was just out of control. We were just dropping $1,000 without thinking about it. I read up, I talked to people and I learned this rule of if you want to save, you want to change your habits, you don't just try to start saving 5% or 10% if you've been saving nothing, you need to start saving for yourself first. You need to pay yourself first and decide what your savings goals are and set that to the side and then pay the rest of your bills. And that meant that our discretionary spending, we were going to cut by 95% or by 90%. If we were spending $1,000 on a recliner, when we had to buy the second recliner, it was going to be $100. And I was bummed because the second recliner was for me and my husband had the fancy recliner. We went to the cheaper furniture store and sat in recliners. And we had these down, sad faces, like “poor us” right? And I sound so privileged talking about this. I realize some people are like, "$100 is a lot of money." I'm just saying for me, it was a big cut. And then we found this recliner for $100 that is so comfortable. It is like the recliner of choice. You come to our house, everyone gravitates to it. It looks comfortable and it is comfortable. It's the kind of thing when you push the buttons and it starts to leans back, you're like, "Ah". It feels like a spa. And it's the cheapest thing in the whole downstairs of our house. Cut spending on something by 90% and see if you noticed.

Bobbi’s Takeaways:

#1 - Julie jokes about how retirement is over romanticized and I couldn't agree more. Work is not just a path to retirement. We put in about a third of our 24 hour day, and for many of us, a lot more than those eight hours. If you hate what you're doing so much, that you are laser focused on retirement, consider refocusing that energy on enjoying your day to day more. If there's anything we've learned during the pandemic, it's that we should not assume things need to stay the same. Hit pause, give yourself some grownup tough love and fix it.

#2 - Let's get better about asking our friends and colleagues of different backgrounds and races about their experiences with money. Even though Julie clearly and candidly talks about how being a person of color impacted her money decisions in the book, as a white person I wasn't sure about asking Julie about it. I'm really glad I did. I'm not sure why I was so hesitant. And I hope we can all make time to both listen and share with each other as well. And in case you're wondering, as a white person in this country, it never even occurred to me that I needed to use a credit card to prove I belonged in a store. We need to be talking about this.

Get your copy of YOUR TURN: How to Be an Adult today!

Follow Julie!

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• Twitter- @jlythcotthaims

• LinkedIn- Julie Lythcott-Haims

• Website- www.julielythcotthaims.com

Follow Bobbi!

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• Twitter- @bobbirebell

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Full Transcript:

Bobbi Rebell:

It is officially spring. And that means graduation season is on. We here at The Financial Grownup Podcast have created some new super fun gifts just for that in our grownupgear.com merch store. We have adorable hats, totes, mugs, pillows, tees, and the seriously, most cozy and comfortable sweaters all on grownupgear.com and all at affordable prices. Grownup Gear also makes great gifts for Mother's Day, Father's Day, engagements, bachelor/bachelorette, parties birthdays, and of course, just for fun to treat yourself. Use code graduation for a 15% discount. And thank you in advance for your orders. Buying from our small business helps to support this free podcast, and we truly appreciate your support.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

They handed me a check for the full amount, $3,900 plus change, and I felt so shamed and so just embarrassed. Here I am highly educated, a fancy degree from a fancy college and I'd managed to get so far in the hole. And I just cried. I just cried. Tears just rolled down my face.

Bobbi Rebell:

You're listening to Financial Grownup with me, certified financial planner, Bobbi Rebell, author of How to be a Financial Grownup. And you know what? Being a grownup is really hard, especially when it comes to money, but it's okay. We're going to get there together. I'm going to bring you one money story from a Financial Grownup, one lesson, and then my take on how you can make it your own. We got this. Hello, my grownup friends. It is April. I am so happy it's April. I don't know about you, but I just, I needed the better weather. Speaking to you from my home in New York City, where we've had a very brutal winter. I was fortunate. I got to go to Florida for a little bit, but we've been home for a while and this better weather could not come at a better time.

Bobbi Rebell:

And also, as some of you get to see, it's very much a work in progress, you see it on my Instagram, but I do get to go out and play golf, which is a really great way to spend time. Anyway, let's talk about this week's Financial Grownup. The adjective that I am going to use to describe her, delightful, Julie Lythcott-Haims is out with a new book, Your Turn: How to be an Adult. It is the much anticipated follow-up to her previous book, How to Raise an Adult, and not to be forgotten in between those, Real American: A Memoir, and a very personal book, which continues to grow in relevance.

Bobbi Rebell:

Julie is a former Stanford Dean. She left that position to pursue her passion, the career she'd always dreamed about, writing. You know what? It's working out okay. Julie's new book, Your Turn: How to be an Adult, is about more than just being a Financial Grownup, though she does have a chapter which is pretty much on the topic. Chapter eight, check it out. The book is about being a full on adult, but for the purposes of this podcast, she was a good sport and gets candid about her money blunders and victories. Here is Julie Lythcott-Haims. Julie Lythcott-Haims, you are a Financial Grownup. Welcome to the podcast.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

Bobbi, no one's ever said that to me before. Thank you.

Bobbi Rebell:

You are very much a Financial Grownup. You're the author of Your Turn: How to be an Adult. Welcome.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. I think I'm going to learn something.

Bobbi Rebell:

I'm going to ask you to share a money story from the book, which has to do with credit card debt, but there's a really interesting angle that has to do with how you relate to your family, which is so appropriate when we talk about Financial Grownups.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

Yeah. Thanks for pointing to something that's deeply personal. No, of course. I shared it in the book.

Bobbi Rebell:

It's in the book, Julie.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

I know. I'm trying to be vulnerable with my readers so that they can feel more safe and seen. Okay, picture me. I now 53, but in the story, I was maybe 22. I had amassed a lot of credit card debt in college. I was at Stanford University. The student union was basically lined with the desks of fakes who were there to offer me a credit card application. And I filled out maybe two of them. I had two credit cards. I would use my credit cards at the local shopping center. I would use them for groceries. I would use them for dinners and lunches out and coffee. I was just, I was spending money without having really learned the habits of how you keep track of your expenses and the whole interest part with credit cards. Long and short, I had accumulated about $3,900 in debt.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

This would be around 1990, 1991. Maybe double that, maybe like $6,000, $7,000 in today's dollars. I had no way to pay it off. My first job I'd earned $20,000 a year. It's hard to pay down a debt of $3,000 when you're only earning $20,000 gross. And I was headed off to law school and was living with my parents over the summer before law school started. And so my mail, including my bills, was being forwarded to my parents' address. Well, unbeknownst to me, after I had opened the latest credit card bill showing just how much I owed, my parents had read it as well.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

One night they just solemnly came toward me and said, "You're about to go start grad school and you're getting married. And we want you to start life with Dan", my boyfriend and soon to be husband, "with a financial clean slate. So here's a check." They handed me a check for the full amount, $3,900 plus change. And I felt so shamed. And so just embarrassed. Here I am highly educated, a fancy degree from a fancy college, and I'd managed to get so far in the hole and I just cried. I just cried. Tears just rolled down my face. They weren't judgmental. They weren't scolding me. They were offering me this gift.

Bobbi Rebell:

There's also another lesson for our listeners about relationships and how you communicate with your family.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

Yeah. That really pushes the button, right? I think I was so ashamed that I had let them down by being this child of theirs who had been so irresponsible. And I think the lesson is had I only reached out sooner. I just kept digging the hole deeper and deeper by paying the minimum on my credit cards. If I had reached out to my parents six months earlier, or a year before, or two years before, I would probably never have gotten into such bad debt to start with.

Bobbi Rebell:

We're going to talk for your everyday money lesson about the fact that you guys like to splurge. But then there was sort of an aha moment. Tell us about the recliner.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

Okay, the recliner. I'm starting to make a lot of money. I'm making enough that my husband, who's a designer, a product designer, user experience designer, is like, "How would you feel about me being a full-time artist?" And I was like, yes. Okay, that's how capable I was of supporting a family of four. My husband became a full-time artist and we started spending money. We're buying the nicer table. We're buying the nicer artwork. We're buying the nicer recliner.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

We realized that our set point of what we could just spend money on, in terms of discretionary spending, had just increased as our salary increased. We're looking around like we're making far more money than we ever had, but we're not saving a darn thing. What is up? And we realized that set point was just out of control. We were just dropping $1,000 without thinking about it. I read up, I talked to people and I learned this rule of if you want to save, you want to change your habits, you don't just try to start saving 5% or 10% if you've been saving nothing, you need to start saving for yourself first.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

You need to pay yourself first and decide what your savings goals are and set that to the side and then pay the rest of your bills. And that meant that our discretionary spending, we were going to cut by 95% or by 90%. If we were spending $1,000 on a recliner, when we had to buy the second recliner, it was going to be $100. And I was bummed because the second recliner was for me and my husband had the fancy recliner. We went to the cheaper furniture store and sat in recliners. And we had these down, sad faces, like poor us, we can only, right? And I sound so privileged talking about this. I realize some people are like,"$100 is a lot of money."

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

I'm just saying for me, it was a big cut. And then we found this recliner for $100 that is so comfortable. It is like the recliner of choice. You come to our house, everyone gravitates to it. It looks comfortable and it is comfortable. It's the kind of thing when you push the buttons and it starts to leans back, you're like, "Ah". It feels like a spa. And it's the cheapest thing in the whole downstairs of our house.

Bobbi Rebell:

But it's good. It's working for you and you saved 90%.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

Yes.

Bobbi Rebell:

Nobody misses not spending the money.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

That's right.

Bobbi Rebell:

It's so great. And yeah, the tip is basically cuts something by 90% and see if you noticed.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

Right. That's right.

Bobbi Rebell:

Yeah. That's a good one.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

100%. Yep.

Bobbi Rebell:

Let's talk more about this book. I devoured it. I have to say it's a robust book. This is a book that took a lot of research. I really encourage people, not only to read it, but to settle in with it because it really is worth your time. I picked out a few of the things that I'd like you to elaborate on within the book. And the first one kind of tag team to what we just talked about because there's a lot of talk about cutting your expenses so that you can retire early. That's one of the motivations for taking drastic action when it comes to spending. But you talk about the fact that retiring early is really over romanticized.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

The retiring early rhetoric tends to be, "My job sucks. I can't wait to retire. I'm just going to slog away working in this dungeon so that I can at 55 or 57 or 60, whatever, I can kick back and relax and travel." If that's the choice you're making, more power to you. But in the book, I'm trying to expand people's horizons and get folks to think maybe work doesn't have to feel so awful, such that all you want to do is leave work. Maybe you can lead a career life, a job life, a professional life that is intrinsically rewarding. It feels good. You're tapping into your talents, your strengths, your loves, you're growing. You're making enough money to pay your bills.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

And you're like, "Hey, I'm not eager to retire. I enjoy what I'm doing." And then to put a fine point on it, Bobbi, oftentimes when people retire, that is they cease doing that which they have always done, that which has been a huge part of their identity, they begin to wither psychologically. They begin to wither physically. They begin to wither in terms of their personal connections, because they're not making things with their hands, they're not doing as much with their brain and they're not seeing human beings as much. Retirement can often lead to a downward spiral. If one is not sort of healthy, hail and active in one's retirement, it can really be the beginning of the end.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

I'm here to say, love the work you do, do the work you love, make sure it pays your bills and do it for as long as you can and build in the travel and the enjoyment and the fishing and all of that along the way, rather than waiting to live that life you imagined only after you've retired from some terrible job.

Bobbi Rebell:

Such a good reminder. Another thing that really stood out in the book that I went, oh, that I don't think about enough, when you talked about the spending, and this ties into your spending on the credit cards when you were younger especially, you talk about the fact that racial stereotypes played into your spending decisions. Tell us more.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

Well, what listeners need to know is I'm a black and biracial woman, very light skin. But nevertheless, I think to the world, unambiguously of color. And most people figure out that I'm black. I, as a young person, had learned to ... I had internalized the hate that I had experienced along the way. Microaggressions, outright racism, these things were things I experienced in childhood. By the time I get to college and I'm at an elite college, I'm at Stanford University in Silicon Valley and I have these credit cards. I am using the credit cards when I'm in a store, in a fancy store, at the Stanford Shopping Center or in a nice restaurant as a way to demonstrate, I have credit, I am capable. You do not have to associate me with that stereotypical black person you think can't afford to purchase your goods, your food, because I have this credit card.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

I was really deep in my internalized oppression that I was trying to not be the stereotypical black person. I was trying to be the model Negro, if you will, I'm using terms of stereotype. I have long since grown out of that behavior, but I will say, yeah, the credit card was like an appendage that was proving my ability or my worthiness or my right to be in these white environments. I overspent as a result, I'd be with friends at dinner and say like, you know what? I'll take care of the bill. And I'd plunk down my gold. How did I have a gold American Express card so young? But I did. They knew who they were preying on. It worked, right? I was like, I'll take care of the bill. And it was my way of showing, not just the restaurant, but my friends, I have money, even though I didn't necessarily have the money in the bank to pay that bill.

Bobbi Rebell:

It's a tough situation that society puts people in that mindset.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

Yeah.

Bobbi Rebell:

We could talk about this a lot more, but this is a short podcast and I want to talk about one final theme. And that is that you really humanize a lot of our experiences with money by bringing stories of other people into the book. I wanted to ask you to share that a little bit.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

Yeah. Thank you so much. The book is part memoir, me telling my lived experience, as you've just asked me about, me with some self-help tips, practical advice, but then I've got the stories of these other people in every chapter, a really diverse set of people from all walks of life in order to say to all readers, I'm trying to envision all of you as I write this. And the two stories in the money chapter are Wesley, who grew up working poor, put himself through community college, put himself into position of getting to drive for UPS and has been with UPS now for 35 years and will retire with a full pension from UPS.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

It hearkens back to days of yore, when you'd work for one employer all your life, and they were very loyal to you and you were loyal to them and unions were strong and that's not really the way much of the working world works these days, but there are plenty of industries that still do offer pensions, like the package driving industry, like UPS and police and law enforcement more broadly and schools. People who work for the government tend to have a pension. And this is a way to the middle class. Wesley has provided a life for himself, his wife and his son that is just many steps above what he grew up with financially. I wanted that story in there. I think it's a really important story about the American dream and that in many ways it is alive and well today.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

The other story is Denae, who's a dancer, got an undergraduate degree and a master's in dance. She's a professional dancer in New York City. She's done some amazing gigs, but dancing gigs come and they go. And when they go, she doesn't have income unless she supplements that with other work, which she does. Nevertheless, she had racked up with interest $50.000 in student loan debt, living in the most expensive city in America, New York, and or one of the most expensive, and she set herself a goal to get out of that credit card debt.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

She said, "I'm going to be debt three and three years." And she did it by being extremely frugal about her food, extremely thoughtful and mindful about her choices, about how she went places, what kinds of places she rented. She would even say when she was working a temp job in between dancing gigs, somebody took her food out of the fridge and started eating it. And she put a note on the refrigerators, "Hey, please don't eat my food. I'm paying down my student loans." And if that wasn't crystal clear, because she didn't know who did it, but she just knew I have to send this message.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

She stood up for herself, both to herself and to her friends and coworkers to say, "Hey, don't take my stuff. I'm paying off my student loan." Really brave. She did pay down that loan. Danced through the subway in a rented dress that she got from Rent the Runway with a big sign saying, "I'm debt-free. Hug me." And then she became a financial planner to help other people. When she's not dancing, she's now a certified financial planner person because she saw how many of her own peers, highly educated, didn't know enough about money. Here's to Denae, very much a resource for other people now that she is completely debt free.

Bobbi Rebell:

I am smiling ear to ear hearing that story. And there's so many other wonderful human stories in this book. We know it's going to be available everywhere. I won't have you say that, but where can people find out more about you and any virtual touring that you're going to be doing, my dear?

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

Thank you, Bobbi. The best way to be in touch with me is through my website, JulieLythcott-Haims.com. I'm sure Bobbi will put the spelling of that in the show notes. From there, you can follow me on social I'm @JLythcott-Haims everywhere. Maybe even Tik Tok, who knows, we'll see. I'm starting a membership club because I like to get real with people. I like to get really vulnerable and share. I know that that's the way we learn and grow and feel less lonely and I'm starting that. That's all online. Go to my website and just from there, you'll be able to follow me what I'm up to and all the virtual tour stuff will be on there as well.

Bobbi Rebell:

Well, thank you so much for this. Thank you for the book and thank you for joining us.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

You're amazing. Thanks for having me. And I actually feel more competent about my financial choices and what I've learned from them because you helped me think it through, by walking through these stories with me. Thanks, Bobbi.

Bobbi Rebell:

They're all your stories. Thank you.

Julie Lythcott-Haims :

Thanks.

Bobbi Rebell:

Okay, my friends, here's my take. Financial Grownup tip number one, Julie jokes about how retirement is over romanticized And I couldn't agree more. Work is not just a path to retirement. We put in about a third of our 24 hour day, and for many of us, a lot more than those eight hours. If you hate what you're doing so much, that you are laser focused on retirement, consider refocusing that energy on enjoying your day to day more. If there's anything we've learned during the pandemic, it's that we should not assume things need to stay the same. Hit pause, give yourself some grownup tough love and fix it.

Bobbi Rebell:

Financial Grownup tip number two, let's get better about asking our friends and colleagues of different backgrounds and races about their experiences with money. Even though Julie clearly and candidly talks about how being a person of color impacted her money decisions in the book, as a white person I wasn't sure about asking Julia about it. I'm really glad I did. I'm not sure why I was so hesitant. And I hope we can all make time to both listen and share with each other as well. And in case you're wondering, as a white person in this country, it never even occurred to me that I needed to use a credit card to prove I belonged in a store. We need to be talking about this.

Bobbi Rebell:

It is Financial Literacy Month and I am giving away a ton of incredible books, including Julie's. You want one? All you have to do is DM me on Instagram @BobbiRebell1, and just say, "I'd love a book from a Financial Grownup". The authors that are on this podcast and their publishers are incredibly generous. And I can't wait to send out lots and lots of books. Everyone, pick up Your Turn: How to be an Adult and big thanks to Julie Lythcott-Haims for helping us all be Financial Grownups.

Bobbi Rebell:

The Financial Grownup Podcast is a production of BRK Media. The podcast is hosted by me, Bobbi Rebell, but the real magic happens behind the scenes with our team. Steve Stewart is our editor and producer and Amanda Savan is our talent coordinator and content creators. Yeah, that means she does the show notes you can get for every show right on our website and all the fantastic graphics that you can see on our social media channels. Our mission here at Financial Grownup is to help you be at your financial best in every stage of life.

Bobbi Rebell:

And this year we want to help you get there by giving away some of our favorite money books. To get yours, make sure you are on the Grownup list. Go-to BobbiRebell.com to sign up for free, while you're there, please check out our Grownup Gear Shop and help support the show by buying something to express your commitment to being a Financial Grownup. Stay in touch on Instagram @BobbiRebell1 and on Twitter @BobbiRebell. You can email us at hello@financialgrownup.com. And if you enjoyed the show, please tell a friend and maybe leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It only takes a couple minutes. Join us next time for more stories to help you live your best grownup life.

Acorn’s Chief Education Officer Jennifer Barrett shares her own “wake up’ call’ when she learned to think like a breadwinner, and gives us specific strategies to build wealth and create a path to have the rich life we all deserve. 

Jennifer’s Money Lesson-

I think every woman would benefit from thinking like a breadwinner, from really basing our choices, the choices we make with our money and our career on the assumption that we should be able to provide the life that we want for ourselves without having to depend on someone else. If we make our money and career choices on that assumption, we will set ourselves up really nicely. Then if we need someone, whether or not we end up being the main earner is sort of irrelevant, but the most important thing is to think about what do I want in my life and what do I need to do financially, professionally to make that happen? One of the most important pieces of that is building wealth. So that means investing right off the bat as early as you can, as much as you can, because that is really the ticket to freedom. The more money that you have invested, the more freedom you have, because you are decreasing your dependency on each paycheck with the amount of money that you have growing for you. It just gives you so many more options. It means you can buy a house on your own, whether or not you're with somebody else. It means that if you lose a job, you are fine. You have that financial security net. It means if you want to have a baby on your own, you can afford that financially. It just gives you so many more choices with your life.

Jennifer’s Money Tip-

I think it comes down to asking yourself the question, "Are the choices I'm making with my money bringing me closer or further away from the future I want?" That seems like such a basic question, but I still ask myself that a lot of times when I'm thinking about even small choices around my money. "Is this going to bring me closer to the future I want, or is this setting me back?" So it's a good question to ask yourself regularly, a good gut check.

Bobbi’s Tips-

Financial Grownup Tip #1-

Jen talked about how hard it is to negotiate. I've had the toughest time with this too so I want to recommend a book that made a huge difference to me. It's called Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. He also has a masterclass if you like to watch videos and I can tell you, I watched it all and it is excellent.

Financial Grownup Tip #2-

Thinking like a breadwinner sadly is not optional. I have twice become the family breadwinner totally out of the blue and it was temporary, but let me tell you, it is a shock to the system. Like Jen, I never thought it would happen to me. You don't have to be the breadwinner, but you do have to be ready to step up if life throws you a curve ball. Jen's book will help you do just that, so definitely pick up a copy of Think Like a Breadwinner.

Get your copy of Think Like A Bread Winner by Jennifer Barrett

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Full Transcript:

Bobbie Rebell: Question for you guys. Are we ever going to get back to that whole dress up for work thing the way we used to? I don't know. But one thing I do know is it is time to get out of those PJ's and those grungy tshirts, and we need to give ourselves an upgraded, but still super comfy, wardrobe that makes us smile, and ideally makes our coworkers, our friends and our family smile as well. I have so many friends that I've wanted to send a little pick me ups to, to let them know it's all good, and that includes you. So that's why I created Grownup Gear, a fun line of t-shirts, sweats, pillows, mugs, totes, and more thaT I guarantee will give you and everyone that you're Zooming with all day long, a good giggle.

Bobbie Rebell: Grownup Gear is about saying the things out loud that we tell ourselves silently. Like when you wake up and you look in the mirror and you think, "I can't believe I'm a grownup either." Or maybe you just want to be honest that you are still a grownup in progress, or you want to send a gift congratulating a friend for paying off their debt. The most comfy sweatshirts, t-shirts, tote bags, mugs, pillows, and more. Give it to yourself or your favorite grownup, or almost grownup, friend. Go to grownupgear.com to check it out. For discount codes and sales, follow us on Instagram at our new handle, @grownupgear, and DM us with any questions. And thank you because by supporting Grownup Gear, you help support this free podcast.

Jen Barrett: Deep down. I really don't think I believed that I would be taking the lead financially at any point in my life. I really thought my husband would be the main earner. So it probably seemed less important to negotiate that salary, and then for the next seven years, I barely negotiated my raises.

Bobbie Rebell: You're listening to Financial Grownup with me, certified financial planner, Bobbi Rebell, author of How To Be a Financial Grownup. And you know what? Being a grownup is really hard, especially when it comes to money, but it's okay. We're going to get there together. I'm going to bring you one money story from a financial grownup, one lesson, and then my take on how you can make it your own. We got this.

Bobbie Rebell: Hey, Grownups, this episode has been about five years in the making. I'll never forget sitting in a Midtown restaurant with my new friend, Jennifer Barrett. A mutual friend had introduced us thinking, "Well, you guys have a lot in common and maybe you guys will come up with some projects together." So we were brainstorming our two big ideas. For me, it was Financial Grownup and the idea of sharing money stories to inspire people to build the foundation for a wealthy life of choices, getting to live the life that they want. For Jen, it was the concept that we all had to, well, think like breadwinners. Jen had, and still has, I should say, what we call a big job. She really is the breadwinner and her job as the chief education officer at Acorns is intense and sometimes all consuming. But finally, her new book, Think Like a Bread Winner, A Wealth Building Manifesto For Women Who Want To Earn More and Worry Less is coming out.

Bobbie Rebell:I can tell all of you it has been well worth the wait. I was honored that Jen asked me to contribute to this book and to endorse it along with David Bach, Eve Rodsky, the author of Fairplay, Farnoosh Torabi, who by the way wrote When She Makes More, so thinking along the same path, and Erin Lowry, who's been a frequent guest on this podcast, author of the Broke Millennial books series, and many more. In our interview, Jen Barrett shares the story that started it all when she realized what she didn't want to admit. If she wanted to get what she wanted to get, she was going to have to start thinking like a breadwinner. Here is Jennifer Barrett.

Bobbie Rebell: Jen Barrett, you are a financial grownup. Welcome to the podcast.

Jen Barrett: Thanks so much for having me.

Bobbie Rebell: I'm so excited to talk to you about your new book. So many years in the making, we've been talking about this for years. It's finally here. Think Like A Breadwinner, A Wealth Building Manifesto For Women Who Want To Earn More and Worry Less. By the way, Jen, it's already getting reviews that are amazing. This one I'm going to read to people. It's from Ladders, which is a career website. "Jennifer Barrett's manifesto for working women transcends its goal by being more than a finance book, but a testament that anyone anywhere can achieve their goals with the right advice." Not bad, Jen.

Jen Barrett: Yeah, that was a nice review. It was nice to read.

Bobbie Rebell: You're very modest.

Jen Barrett: I know. You're so nervous. You're on pins and needles before the book comes out. You're like, "I hope they like it." So it was really nice to read that.

Bobbie Rebell: Well, I got a sneak peek of the book because I got to endorse it so everyone can read my blurb when they get the book. Before we talk more about it, though, you did bring with you a money story, which really inspired the book so many years ago. Tell us your money story, Jen.

Jen Barrett: Yeah, well, there's a material difference between being able to cover the bills and handle a budgets and building wealth that supports your life and the future you want. That difference became super clear to me just after we'd had our oldest son. At the time, I was in my early 30s and we were sharing a small one bedroom apartment with our toddler who was about 18 months old. One night I was pacing back and forth with him, trying to get him back to sleep, and I think it just hit me so hard in that moment that we were in a situation that was just completely unsustainable.

Jen Barrett: I had this moment of, "Wait a second. I thought I was doing everything right financially." I had a little 401k. I had a little bit of savings. I was paying half the bills. But what I realized was that I hadn't been putting money away for the things that were most important to me, and that was being able to have another child, to afford to buy a place or even to move into a bigger apartments because we lived in Brooklyn, which is not cheap. I did some real soul searching and asked myself, "Why didn't I make those choices with my money to save more and to invest more?" I realized that subconsciously I had been thinking that my husband would take the lead there. In that moment, I think it finally dawned on me how precarious an assumption that is. So I asked myself in the days that followed, "How would the choices I make with my money and my career be different if I had been raised to think like a breadwinner?"

Jen Barrett: That's what sort of set me off on a whole new journey and brought me to where I am today, more than a decade later, which is a much better place financially. We have a larger home. I helped with most of the down payment. We have two lovely sons now. I've had both a career and been able to build the kind of wealth that I couldn't have even imagined 12 years ago when I had that wake up call.

Bobbie Rebell: Tell us more about what you were doing before you had that wake up call, what kind of job you had. Because you had a really good job that a lot of people would be very, very envious of and really admire. I mean, you were high achieving and then the things that you looked for in the next job, besides obviously paying more. I know there was a lot of soul searching about sort of what people would think, because we're both journalist backgrounds, there's a lot of judgment there.

Jen Barrett: Yeah, and I think that's an important point is just because you have a good job doesn't mean that you have your finances together. You can be a professional success and feel like a financial failure. I interviewed more than 100 women for the book and I did find that to be the case with a surprising number of women who were otherwise very successful. So I think I was in sort of the same situation but with one crucial distinction, which is I was an editor at Newsweek at that point a pretty big weekly news magazine. It has since sort of gone under and been reborn and it's not quite the same as it used to be, but it was a great job. I really looked like I had it all together from the outside, but I was really living paycheck to paycheck for the most part.

Jen Barrett: We say paycheck to paycheck, but what I was was broke, right? I only had a few hundred dollars in my savings. I was still paying down some credit card debt. So if you looked at my actual net worth, I was in negative territory and I really wasn't making the kinds of choices or making the kinds of money that would allow me to support the life that I really wanted. One big reason for that, which is almost embarrassing to admit now and I've since changed my approach with this significantly, is that I had never negotiated my salary. So when I got the job at Newsweek, I was just so thrilled to be hired there I literally did not even think to negotiate. I do think part of that was that I was so excited to be hired there, but the other part of it was deep down I really don't think I believed that I would be taking the lead financially at any point in my life.

Jen Barrett: I really thought my husband would be the main earner and so it probably seemed less important to negotiate that salary. Then for the next seven years, I barely negotiated my raises. So one other critical moment for me was I came back from maternity leave and I found out that someone had been hired who had just a few more years experience than me in a very similar role and they were making 50% more than me. That moment was like ... It was so crushing that I vowed I would never ever make that mistake again and I was going to negotiate the hell out of every job offer and raise that I got from that point on, and it made me sort of reassess this idea I had about loyalty and about employers just taking care of you because you're doing a great job. It was a real wake up call in that sense too, where I realized I need to advocate for myself. I need to show my value. I need to ask for it and not assume that I'm going to get it just because I'm doing a good job.

Bobbie Rebell: So you set out to get a job that paid more. Tell us what that job was and how that onboarding went.

Jen Barrett: Yeah. So I was hired in my first job in management. I became the director of a health site. It was part of NBC. It was called iVillage Health. It was a huge site at the time. I think one of the top five largest health sites for women. It was a dramatic increase in the amount of responsibility I had, but also in my salary. So I ended up making almost double what I had ... Actually, no. More than double what I had been making at Newsweek and in between there I freelanced, and when I was freelancing, I really understood that I had undervalued myself and my skills because I was able to make a lot more freelancing than I had in my full-time job at Newsweek. So that was also a realization and a validation of the fact that the skills that I had were valuable. Then with this job, it both provided a lot more income. It allowed me to get the mortgage and it also put me on the management track, which I have been on ever since.

Bobbie Rebell: Jen, what was your husband thinking while this was going on? Did you have talks about this?

Jen Barrett: We did and I think part of it was when he and I first started dating, he was working at a startup at the time and was making a lot more than I was as a reporter. But I think that's where some of the assumptions sort of got set in my head. The startup went under and then he moved back to journalism. So he took a pretty big pay cut and suddenly our salaries were much closer than they have been. But I think in my head, I still kept telling myself that that was a temporary situation. I still expected him to earn considerably more than me, even as the evidence started to mount that that may not be the case, particularly with both of us being in journalism. We did have some discussions around that and in particular, when I got that job in management at that point, he was on contract.

Jen Barrett: So we realized that my income and my income prospects were probably greater at that particular point. Certainly I was the one who had secured the mortgage in part because I had a full-time job and it's very difficult when you are on contract to get approved. So we realized that my income was really critical to the household and so that launched a whole series of discussions about how is this going to work. I'm not going to say it was easy. We had to have a lot of really difficult discussions because I was pregnant with our second son when I moved into the breadwinner role. In my mind, again, I thought, "Oh, this is sort of a temporary situation where I'm going to take on this really demanding role so we can get the mortgage. I'll keep doing this."

Jen Barrett: Then I found I really enjoyed it. I realized I really am quite ambitious and so I wasn't sure I wanted to give up that role, but at the same time, for a while I was also trying to be the primary caregiver and that, as anyone who has tried to do both can tell you, is almost impossible to sustain. So it led to some really emotional and candid conversations with my husband about what role are we each going to take here and how are we going to divide all the responsibilities, household responsibilities, caregiving, breadwinning, in a way that feels fair to each of us?

Bobbie Rebell: Jen, what is the lesson from your story?

Jen Barrett: I think every woman would benefit from thinking like a breadwinner, from really basing our choices, the choices we make with our money and our career on the assumption that we should be able to provide the life that we want for ourselves without having to depend on someone else. If we make our money and career choices on that assumption, we will set ourselves up really nicely. Then if we need someone, whether or not we end up being the main earner is sort of irrelevant, but the most important thing is to think about what do I want in my life and what do I need to do financially, professionally to make that happen? One of the most important pieces of that is building wealth.

Jen Barrett: So that means investing right off the bat as early as you can, as much as you can, because that is really the ticket to freedom. The more money that you have invested, the more freedom you have, because you are decreasing your dependency on each paycheck with the amount of money that you have growing for you. It just gives you so many more options. It means you can buy a house on your own, whether or not you're with somebody else. It means that if you lose a job, you are fine. You have that financial security net. It means if you want to have a baby on your own, you can afford that financially. It just gives you so many more choices with your life.

Bobbie Rebell: You also brought with you in everyday money tip.

Jen Barrett: Yeah, I think it comes down to asking yourself the question, "Are the choices I'm making with my money bringing me closer or further away from the future I want?" That seems like such a basic question, but I still ask myself that a lot of times when I'm thinking about even small choices around my money. "Is this going to bring me closer to the future I want, or is this setting me back?" So it's a good question to ask yourself regularly, a good gut check.

Bobbie Rebell: It's a very good gut check and I think it's something that sounds easy, but we don't really do that a lot. We don't usually just kind of pause and sit down and really think about that and maybe even write down a few things that we want to do. I find when you write things down, sometimes they stick a little bit better. I don't know. All right, we got to shift gears because I don't want to run out of time and we have to talk about Think Like A Breadwinner because this is a book that has been in the making for quite a long time, because it is so well researched, Jen. You spent a lot of time doing the work here and the book is chock-full of statistics that are ... Some of them would just blow my mind. If you could share with us just one statistic that's sort of your elevator pitch to get this book, what is that one stat that stands out?

Jen Barrett: Well, I think one of the most significant stats is that half of moms in this country today are contributing at least 40% of the total household earnings. That's according to the latest Institute for Women's Policy Research report. That just reinforces the fact that women's income is absolutely critical right now. I think we saw that when women started dropping out of the workforce. We could see what the impact was going to be, not just on families, but on the economy.

Bobbie Rebell: A lot of this book was already done before the pandemic, but you were still finishing it up during the pandemic. What is in the book now that would not have been pre-pandemic?

Jen Barrett: The pandemic reminded us of how important it is to take charge of our finances and to build the kind of savings and wealth that provide financial security and help us weather tough times like this. So that message of taking care of yourself and putting money into an investment account and building wealth to support you not just now but in the future is more important than ever.

Bobbie Rebell: So well said. Jen, where can people catch up with you? I know that your book is going to be everywhere.

Jen Barrett: I hope so. You can find me at jenniferbarrett.com and you can read more about the book there, and then I'm on social media all over the place. It's @jbarrettNYC on Instagram, Twitter. I'm on LinkedIn.

Bobbie Rebell: All the places.

Jen Barrett: Oh, the places. Clubhouse. Yes.

Bobbie Rebell: Yes, Clubhouse. Let's not forget that. Thanks, Jen.

Jen Barrett: Thank you.

Bobbie Rebell: Here we go. Financial Grownup tip number one. Jen talked about how hard it is to negotiate. I've had the toughest time with this too so I want to recommend a book that made a huge difference to me. It's called Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. He also has a masterclass if you like to watch videos and I can tell you, I watched it all and it is excellent. Financial Grownup tip number two, thinking like a breadwinner sadly is not optional. I have twice become the family breadwinner totally out of the blue and it was temporary, but let me tell you, it is a shock to the system. Like Jen, I never thought it would happen to me. You don't have to be the breadwinner, but you do have to be ready to step up if life throws you a curve ball. Jen's book will help you do just that, so definitely pick up a copy of Think Like a Breadwinner.

Bobbie Rebell: One thing I do, I always try to think of new revenue streams. My latest is Grownup Gear. You can see more about it at grownupgear.com. I hope you'll support it by checking out the merchandise. It's perfect for all of your grownup milestones. Gifts for graduation, new parents, mother's day, father's day, a new home, birthdays, or just celebrating being a grownup and kind of owning it. Discount codes available on my Instagram @bobbirebell1. Another reason to follow me on Instagram, we will be giving away copies of Jen's book and of other authors on the show. This spring, so many amazing authors are on tap and they're generously giving gifts to our Grownup community. I also want to invite everyone to join our weekly Friday at 1:00 PM Clubhouse chats in the Money Tips For Grownups club. DM me on Instagram if you need and invite to Clubhouse. Big thanks to Jen Barrett for helping us all be financial grownups.

Bobbie Rebell: The Financial Grownup Podcast is a production of BRK media. The podcast is hosted by me, Bobbi Rebell, but the real magic happens behind the scenes with our team. Steve Stewart is our editor and producer, and Amanda Savan is our talent coordinator and content creator. So yeah, that means she does the show notes you can get for every show right on our website and all the fantastic graphics that you can see on our social media channels. Our mission here at Financial Grownup is to help you be at your financial best in every stage of life. This year we want to help you get there by giving away some of our favorite money books.

Bobbie Rebell: To get yours, make sure you are on the Grownup list. Go to bobbirebell.com to sign up for free. While you're there, please check out our Grownup Gear shop and help support the show by buying something to express your commitment to being a financial grownup. Stay in touch on Instagram @bobbirebell1and on Twitter @bobbirebell. You can email us at hello@financialgrownup.com and if you enjoyed the show, please tell a friend and maybe leave a review on Apple podcasts. It only takes a couple minutes. Join us next time for more stories to help you live your best grownup life.

The buzz on SPACs keeps building. Bobbi shares what is driving the trend, what a SPAC is, and what investors need to know about them. 

Pros of SPAC

#1: It lowers the risk of going public. Let’s face it: a lot can go wrong. Companies are worried that market volatility could tank their public debut. Merging with a SPAC gets them a capital influx much faster and easier. 

#2: It’s faster. Space have no financial history- so the only track record is the reputation of the management teams. For a company, merging with a SPAC can get them funding in a few months. The traditional IPO route which involves a lot of paperwork with the SEC can take as much as 6 months, sometimes longer. 

#3: More control over valuation. With a SPAC merger, the company can negotiate a fixed valuation with the sponsors. 

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Cons of SPAC

#1: Shady history.  Back in the 1980’s SPAC’s were known as  “Blank Check Companies” The industry was full of fraud, and known for scamming investors. A federal law was even passed to crack down on them. Now there are some guardrails in place- for example, if an investor does not approve of a company that the SPAC is merging with they can get their money back. 

#2: A successful SPAC can be incredibly lucrative for the for the sponsor, to the point where there is a concern that they might merge the SPAC with a less than ideal company just to get their big payday. Oh- and generally they have to make a deal within 2 years- so there’s a ticking clock to make something, sometimes anything, happen. 

#3: Investors should be aware that the company that has gone public by merging with the SPAC has not gone through the vetting process of doing all the financial audits and requirements that happen in a traditional initial public offering. So you have to wonder: what do you not know about the company? In other words, it is easier for the company, but riskier for the investor. 

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FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Financial Grownup Guide: What is a SPAC- and why it is such a hot trend on Wall Street

Hi friends!

If you pay attention to the money and investing related news, which you should be, you have probably been hearing about SPACS- which stands for special purpose acquisition company. They have actually been around for decades-but the buzz has really been building lately. Their rep is that they are last resorts for small companies to go public, because they couldn’t raise money on the open market. But that doesn’t really explain why they are having such a big moment right now. 

So here’s what we are going to go over in this episode:

-What is a SPAC

-Why would a company go public using a SPAC rather than the traditional route?

-What are SPACs so popular now- and what role did the global pandemic play in the trend?

-I'll tell you about the shady history of SPAC's

-What are the risks for investors?

Before we get into it- I do want to welcome everyone. If you are new- this is kind of a special episode. I do these solo episodes on occasion where I talk about a money topic- usually something in the news. 

But most of our episodes focus on having a role model as a guest- a financial grownup as we like to say, sharing a money story that had a big impact on their life and then the lessons we can all learn from their experience. We also have them share everyday money tips that we can put to work right away. If you enjoy this podcast I hope you will take a moment to subscribe, and share it with friends or family that you think might enjoy it. One easy way is just to take a screenshot of the show and share it on social media- and please tag me @bobbirebell1 on instagram so I can thank you. 

Back to SPACs. Let’s first go over exactly what a SPAC is- and is not. 

Think of a SPAC as a shell company set up to buy another company- except it doesn’t necessarily know what that company will be. Usually a team of investors raise the money first- but again- very often without a target company. It goes public as a Special Purpose Acquisition Company but it contains no company. All it has is money kept in a trust. 

Then we have companies that need money- and are on the hunt for the right way to get it. 

So to simplify- on one side we have money with no company, and on the other side we have a company, that it looking for money. 

This is different from the more common way for companies to raise big money in the public markets with a standard initial public offering. But that is really complicated- and expensive. There’s a ton of paperwork, financial audits and regulations. There are road shows, and pitch meetings with institutional investors. And it is super risky. Some of the risks the company can control, but the truth is the depending on what is going on in the world at the time the company wants to go public, a lot of how well that company will do- it can’t control. 

But they have become a really big trend on Wall Street recently. 242 SPACs were introduced in 2020, quadruple the number raised in 2019, according to SPAC Insider. The average size of a SPAC in 2020 was $335 million, that is almost  10 times the amount in 2009.

And there are some interesting reasons why that we are going to talk about. 

Reason #1: It lowers the risk of going public. Let’s face it: a lot can go wrong. Companies are worried that market volatility could tank their public debut. Merging with a SPAC gets them a capital influx much faster and easier. 

Reason #2: It’s faster. Space have no financial history- so the only track record is the reputation of the management teams. For a company, merging with a SPAC can get them funding in a few months. The traditional IPO route which involves a lot of paperwork with the SEC can take as much as 6 months, sometimes longer. 

Reason #3 More control over valuation. With a SPAC merger, the company can negotiate a fixed valuation with the sponsors. 

All this has a lot of appeal during the global pandemic, given how much uncertainty there has been in the global markets. It got a lot harder to raise money the traditional way. So SPAC’s can provide a viable option for capital starved companies to access funding. 

This all sounds great- so what’s the catch?

Well first- their shady history.  Back in the 1980’s SPAC’s were known as  “Blank Check Companies” The industry was full of fraud, and known for scamming investors. A federal law was even passed to crack down on them. Now there are some guardrails in place- for example, if an investor does not approve of a company that the SPAC is merging with they can get their money back. 

Second: A successful SPAC can be incredibly lucrative for the for the sponsor, to the point where there is a concern that they might merge the SPAC with a less than ideal company just to get their big payday. Oh- and generally they have to make a deal within 2 years- so there’s a ticking clock to make something, sometimes anything, happen. 

Third: Investors should be aware that the company that has gone public by merging with the SPAC has not gone through the vetting process of doing all the financial audits and requirements that happen in a traditional initial public offering. So you have to wonder: what do you not know about the company? In other words, it is easier for the company, but riskier for the investor. 

Which brings us to why you should be paying attention to the trend. In my opinion- and this is an opinion, we should look carefully at why a company would choose to go public this way. That does not mean it is not a good investment. It just means, it did not go through the traditional red tape. To be clear, many companies go through the red tape, and no one takes the time to read all the details of what they have disclosed to potential investors. 

That said, once a company is publicly traded, as the calendar mandates, it will have to comply with the laws regarding disclosure. So maybe, if you want to invest in a company that used a SPAC to go public, you might consider taking your time, and getting more information before you jump in. 

Before I let you go- a reminder that I am on a campaign to boost financial literacy by giving out free books. If you want to win a book that has been grownup list approved- all you need to do is either do a screen grab of the podcast while you are listening to it - and post it on instagram and tag me at bobbirebell1- or write a review on apple podcasts and email it to us at hello@financialgrownup.com. You could win a book by one of the authors that has been on the show, or some of the merch from the grownupgear store which you can check out at grownupgear.com.

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Jessica Zweig leads the thriving personal branding business: Simply Be. But the author of the new book "Be: A No-Bullsh*t Guide to Increasing Your Self Worth and Net Worth by Simply Being Yourself” only got to this point in her life because she was able to exit a toxic business relationship that brought her personally and financially to rock bottom. Plus she shares an everyday money tip that will help us reach our goals during the pandemic, no matter what obstacles we are facing. 

Jessica’s Money Story:

My first company was a magazine that I ran called Cheeky for seven years, from 2008 to 2014. I was 26 when I started that company. We launched the biggest platform for women in Chicago. We were the it fashion, food blog in the city. We had 100,000 local readers. And from the outside we were this really sparkly, successful business but on the inside we were very dysfunctional, toxic, and weren't really succeeding. And it was our first business. We were so young. I was 26, she was 24. I didn't know her that well when we went into business which is I think a common mistake people make when they meet someone they really love and they have that spark and then they get into business together and then they're like, "Oh my gosh. Business is like running a family and a marriage. It's such an intense relationship." And we really didn't know each other and so we just made a ton of mistakes. We opened up a ton of credit cards. She was managing the books, I was doing sales. We were so young, so green, so inexperienced and seven years later we had $75,000 worth of debt and I wanted to leave the business and she didn't. And so, I was willing to settle for my half of the debt and she was very, very upset with me for leaving and it was a really tough decision. I loved her, I loved the business. I mean, we were like sisters. We had a love, hate. After seven years of building something great with someone you do have a relationship. So it wasn't an easy thing but I think in many ways she looked at me like I was abandoning her but I was really just following my truth. It had run its course. I couldn't do it anymore. And I did want to clean up my side of the street and pay off my 50% of the debt with a payment plan because that's all I could afford. And I got a lawyer and she got hers and it just got really, really, really ugly and it took about seven, nine months for us to settle it. And I ended up paying 50% of the debt in one fell swoop and I had very little money in savings. I ended up having no choice but to just clear it and start from scratch.

Jessica’s Money Lesson:

Communicate. Be willing to have hard conversations. Money makes people funny. I also would say, don't ever talk about money in those conversations on email or on Slack or even on the phone. We unfortunately can't get together in person so if you Zoom, Zoom, but in-person is best. Having sacred space around conversations, honoring this is uncomfortable, honoring this is important, honoring this is going to make or break our business if we don't talk about it. And we just didn't communicate. Our communication style was so dysfunctional and broken. Because if you do then you won't need to ceremonialize these conversations so much because you'll already be in the same vibration, in the same page.

Jessica’s Money Tip:

So I actually write about this in my book. I have a whole chapter on accountability partners. Because attempting to do anything great and big and significant for your life you need someone to keep you accountable. You need someone to hold you in check. So whether that's writing a book, launching a business, saving money, paying off your debt, having a partner in it is I think the key to the success of it all. And to be frank with you, I'm very fortunate. So the pandemic disrupted my business in a lot of beautiful ways, in a lot of challenging ways. And one of the things I did is I applied for the PPP. I had a finance team at the time that I didn't really fully like, they were fine, and they wanted to charge me $10,000 to apply for the PPP loan which I thought was the most counterintuitive request I've ever seen because we were a small business going into a pandemic applying for a loan and they wanted to charge us money.

Bobbi’s Take:

Financial Grownup Tip #1:

Some of the greatest business and financial success stories come from people who have survived toxic business relationships, and used the lessons from those crushing and painful experiences to thrive in their next venture. - This past week the dating app Bumble went public. Its founder,  Whitney Wolfe Herd started Bumble in 2014..  after she very publicly left the dating app Tinder, where she was a co-founder- after a breakup with another co-founder. She is now the youngest female CEO to take her company public and is worth over a billion dollars. 

Financial Grownup Tip #2:

So many of us are having trouble staying on track to meet our goals during the pandemic- in part because it feels like no one is watching. I mean after all. We can and do literally work in our pajamas. We can quite literally take a nap between meetings. So it is time. Get an accountability partner. Get someone who will be committed to you- and to whom you will also be committed to keeping on track. And if you both aren’t doing that- break up fast and find another accountability partner. Nothing wrong with taking it a little easy, but this more quiet time will come to an end, and the opportunity to get to your goals without so many distractions should not go to waste. 

Get your copy of Be: A No-Bullsh*t Guide to Increasing Your Self Worth and Net Worth by Simply Being Yourself.

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Full Transcript:

Bobbi Rebell: Question for you guys, are we ever going to get back to that whole dress-up for work thing the way we used to? I don't know. But one thing I do know is it is time to get out of those PJ's and those grungy t-shirts and we need to give ourselves an upgraded but still super comfy wardrobe that makes us smile and ideally makes our coworkers, our friends and our family smile as well.

Bobbi Rebell: I have so many friends that I've wanted to send little pick me ups to to let them know it's all good and that includes you. So that's why I created Grownup Gear a fun line of t-shirts, sweats, pillows, mugs, totes, and more that I guarantee will give you and everyone that you're Zooming with all day long a good giggle. Grownup Gear is about saying the things out loud that we tell ourselves silently like when you wake up and you look in the mirror and you think, "I can't believe I'm a grownup either." Or maybe you just want to be honest that you are still a grownup in progress or you want to send a gift congratulating a friend for paying off their debt. The most comfy sweatshirts, t-shirts, tote bags, mugs, pillows, and more give it to yourself or your favorite grownup or almost grownup friend. Go to grownupgear.com to check it out. For discount codes and sales follow us on Instagram at our new handle at @GrownupGear and DM us with any questions. And thank you because by supporting Grownup Gear you help support this free podcast.

Bobbi Rebell: The debt and the brokeness has made me value money today and cherish money and respect money and operate my money with so much more reverence and care than I think I would've if I hadn't reached that rock bottom. You're listening to Financial Grownup with me, certified financial planner Bobbi Rebell author of How To Be a Financial Grownup. And you know what? Being a grownup is really hard especially when it comes to money but it's okay. We're going to get there together. I'm going to bring you one money story from a financial grownup, one lesson, and then my take on how you can make it your own. We've got this.

Bobbi Rebell: Welcome everyone to a new episode of the Financial Grownup Podcast. We share money stories here that had big impacts on our guests lives and of course then they share with us the lessons from them. I'm your host Bobbi Rebell, Journalist, Certified Financial Planner and author of the book How To Be a Financial Grownup. If you're new here welcome. I'm so glad you found us.

Bobbi Rebell: So that clip that you heard at the top of the show was from author and personal branding expert Jessica Zweig. Jessica has a new book out called Be, A No Bullshit Guide to Increasing Your Self-Worth and Net Worth by Simply Being Yourself. I have to say I love that title. The thing about Jessica is that if you don't know her you would never know all the things that she has had to overcome to well be where she is now that included a toxic business relationship that lasted for seven years. The breakup left her with nothing hitting rock bottom at age 33, even having to ask her parents for money just to pay her phone bill. Just when we think we will be hitting our grownup stride you never know what's going to hit us. There is a lot to learn from this remarkable woman and she does not hold back in this interview. Here is Jessica Zweig.

Bobbi Rebell: Jessica Zweig, you are a financial grownup. Welcome to the podcast.

Jessica Zweig: Thank you so much for having me Bobbi. I'm pumped to be here.

Bobbi Rebell: Well, I am pumped to have you here. Your book Be, I'm holding it up by the way, Be, A No Bullshit Guide to Increasing Your Self-Worth and Net Worth by Simply Being Yourself is about to come out and it's your first book. Congratulations.

Jessica Zweig: Thank you so much. You know how much goes into it so thank you for saying that.

Bobbi Rebell: I really enjoyed learning so much about you and what you teach people in the book. What's interesting is you come across as having it all together which you do now I'm going to say but it wasn't always the case. You brought with us a money story that is sadly something many of us can relate to but often don't know what to do with, I should say that often don't know what to do about, and that is finding ourselves in toxic relationships personally and in business in work environments. Tell us your money story Jessica.

Jessica Zweig: My first company was a magazine that I ran called Cheeky for seven years, from 2008 to 2014. I was 26 when I started that company. We launched the biggest platform for women in Chicago. We were the it fashion, food blog in the city. We had a hundred thousand local readers. And from the outside we were this really sparkly, successful business but on the inside we were very dysfunctional, toxic, and weren't really succeeding. And it was our first business. We were so young. I was 26, she was 24. I didn't know her that well when we went into business which is I think a common mistake people make when they meet someone they really love and they have that spark and then they get into business together and then they're like, "Oh my gosh. Business is like running a family and a marriage. It's such an intense relationship."

Jessica Zweig: And we really didn't know each other and so we just made a ton of mistakes. We opened up a ton of credit cards. She was managing the books, I was doing sales. We were so young, so green, so inexperienced and seven years later we had $75,000 worth of debt and I wanted to leave the business and she didn't. And so, I was willing to settle for my half of the debt and she was very, very upset with me for leaving and it was a really tough decision. I loved her, I loved the business. I mean, we were like sisters. We had a love, hate. After seven years of building something great with someone you do have a relationship. So it wasn't an easy thing but I think in many ways she looked at me like I was abandoning her but I was really just following my truth.

Jessica Zweig: It had run its course. I couldn't do it anymore. And I did want to clean up my side of the street and pay off my 50% of the debt with a payment plan because that's all I could afford. And I got a lawyer and she got hers and it just got really, really, really ugly and it took about seven, nine months for us to settle it. And I ended up paying 50% of the debt in one fell swoop and I had very little money in savings. I ended up having no choice but to just clear it and start from scratch. Bobbi Rebell: When you look back were there red flags that you should have spotted in the relationship, in the business in terms of the skills that you both brought?

Jessica Zweig: From day one. I mean, there were massive red flags. I think I realized three months in just how different we were but we were young and we were so naive and we both really loved this business. This magazine Cheeky was our baby. And so I didn't want to give it up and she didn't want to give it up and at the core there was a magic connection with us. We wouldn't have created what we created if there wasn't that synergistic spark. And we both loved each other to a degree which was what made it so difficult.

Jessica Zweig: But there were red flags and it was honestly one of the most toxic relationships of my life. I mean, we were together for seven years and we were water and vinegar. We were just totally different people. And I'm not saying I was better or she was worse, we were just different. I've come to so much peace and love and honestly forgiveness for myself first in the way that I showed up in that relationship as much as her and how she showed up in the relationship which I think has really been a huge key to me soaring in the last few years because I really did my own work.

Jessica Zweig: I think it's so easy to point fingers at people when they burn us or they hurt us or they come after us. There's that expression when you point one finger at someone, I mean do it, you're pointing three back at yourself. So you really do have to look at yourself in any sort of situation but when it comes to money it's especially loaded and I could still be angry, I could still be bitter, I could still be resentful. I don't feel any of those feelings. And it was the greatest learning lesson of my life. I applied all of those mistakes, all of those failures to simply be and simply be is so successful and it wouldn't have been unless I had that seven year chapter and run of making all of those mistakes.

Jessica Zweig: So, I think that everything happens for a reason and I feel like the debt and the brokenness has made me value money today and cherish money and respect money and operate my money with so much more reverence and care than I think I would have if I hadn't reached that rock bottom. So, everything happens for a reason and divine order. It's happening for you not to you even though it can really feel the opposite in the moment. I wouldn't be who I am without that business and that failure.

Bobbi Rebell: Can you me a specific example of something that happened that highlighted your differences? It doesn't have to be your biggest fight or something but something especially money related that you just never agreed on.

Jessica Zweig:I think we were both pretty irresponsible with the way we spent the business's money. I really wanted to grow it and scale it and exit. I wanted to be that type of entrepreneur and she wanted it to be a more lifestyle business. If you're going to go into business with anyone whether it's a business partner or someone on your team or your leadership team to really understand those nuances and get everyone on the same page. Because it sets the foundation for the type of business and the rate in which you want to grow and how you want to operate and who you want to do business with so, so much. And we just didn't have the skills. We were so young. We didn't have the tools to talk about money and business at that level. We were green as grass. So, of course it netted out the way that we netted out. And we also were really done when we opened up our credit cards. She was the personal guarantor on the credit cards. It was just mistake, after mistake, after mistake.

Bobbi Rebell: Yeah. I love that you're talking about the fact that it is so hard to talk about money and it sounds like you guys didn't have a lot of talks about money and how you were going to structure your firm and how you were going to fund it before you started it. What is the lesson for our listeners as we put it all in context?

Jessica Zweig: Communicate. Be willing to have hard conversations. Money makes people funny. I also would say, don't ever talk about money in those conversations on email or on Slack or even on the phone. We unfortunately can't get together in person so if you Zoom, Zoom, but in-person is best. Having sacred space around conversations, honoring this is uncomfortable, honoring this is important, honoring this is going to make or break our business if we don't talk about it. And we just didn't communicate. Our communication style was so dysfunctional and broken and I think actually way, way up and make the right decision to partner with the right people in the first place. Because if you do then you won't need to ceremonialize these conversations so much because you'll already be in the same vibration, in the same page. And yet money makes people funny no matter what and so you really have to recognize that in yourself and in the others and bring as much consciousness and integrity to those kinds of negotiations, conversations, whatnot.

Bobbi Rebell: I could talk to you forever about this but I want to get your everyday money tip because it's something that I am already implementing for 2021 and that is having accountability, having an accountability partner. Talk about that.

Jessica Zweig: Yeah. So I actually write about this in my book. I have a whole chapter on accountability partners. Because attempting to do anything great and big and significant for your life you need someone to keep you accountable. You need someone to hold you in check. So whether that's writing a book, launching a business, saving money, paying off your debt, having a partner in it is I think the key to the success of it all. And to be frank with you, I'm very fortunate. So the pandemic disrupted my business in a lot of beautiful ways, in a lot of challenging ways. And one of the things I did is I applied for the PPP. I had a finance team at the time that I didn't really fully like, they were fine, and they wanted to charge me $10,000 to apply for the PPP loan which I thought was the most counterintuitive request I've ever seen because we were a small business going into a pandemic applying for a loan and they wanted to charge us money.

Jessica Zweig: And so, I brought in my husband who is a financial advisor, as well as you are. And his business had kind of slowed down, he couldn't go out and network, we were quarantining. And he's like, "Jess, I'll help you with the PPP." He took one look at my finance team and was like, "Dude, I can do this better." And so I fired my finance team and I hired my husband. And my husband and I have always obviously been partners and accountable to each other because we're married but bringing him into my business...

Jessica Zweig: He's now my CFO, he helps me run the shop, saving money, ensuring that our P and L's are always balanced, making sure we're net profitable. Having someone that I trust, obviously I trust no one more than my own husband but he has really allowed me to fly as the CEO because I know that he's got things covered. And we operate like a legit finance CFO to CEO. We take weekly meetings. He has an agenda. We run through every money in money out, hiring, investments, savings. We don't have any debt in our business. It's a really powerful person, obviously it's my own husband. But if you can have someone to pulse check you, to support you, to believe in you, to honestly be able to see the forest from the trees more than you can in your own project or business or money endeavor that is so key.

Jessica Zweig: And then another thing that I have done that has really allowed me to get out of debt and save money and feel really, really peaceful and abundant and my husband has helped me with this is we've set up an account. I call it my island account and it's a bank account we can only put money in. And if I needed to take money out I'd have to drive all the way across town in the worst hours, whatever. It's my island account. I can only send money to it, it can only grow. And I'm stacking my cheddar as my accountant once told me and my husband helps me ensure that money is being sent to that account every single month and that we're totally able to send that level of money over to that account and that's really grown our savings. My husband and I sleep well at night because of it.

Jessica Zweig: And so those are the key hacks that having my husband and having that account has changed honestly my financial wellbeing more than my finances but more of my financial wellbeing, which I think is key to vibrating at that level of abundance and attracting more.

Bobbi Rebell: That's such great advice. There's also a lot more great advice and I'm picking up your book now even though I know we're on audio and your book, okay I'm going to read the title Be, with a period, A No Bullshit Guide to Increasing Your Self-Worth and Net Worth by Simply Being Yourself. And I love the yellow cover. Yellow became one of your themes in the book so it transcends so much about you and your sunny personality. Tell us briefly about the book.

Jessica Zweig: So the book is a personal branding book. It's going to walk you through my trademark methodology of how to build your platform, the platform of you. Whether you work for yourself, or you work for someone else, or you want to one day work for yourself, having an understanding of what makes you you is an invaluable asset that you can take with you no matter what your job title is. That's number one. It's going to teach you tactically step-by-step how to do that from messaging, to strategy, to content, to social media, to PR.

Jessica Zweig: However, it is a personal empowerment book in fact disguised as a business book. Because I think at the core most people feel afraid to do that and to put themselves out there. And I say that my book is the permission slip and the reminder that you are worthy to be seen and to shine and to have everything you ever want. And it's my own journey in fact as well and my uncovering that truth for myself. And so, I'm right along with you throughout the whole book and you're going to take away so much tactical knowledge but at the end of the day I hope it inspires people to stop playing small and stop apologizing for their authentic amazingness. And that's what my book Be is about.

Bobbi Rebell: One of the recommendations in the book is to keep your social media and all of your public identifying names, et cetera, very consistent. So let's end with you telling us where people can find you on all of the social media because I know you keep it easy.

Jessica Zweig: I walk the talk as I say I drink my own Kool-Aid. So yes I am at Jessica Zweig on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on LinkedIn, jessicazweig.com. You can also go to simplybeagency.com which is my company's website and find me. I'm really, really, really easy to find. I'm out there. So please come and say hi.

Bobbi Rebell: Perfect. Thank you so much for joining us.

Jessica Zweig: Thank you so much for having me. This was amazing.

Bobbi Rebell: Here we go my friends Financial Grownup tip number one, some of the greatest business and financial success stories come from people who have survived toxic business relationships like Jessica, and like Jessica they use the lessons from those crushing and painful experiences to thrive in their next venture. This past week the dating app Bumble went public and its founder Whitney Wolfe-Herd started Bumble in 2014 after she very publicly left the dating app Tinder where she was a co-founder after a breakup with another co-founder. And she's talked about it a lot, it was a toxic relationship for sure. She is now the youngest female CEO to take her company public and worth over a billion dollars. What a great story.

Bobbi Rebell: Financial Grownup tip number two, so many of us are having trouble staying on track to meet our goals during the pandemic in part because it feels like no one's watching. I mean, after all we can and do literally work in our pajamas, certainly the off-camera part. We can quite literally take a nap between meetings. So it is time, get an accountability partner like Jessica. Get someone who will be committed to you and to whom you will also be committed to keeping on track. And if you both aren't doing that well break up fast and find another accountability partner who's a better fit. Nothing wrong with taking it a little easy but this more quiet time will come to an end and the opportunity to get your goals without so many distractions should not go to waste.

Bobbi Rebell: One way to get motivated, get out of those PJ's. Realistically, I know we aren't getting dressed up but have some fun with your pandemic wardrobe. That's what I know I needed when I came up with a concept for Grownup Gear it is all about celebrating wherever we are in our journey to being grown ups which never really ends let's be honest. Check out the designs on my website, bobbirebell.com. Click on shop or just go directly to grownupgear.com. And please be in touch. DM me what you want more of on this podcast. I love your feedback. I put discount codes for Grownup Gear on my Instagram, which by the way is Bobbi Rebell one. And we did just start a Grownup Gear Instagram. We don't have a lot of followers so please come check it out. That's at @GrownupGear on Instagram.

Bobbi Rebell: So big thanks to Jessica Zweig, author of Be, A No Bullshit Guide to Increasing You Self-Worth and Your Net Worth By Simply Being Yourself. Everyone check out the book and thanks again to Jessica for helping us all be financial grownups. Financial Grownup with Bobbi Rebell is edited and produced by Steve Stewart and is a BRK Media production.

Gamestop's meteoric rise and fall, and the roles Reddit, Hedge Funds, and Robinhood played in it, have many lessons for financial grownups. Bobbi explains what happened, and reveals what new data is showing that many news reports initially got wrong. 

In this episode, you will learn:

-What actually happened?

- Why did Gamestop stock surge?

-How does short selling work?

-What goes on in the online forums (like reddit’s Wall Street Bets)?

-What is a short squeeze?

-How FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) played into things.

-Why did brokerages like Robinhood put the brakes on trading?

-Who got hurt and why?

-What did we learn from this?

Takeaways:

#1 - While everyone loves a great David vs Goliath story- be aware that sometimes there is more to the story.

#2 - Trading stocks is really risky and this kind of trading-where you are buying a stock not based on any connection to the actual business of the company- is not investing - it is gambling. So only use the money you would take with you to a casino. 

#3 -Beware of the hype and think twice before getting on the bandwagon. Yes, a lot of small investors are out there bragging about how much they made off Gamestop and other similar situations. But a lot of people lost money, or are holding stock that is well below what they paid and will likely sell it at a loss. 

Full Transcript:

Bobbi Rebell:

This is going to be a special solo episode and we are going to talk about the Gamestop phenemonon that happened recently that has gotten a lot of you interested in how the stock market works, how the companies that hold the money you invest in stocks work, and most of all, how you can make money by buying stocks. 

Here on the financial grownups podcast we normally share money stories that impacted our lives and the lessons from them, or tips and tricks to improve your financial situation but today we’re breaking format because what happened recently with Gamestop, and a few other stocks, and Robinhood and some other brokerage firms really changed the game for a lot of people. 

Here’s what we are going to cover:

What actually happened- why did Gamestop (which is a company that wasn’t doing well). suddenly have a surging stock?

How does short selling work?

What goes on in the online forums, like reddit’s Wall Street Bets?

What is a short squeeze?

FOMO- fear of missing out- how that played into things…

Why did brokerages like Robinhood put the brakes on trading?

Who got hurt and why?

What did we learn?

So let’s start with what happened. Gamestop’s actual business, which is primarily selling video games in brick and mortar retail stores, was not doing well. So a lot of professional investors, including hedge funds, were betting against it, doing something called short selling. And by the way- this happened recently with a few stocks but we’re just going to talk about Gamestop here. 

What is short selling. Essentially- the investor goes to the broker and borrows the stock. They turn around and sell that stock to someone else. So they don’t have the stock, but they do have to return it to the broker. The goal is for the stock to go down between the time they sold it to someone else, and the time they have to buy it back, to return it back to the broker who lent it to them. Short selling is super risky because if the stock goes up- it absolutely has to be bought to give back to the broker. Since there is no limit to how high a stock can go, there is no limit to how much the short seller can lose. In other words- don’t go there unless you really know what you are doing. 

While this was happening, the stock started getting talked about on reddit, in particular on a page called Wall Street bets. They noticed that the stock was heavily shorted- and that there was a big change at Gamestop- some new members of the board. One in particular, Chewy Co-founder Ryan Cohen got noticed because he had a lot of digital experience- something Gamestop really needed. That combination got the Wall Street Bets folks to pile into the stock and cause it to rally. 

Next topic: The short Squeeze. Remember all those Wall Street professionals that had shorted the stock? As the stock rose, they were seeing that the price to re-buy the stock they had shorted was skyrocketing and they had to cover their bets.. by buying the stock… which set in motion this seemingly accelerating rise in Gamestop stock-

Then came the FOMO- fear of missing out. As news reports of this were coming out, more and more people wanted in on the action, and things started to get out of hand. Plus the whole thing took on a larger meaning because of media reports that  all these little guys banding together- there were more than 5 million folks on that reddit page- and the word was they were beating these big professional hedge funds. Everyone was talking about it. 

Now let’s talk about the brokerage firms and one in particular that gets a lot of attention: Robinhood. Amateur investors can go on Robinhood and trade for free. Robinhood has had it’s share of controversy in the past, but that’s a whole other podcast. In this case, Robinhood started to get worried- and, citing extreme volatility stopped allowing it’s customers to buy the stock- though they could still sell it. So keep in mind, Robinhood’s customers are generally individuals. The professional investors who were not dependent on Robinhood could keep buying and selling. The optics were not good. Some people thought they were doing it to protect the Wall Street pro’s from losing too much money. Politicians cried foul, and people lawyered up. 

As the dust settles - there is another dramatic twist. University of Chicago law professor Todd Henderson, says the pros saw what was happening and basically piggy backed on the little guys. 

He studied the data from that time. And while there was a burst of retail activity-  he says in a cnbc piece- eventually it was actually the big guys- against the other big guys. According to Henderson, hedge funds purchased stock and held it. This created fewer shares for short sellers to borrow in the market, and that squeezed the number of possible shares available to be loaned, making it harder for short sellers to bet against the stock. The desperate short-sellers needed to find new shares to borrow but supply got constricted.. If you are not following at this point- that’s kind of the point. It’s complicated. And it is not for amateurs. 

And that brings us to who got hurt and why. So yes, hedge funds and one in particular got hurt. As I write this, Gamestop’s gains have almost all disappeared, so a lot of people who bought it will likely sell it for a big loss. And they probably won’t talk about it. Especially with all the bragging going on about how much their friends and family made on the rise up- assuming they sold it at a profit. FOMO can cost you. 

So finally - what are the lessons to take away from all this?

Lesson #1 - while everyone loves a great David vs Goliath story- be aware that sometimes there is more to the story.

Lesson #2 - Trading stocks is really risky and this kind of trading-where you are buying a stock not based on any connection to the actual business of the company- is not investing - it is gambling. So only use the money you would take with you to a casino. 

Lesson #3 Beware of the hype and think twice before getting on the bandwagon. Yes, a lot of small investors are out there bragging about how much they made off Gamestop and other similar situations. But a lot of people lost money, or are holding stock that is well below what they paid and will likely sell it at a loss. 

As for my take, it’s never a good feeling to know that many well meaning people took risks they didn’t understand and lost money, I am glad that this got so many non-investors interested in learning more about the stock market. And even though that interest was motivated by momentum driven trading, my hope is that eventually that will evolve into learning about thoughtful, intentional and strategic investing, that will help all of us reach out grownup financial goals. 

Thanks everyone for joining me- for more money tips and advice- plus lots of giveaways please go to my website bobbirebell.com and sign up for the grownup list. 

I love bringing you this podcast and it is and always will be free to you but there are a number of ways that you can support the show if you enjoy it. 

Number one- tell a friend about it. 

Number two- take a screenshot and share on social media

Number three- write a review on apple podcasts

And finally- do a little responsible shopping on my grownupgear.com website. It’s got t-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, tote bags and more- all tied to being grownups. The products make great gifts, for friends, family and co-workers, and even for yourself. 

Thanks everyone, for joining me and for being financial grownups. 

Follow Bobbi!

• Instagram - @bobbirebell1

• Twitter- @bobbirebell

• LinkedIn-https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobbirebellkaufman

• Website- http://www.bobbirebell.com/

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own.

When Jessica Goodman landed a book deal, and later a TV deal for her debut novel “They Wish They Were us” many people though she would go full time on her side-hustle. But Goodman says that was never the plan, and explains why and how she blends the finances and demands of her two dream jobs.

In Jessica’s Money Story she shares:

-How she started writing her e first book, “They Wish They Were Us.”after having the idea for years.

-How she researched what is involved in selling a book to a publisher, including getting an agent

-How she kept her employer, Cosmopolitan Magazine informed and supportive of her book writing side hustle

-How an advance works for an author, including the tax implications

-What she wishes she knew about being an author and how much they are paid before she wrote and sold the book

-How she was able to adapt her schedule to both her full time job at Cosmopolitan Magazine, and writing books

-What you need to know about how a full time job works compared to being a self-employed author, including quarterly taxes

-When you should think about bringing in an accountant.

In Jessica’s Money Lesson you will learn:

-Why and how you should re-evaluate the way you think about money

-The best strategies to manage money when you are paid inconsistently in chunks

-How she and her partner adapted their spending during the pandemic

-How to resist it when people who care about you give you bad financial advice

Jessica’s Money Tip:

-Even if you live in a small space it can pay to buy in bulk during quarantine (and maybe after!)

-Think of non-traditional items that you would not have used as much at home- like buying wine by the case

-Tips about ordering groceries online including having the heaviest items delivered

Bobbi’s Financial Grownup Tips:

Financial Grownup Tip #1:

Jessica shared that she regretted not taking the time and advanced to understand the financial impact of having both a W2 job, that's a full time job, and self-employment income. Whenever you start a new venture that might bring in revenue, check in with a tax professional. If you are at a full-time job, read through those benefits, go to your HR website because the truth is many companies allow you to enroll in a free or low cost legal plan where you can get that kind of advice in a very affordable way.

Financial Grownup Tip #2:

Get a system going and understand that you might miss out on things if you want to reach your goals. Jessica was pretty candid about her commitment to her writing routine. To get to what you want to accomplish, most of us are going to have to be deliberate and to make room for something like writing a novel, when you aren't at your day job, you probably will have to give some things up.

Episode Links:

• Jessica’s website - https://www.goodmanjessica.com/

• Buy They Wish They Were Us

• Pre-Order They’ll Never Catch Us

Follow Jessica!

• Instagram - @jessicagoodman

• Twitter - @jessgood

Follow Bobbi!

• Instagram - @bobbirebell1

• Twitter - @bobbirebell

  
  Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own.

Full transcript of show:

Bobbi Rebell:

Part of being a financial grownup is making sure you have a plan for how you spend your money and how you pay your bills. And now we have a new tool for that. It is called Splitit. It will take a lot of the stress away from those big purchases and really allow you to plan ahead. Here's how it works. You shop online and when you're ready to pay, you just choose Splitit at the checkout to split your payment on your credit card and pay over time. There's no interest, no application, no fees. It is fast and easy. So if you buy something for $500, you can split it into five smaller payments of $100 a month without any interest or fees. Much more manageable and you're in control of your costs. By turning your payments into smaller installments over time with no interest, Splitit gives you more spending power.

Bobbi Rebell:

I know I don't like to have to pay interest if I can avoid it. And I also don't want to always be opening new lines of credit. Split your payments and live big with the credit cards you already have go to splitit.com today. That's splitit.com.

Jessica Goodman:

When I was like a little kid, I was like, oh my God. You publish a book and you become a millionaire. That's just like how it works. But in reality, I learned that was not the case.

Bobbi Rebell:

You're listening to Financial Grownup with me, certified financial planner, Bobbi Rebell, author of How To Be a Financial Grownup. But you know what? Being a grownup is really hard, especially when it comes to money, but it's okay. We're going to get there together. I'm going to bring you one money story from a financial grownup, one lesson, and then my take on how you can make it your own. We got this.

Bobbi Rebell:

Hey friends, do you have a passion project or a side hustle? One you dream of doing full time one day and maybe getting to ditch that day job? Well, Cosmopolitan's Jessica Goodman had a passion project that she was quietly working on for years. And that was to be an author. Her debut novel, a murder mystery set in an elite private school called They Wish They Were Us ended up being such a hit that it is now being made into a TV series, starring Halsey and Euphoria's Sydney Sweeney. Fast-forward and Jessica has now scored a book for a second novel that is already coming out this summer. So all systems go on the dream career, right? Well, not so fast. To the surprise of quite a few people in her life, rather than ditch, she doubled down, staying on a Cosmopolitan magazine where she is currently the op-ed editor.

Bobbi Rebell:

In our interview, Jessica shares why she is sticking with the day job, goes through exactly how she manages her time and gets candid about what she wishes she knew about before diving into the book business, including, well, a lot of tech stuff. For those of you new to the Financial Grownup Podcast, welcome. I'm so glad that you are here. We talk with financial grownups here about money stories that impacted their lives and the lessons learned from those stories. We also ask them to bring along an everyday money tip that we can put to work right away. Spoiler alert. Jessica's has to do with how she and her partner buy their wine. So stay tuned for her tip on that. And with that, let's get to this week's interview. Here is Cosmo op-ed editor and author of They Wish They Were Us, Jessica Goodman.

Bobbi Rebell:

Jessica Goodman, I'm so excited to finally have you on the show. You are definitely a financial grownup. Welcome.

Jessica Goodman:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

Bobbi Rebell:

And happy 2021, a year when your second, soon to be bestseller is going to be released. Before we get into your money story, tell us a little bit about each of your books just briefly.

Jessica Goodman:

So my first book, They Wish They Were Us came out in August and it is a young adult thriller that follows a high school senior, Jill Newman, who is in a very exclusive society within her Long Island prep school. And at the beginning of the book, she is reflecting on the fact that her best friend died when she was a freshman and she was also part of this society. And soon after the book begins, she starts getting text messages that say that her best friend Shayla didn't die the way that everybody thinks she did. And so what follows is kind of a whodunit, murder mystery set in this very exclusive prep school. And it's really an exploration of privilege and friendship and peer pressure. And I kind of like to say that it's like Gossip Girl meets Pretty Little Liars, meets A Secret History. It's really fun. And it's being adapted into a TV series, starring Sydney Sweeney and Halsey. So if those people are on your brain, I think you might enjoy.

Jessica Goodman:

And then I also have a new book coming out this summer. It's called, They'll Never Catch Us. It's currently available for pre-order wherever books are sold. And it is also a young adult thriller about two super competitive sisters who run cross country. And they're both trying to be the best on their team and in the state. And they threaten to kind of lose the number one and two spots when a new girl comes to town. And then soon after she arrives, she also disappears. And everybody in the town begins to suspect that the sisters had something to do with it. So that's where my brain has been for the past couple of months, which is really exciting.

Bobbi Rebell:

It is really exciting. What's amazing to me, and I think our listeners will really enjoy hearing about this is while you are doing this, this is actually really a side hustle to your primary job. You have been in a number of different positions at Cosmopolitan magazine. You're currently the op-ed editor. Did I get that right?

Jessica Goodman:

You did. And I'm very impressed that you didn't trip up over the ed editor because I always do when I say it out loud and I have to be like, oh wait, no, this is my job.

Bobbi Rebell:

That is your job now, you are still working there with one book out, another one on the way. So for your money story, I've asked you to kind of talk about how that happened, especially the money-related decisions that you had to make along the way to make this happen. Having a very full-time job at Cosmo. And then on the side, writing this book. It was a lot of choices you had to make I would say. Tell us your money story.

Jessica Goodman:

Definitely. Yeah, so many choices along the way. When I started writing the first book, They Wish They Were Us. And I really started writing it in earnest after having kind of dabbled with it for many years. In earnest, I started working on it in like 2015, 2016. I would say. I didn't get to the point where I thought I could actually sell it and be a professional author until maybe like 2018. And that's when I got connected with my agent and we started working towards being able to sell it. But I did a lot of research into how one becomes an author. I was literally Googling like, how do you publish a book? Like, how do you find an agent? Like what is a book advance? Like all of these kinds of really basic questions that I just had no idea what it was all about.

Jessica Goodman:

And I basically found out that it's really, really, really difficult to publish and sell a book. And that be your sole income or your sole career, like one book basically. And so it was never really an option for me to quit my ... Like I never thought about quitting my jobs in journalism while I was trying to sell the book. So it was always just like, how can I make both of these dreams come true at the same time? And so we sold the book, They Wish They Were Us, in the fall of 2018. And we got an advance, which is what they call the income that you make from selling your book. And publishers usually split it up into a few big chunks. For mine, it was like, I got a chunk of money when I signed the contract, a chunk of money when I turned in the book and then a chunk of money when the book came out. And when, at least when I was like a little kid, I was like, oh my God. It's like you publish a book and you become a millionaire. That's just like how it works. But in reality, I learned that was not the case. And it's certainly like a fantastic thing to have of course, but it's not the kind of financial gains that I originally thought it would be. And I think that a lot of people think about when they think of like someone getting a book advance. Like I said, it was always like a no-brainer that I would keep my job, but I really had to learn how to prioritize both jobs to be able to do them well. So my schedule when I'm being my best self is that I write in the morning before work, usually from seven to nine. And then I do my job from ten to whenever. And then I write on the weekends as well. It's certainly hard at some points, especially at my job at Cosmo, I cover the news, especially like elections and special elections and anything relating to, like having to do with politics. So obviously this past year was hard to balance everything.

Bobbi Rebell:

Were you open with your bosses about these efforts, or was it something you kept private?

Jessica Goodman:

When the book deal actually happened, I went in and told my boss, hey, I just want to give you a heads up that like this happened and it's not going to affect the work that I do here. Like, I really wanted to make sure that they knew that I wasn't about to quit basically, that I was just like, this is just something that I'm doing for myself and my personal dreams. But like, it's not going to affect my work or my productivity here. And I just wanted to give you like a courtesy heads up basically. And everybody was really supportive and they have been really supportive of the book. And so it's been lovely honestly, but I definitely have heard some horror stories at other companies. But I think when you work in a field that's somewhat like adjacent to whatever your side hustle is, it does make it a little bit easier for people to understand why you might be doing something or how it won't interfere with your responsibilities.

Bobbi Rebell:

What do you wish you knew in terms of the book business and the financial aspects of it? What do you wish you knew ahead of time? You mentioned that you get the bulk payments and you kind of had this idea as a child that authors become millionaires.

Jessica Goodman:

Yeah, I think something that I definitely wish that I knew was like taxes. Like I think if you're like me and you've really only had a job that you get a salary and benefits from your employer, it's really difficult to self-manage money that comes in chunks, whether you're a freelance writer or you're your own boss and you're not part of like a company. I think it's really difficult to know things like, oh, I have to pay quarterly taxes on this income. Or like, oh, I don't know how much money to put aside from this advanced check that I got, because that advance doesn't reflect the taxes I need to pay on it. So I ended up working with an accountant because I had no idea how to navigate this on my own. And I wanted to make sure that I was doing everything by the book.

Jessica Goodman:

And I wasn't going to get dinged at the end of the fiscal year because I have heard horror stories of people getting, like a $100,000 of their advance, spending it, and then not realizing that they needed to pay however many tens of thousands of dollars of taxes on that. And like, oh my God, what a nightmare. Or even realizing that I had to pay quarterly taxes on like freelance income was the real shock to me. So I got an accountant kind of like late in the game, I would say. And I wish I had got one, like even before the first check came in to like really help me navigate that.

Bobbi Rebell:

What is the lesson for our listeners, from this story? What's your advice to people thinking about whether it's writing a novel or any kind of side hustle where they're going to have to hold on to their job?

Jessica Goodman:

I think for me, it was really reevaluating the way that I thought about money. Like I think after having been in jobs where like I got a salary check every other week. That was like, okay, like I know what my monthly expenses are. I know how much my rent is. I know how much my utilities are. Like, I know how much I spend on groceries. Like all that stuff that they tell you. And I knew how to manage that money. Like I knew how much I might be able to save, how much I would need to pay my credit card bill, like all this stuff. But when you get these like big chunks of money, or even just smaller chunks of money from like freelance gigs or whatever, I think it can feel really tempting to just kind of spend it immediately. Even if you're the type of person who is really invested in saving and planning for your future, I think it's hard to conceptualize like how much money you might need for stuff. And especially this year, when I wasn't interested in spending a lot of money at all, based on the kind of times we're in, I splurged on a few things and those things I was thinking about them before we hopped on the call. Those are the things that I really splurged on this year where I turned 30 and I bought myself $80 worth of oysters that were shipped from Cape Cod and an oyster shucker. And that's how I spent my 30th birthday with my partner. We shucked like 50 oysters and save the additional, however many for the next day. And it was such a treat and it was so much fun and something that I'll remember forever. And I bought myself a $90 tie dyed sweatsuit because I am a millennial and on Instagram and it just looked really cozy. And those were like my two big splurges of the year.

Jessica Goodman:

And I know a lot of people, when they get like a book advancer or kind of achieve these really big milestones, they're like, I'm going to buy myself a really expensive piece of jewelry or a fancy handbag, or even like house or whatever. And I mean, I think all of those things are fantastic, but for me, the lesson for me, the lesson here was like, all right, I don't really have anything that I'm ready to splurge on that big right now. I really want to like, save all of this money as much as I can. And those are the things I'm going to splurge on, like oysters and a tie dyed sweatsuit. And knowing that like my big splurge might come later. Like I am saving up to buy a house with my partner. And I think that like my book advance will of course go towards that.

Jessica Goodman:

But realizing that like, I didn't need to spend it all right away I think was a huge revelation, especially because so many people were like, what are you going to treat yourself to? Like your book just came out, like, what are you going to do to mark the occasion? And I didn't really do that much because it just didn't feel right for me. Those were my splurges.

Bobbi Rebell:

I love it. I love the idea of oysters. So tell us your everyday money tip.

Jessica Goodman:

Oh yes. Okay. So this is one that I really got to be obsessed with during the pandemic. Like I am not the type of person that should or would traditionally buy in bulk. Like I live with one other person. We live in a one bedroom apartment. It's very small. We don't have a lot of storage space, but this year I became the kind of person that buys in bulk. Obviously, so many people are doing this during the pandemic, but I don't think I really realized how much you actually save when you buy in bulk and you know what you're going to use in those bulk quantities. And I think the pandemic has really shown people like what they actually use and what is actually important to them. And so for us, like there were a few things that really changed the way I thought about this. One was I started doing like subscribe and save Amazon paper towels and toilet paper. And actually I had done this pre run out of toilet paper in like March moment. So I pat myself on the back for knowing that would be a thing.

Jessica Goodman:

But I think I did the math recently. And it was like if I were to buy a few rolls every time I went to the grocery store, I would spend nearly twice the amount that I do just doing subscribe and save and having them shipped directly to my house. And even though they just sit in boxes in like a corner of our apartment. Because again, small one bedroom apartment, I think it's like totally worth it for us. And the other way that I found this to be really useful was we started buying our wine in cases, which a year ago I would have said like, are you okay? Like what's going on here?

Jessica Goodman:

But my local wine shop, they started offering a 15% discount if you bought a case of wine. And so we basically did the math and we were like, well, we'd be losing money if we didn't do this. And we don't go through them that quickly. I mean, it's no brainer how much money you save. We started looking for ways that you could buy in bulk and save like that. Like the fancy coffee shop near us. If you buy beans in bulk, it's like the same thing. And all these companies now do like subscribe and save membership things, like there's so many coffee ones where like every week they'll send you a bag of beans or whatever. And I think like looking for those has really been super helpful for us and certainly cut down on how we spend.

Jessica Goodman:

The other thing about like this buying in bulk grocery shopping thing is I heard this tip from Carla Lalli Music who used to work at Bon Appetit and now is she's like a chef home cook person on Instagram and has like a fantastic cookbook. But her big tip was always like, if you're ordering groceries, like order all the heavy stuff that's going to be delivered to your apartment. So you don't have to carry stuff, especially in an apartment. And that has been so helpful to me too, where it's like, every time I do like a big shop online or Instacart or Whole Foods or whatever, I get like 10 cans of beans, because like, I don't want to carry that. Or like four jugs of olive oil or like four twelve packs of seltzer because yes, you're buying in bulk. And sometimes you can get discounts that way, but also like who wants to carry that stuff home?

Bobbi Rebell:

Definitely good to always make your life easier. Especially if you are paying those fees to have it delivered. You want to get the most out of that delivery fee. Jessica, thank you so much for being with us, tell us where people can find out more about you. We know your books are available everywhere. We don't know when is the TV series coming.

Jessica Goodman:

TBD on the TV series, but you can stay up to date with all of that info on my Instagram, which is @JessicaGoodman or Twitter @JessGood. And I also have a website goodmanjessica.com. Thank you so much for having me.

Bobbi Rebell:

Okay. My friends let's do this. Financial Grownup tip number one, Jessica shared that she regretted not taking the time and advanced to understand the financial impact of having both a W2 job, that's a full time job, and self-employment income. Whenever you start a new venture that might bring in revenue, check in with a tax professional. And by the way, if you are at a full-time job, read through those benefits, go to your HR website because the truth is many companies allow you to enroll in a free or low cost legal plan where you can get that kind of advice in a very affordable way.Financial Grownup tip number two, get a system going and understand that you might miss things if you want to reach your goals. Jessica was pretty candid about her commitment to her writing routine. To get to what you want to accomplish, most of us are going to have to be deliberate and to make room for something like writing a novel, when you aren't at your day job, you probably will have to give some things up.

Bobbi Rebell:

I had so much fun talking with Jessica and her book was really, really a page turner. As I mentioned, it is a murder mystery. And for the record, I really was totally fooled. I didn't see the twists and turns coming. One thing that I've really loved during our forced stayed home time during this pandemic has been catching up on reading fiction and really getting lost in books. We're going to be giving away a few signed copies of Jessica's book to that end so please make sure you are on the Grownup list ASAP so you don't miss that. Just go to my website, bobbirebell.com, and you can sign up for free.

Bobbi Rebell:

Now while you are there, please check out my big project that I have been working on. I am so excited to see what you guys think. It is the new Grownup Gear Shop. It's a passion project of mine, and I hope you guys will all support it. Podcasts listeners can get 10% off if you use the code “Jessica” within one week of this episode dropping. So just go to my website, bobbirebell.com, and you'll see the word shop, click on there. Check it out. I hope you guys like it. Big thanks to author Jessica Goodman for helping us all be financial grownups.

Bobbi Rebell:

Financial grownup with Bobbi Rebell is edited and produced by Steve Stewart and is a BRK media production.

Author Erica Keswin returns to the Financial Grownup podcast to discuss her new book Rituals Roadmap: The Human Way to Transform Everyday Routines Into Workplace Magic. Erica shares specific, free and low cost ways to use rituals to improve productivity, increase a sense of safety and belonging, as well as purpose both for work and for life.

Tip #1:

Begin and end with intention. Beginnings and endings are prime rituals real estate. So be aware of how you start and end your day, and do something that makes you feel most like you.

Tip #2:

Take breaks. We need to build in rituals to actually get up and move.

Tip #3:

Make sure that you're staying connected. We are all feeling isolated and lonely and we're really wired for connection. This may look like scheduling a phone call with a friend. We can build that ritual in once a week or once a month for us to stay connected.

Tip #4:

Give back. If there's ever a time to building a ritual around gratitude, it's 2021. I do believe it's something that many of us started in 2020 that we need to really focus on. There's a lot of data around the impact of gratitude on performance and how we feel in general.

Tip #5:

Build in some rituals to have fun. These days can feel long and heavy and just because it's 2021, that doesn’t mean the pandemic went away. So we need to build in some time for fun, some time for silliness and not feel guilty about it.

Get Erica’s new book, Rituals Roadmap, here

Get all of Erica’s books here

Full Show Transcript:

Bobbi Rebell :

Part of being a financial grownup is making sure you have a plan for how you spend your money, and how you pay your bills. And now we have a new tool for that. It is called Splitit. It will take a lot of the stress away from those big purchases and really allow you to plan ahead. Here's how it works. You shop online and when you're ready to pay, you just choose Splitit at the checkout to split your payment on your credit card and pay over time. There's no interest, no application, no fees. It is fast and easy.

Bobbi Rebell :

So, if you buy something for $500, you can split it into five smaller payments of $100 a month without any interest or fees, much more manageable, and you're in control of your costs. By turning your payments into smaller installments over time with no interest, Splitit gives you more spending power. I know, I don't like to have to pay interest if I can avoid it. And I also don't want to always be opening new lines of credit. Split your payments and live big with the credit cards you already have. Go to splitit.com today. That's splitit.com.

Bobbi Rebell :

Financial Grownup Guide. Five ways to use the power of rituals for a fresh start in 2021 with author Erica Keswin. You're listening to Financial Grownup with me, certified financial planner, Bobbi Rebell. Author of How to Be a Financial Grownup. But you know what? Being a grownup is really hard, especially when it comes to money. But it's okay, we're going to get there together. I'm going to bring you one money story from a financial grownup, one lesson, and then my take on how you can make it your own. We got this.

Bobbi Rebell :

Okay, my friends, if ever there was a time we really need to find ways to cope with chaos, total chaos, things we never thought could possibly happen, it is now. And so the timing could not be better to bring back my friend, Erica Keswin to give us some really powerful ways to use rituals, to help get a fresh start and really a better sense of control as we move into 2021, which so far has not been as boring as many of us had hoped it would be.

Bobbi Rebell :

Here in the Financial Grownup podcast we have two formats, one in which we share money stories and the lessons from those stories, but sometimes we like to mix things up. And we have something called Financial Grownup Guides, which focus on tips and strategies for you to live your best financial grownup life. And as Erica shared with me the details of her latest book, it was perfect for that. And even more so, given the events of early 2021.

Bobbi Rebell :

Rituals Roadmap: The Human Way to Transform Everyday Routines Into Workplace Magic, got me thinking about the rituals I already have and brainstorming new ones to try out. And spoiler alert, not just for the workplace. Now, before I roll the interview, I also to invite everyone to join the Grownup List. We have amazing giveaways coming, including free books from our financial grownup authors. We're also building out some grownup merch, but it's not yet available for sale. You can only get it if you were on the Grownup List and win. Go to my website, bobbirebell.com to get on the List for free. We'll also leave a link in the show notes, and when you get the next newsletter, you will learn how to win the prizes.

Bobbi Rebell :

Speaking of show notes, don't feel you need to take notes on all of the great Intel Erica is going to share. We'll have it all for you in those show notes, which are available under the financial grownup dropdown again, on my website. Okay. I'm really excited for you guys to hear the interview here is Erica Keswin giving us some highlights of Rituals Roadmap. Erica, thanks for coming back to the Financial Grownup Podcast.

Erica Keswin :
Thank you for having me.

Bobbi Rebell :

Big congratulations on your next bestseller, Rituals Roadmap: The Human Way to Transform Everyday Routines into Workplace Magic. You're going to be giving us five ways to use the power of rituals for a fresh start in 2021. But before we get there, first of all, tell us about the book a little bit. And then I'm going to ask you a couple of quick questions.

Erica Keswin :

Sure. I had a book in 2018 as you know because it was on your show called Bring Your Human to Work. And one of the things I realized after it came out that rituals are a tool to create a more human workplace, and to feel more connected. And I know we'll get into some of that. We can use rituals at home. We can use them at work. Right now, working home are pretty much the same thing, so they're even more important. But rituals are very accessible and there's something that we can all use in our lives. And one of the things I found over the last nine months is that they really do help us during turbulent times, especially now.

Bobbi Rebell :

Especially now, and as much as we turn the page and we're now in 2021, the reality is 2021 is likely to be full of so many surprises just as 2020 was. I want to quickly ask you a couple questions about the book and some things that you say in there that I think are particularly relevant to Financial Grownups. The first one is you say in there, the cost of rituals is minimal, but their value is priceless.

Erica Keswin :

Yes. When I started studying rituals, I came up with an equation called the three Ps. The three Ps of rituals. Rituals give us a sense of psychological safety and belonging. They give us an opportunity to connect to purpose. And if you add those two together, it equals performance. And so when I think about performance, it could be that rituals impact how our team feels more connected. It could be bottom line performance, but also performance in our personal lives, that when we have rituals in our lives, our cortisol, our stress goes down, our oxytocin, our feel good hormone goes up. We're more engaged at work. We're more engaged in life. And the book has tons of different studies and science and stories of how rituals impact our lives in really positive ways.

Bobbi Rebell :
And one thing I really enjoyed about the book is that there were a lot of specific examples of that. That we can sort of emulate in our own lives. You call rituals magic, expand a little bit on that.

Erica Keswin :

So people will say, "Well, what is a ritual?" To me, a great example is, if I'm lighting a candle, that may or may not be a ritual. If I'm sitting here lighting a candle because my lights went out, I'm just lighting a candle because I need light. A ritual is something that goes beyond its practical purpose. So if I light a candle every Friday at five o'clock to signify the transition from the workweek to the weekend, I'm almost elevating that act of lighting a candle.

Erica Keswin :

And again, it's not to give me light per se, but it does give me a sense of meaning and connection to myself and to what's going on around me. So that's really that magical element of bringing awareness and intention to what we do.

Bobbi Rebell :
And it's different from something like habits.

Erica Keswin :

Yes. I mean, I believe so. A ritual is something that if you missed it for a day or for a week, something would feel really, really off in your life. It could be if you meditate every morning, for me during the pandemic, we started quarantining on a Thursday I believe, and the following Tuesday I said, "You know what? Our family ritual is to have taco Tuesday, I'm going to do it." I saw the look on it, and my kids are older, they're they're teenagers, but the look on their faces and they were able to smell the same smell and the things that we did pre pandemic. And I was able to see firsthand the impact of maintaining some of those rituals, and how it gave them a sense of psychological safety and belonging.

Erica Keswin :

And rituals also create some order out of chaos. And so I think for everyone now, we need to think about how do we maintain some of our old rituals, but also think about, given that things are so different right now, what are new rituals that we also can add to our lives.

Bobbi Rebell :

Which leads us to the five ways to use the power of rituals for a fresh start in 2021 that you have brought to us.

Erica Keswin :

Great. Begin and end with intention. Beginnings and endings are what I call prime rituals real estate. So be aware of how you start your day, and do something that makes you feel most like you. It could be meditation, taking a few deep breaths or having coffee at Starbucks, which is as many people know my favorite ritual. So that's a really important place to start. It also could be how you end the day. It could be how you transition from work to home, especially when we're all doing that in basically one room. So, transition rituals are important as well.

Erica Keswin : Number two is take breaks. For me if I learned anything in 2020, it's that it's really hard to be in front of your computer all day. And so we need to build in rituals to actually get up and move. And a really fun ritual a woman just share with me recently, she calls 20 by 20 by 20. Every 20 minutes, she takes a 22nd break, 20 feet from her computer-

Bobbi Rebell : Oh I love that.

Erica Keswin :

... and stretches. And again, it's not a box check. It's this elevation of, I know this is important, it's giving me a moment, 20 seconds to connect to something outside of myself. So something that your listeners can try.

Bobbi Rebell :

Yeah. And I think that you wouldn't do that if you didn't have the ritual, because you would feel like if you were taking a break, you are interrupting your workflow and it's not going to help your productivity. But if you have it as a ritual, then that becomes something that you don't feel guilty about. In fact, you know that it's going to empower you to do better the rest of the way.

Erica Keswin :

Exactly. And it's something that you're looking forward to. And it would all of a sudden feel weird if all of a sudden three hours went by and you hadn't gotten up to do it.

Erica Keswin :

Number three is to make sure that you're staying connected. Whether you live alone or living with five other people as I'm doing right now, we are all feeling isolated and lonely and we're really wired for connection. And so, one of the things I've been doing as part of my rituals is to say, "I am going to reach out to some friends and check-in, schedule those phone calls. I have one friend where, and this is actually how you and I met the first time we went for a walk around the reservoir in New York, so maybe when we're both back in New York, we can build that ritual in, you know, once a week or once a month for us to stay connected.

Erica Keswin :

But it's been really nice to get off of Zoom, outside in nature with a friend on a regular time, you know, once a week. So staying connected is number three. Number four is giving back. And I do think that if there's ever a time to building a ritual around gratitude, it's 2021. And that could be anything from coming together with your kids and talking about what you're grateful for, figuring out how you want to give back as a family, you know, the beginning of quarantine, living in New York city, checking in an elderly neighbor, dropping off groceries, I do believe it's something that many of us started in 2020 that we need to really focus on. And there's a lot of data around the impact of gratitude on performance and how we feel in general.

Bobbi Rebell :
And part of a ritual can be involving your entire family.

Erica Keswin :

Yes, 100%. And the kids need to, and they want to. Once they get into it and see the impact on how they feel. I mean, I know we both have seen that firsthand. And last and definitely not least, I'm trying to build in some rituals to have fun. These days can feel long and heavy, and as you said in the beginning, just because it's now on the calendar 2021, it's not as if the pandemic went away. I mean, some people woke up depressing, wow, it's 2021 and things still feel the same. And so we need to build in some time for fun, some time for silliness and not feel guilty about it.

Erica Keswin :

You and I have a mutual friend in Randi Zuckerberg, and she shared with me that on Fridays, and she has little kids, so I think that this connects with the under 10 set, but her family has dessert before dinner on Fridays. And they all think it's like the most hilarious thing.

Bobbi Rebell :
Oh, I think any family will go for that. I think kids of all ages will be on board with that ritual.

Erica Keswin :

You know, or on the company side I've worked, spoke with a group at LinkedIn that has a one-minute dance party every day at three o'clock and they just get up and they let loose, they did it in person, you can do it remote. But again, we need-

Bobbi Rebell :

Erica, I want to see you get your twin daughters to do the one minute dance ritual every day at three o'clock. I think that'd be great.

Erica Keswin :

They would, they probably would want me to film it and put it on my social media, which I have to get special permission to do now. But what we do to have fun is every Monday, our entire family, my husband, my 15 year old son and my dog, we all watch the Bachelor. That is our guilty pleasure. We laugh so hard and we are actually this year doing a bracket like a final four bracket-

Bobbi Rebell : Oh my gosh.

Erica Keswin :
... of the Bachelor.

Bobbi Rebell : I love it.

Erica Keswin :

but be intentional and build in some rituals for fun because we all need it, and it's contagious.

Bobbi Rebell :

Well, there're a lot of great ideas and specific examples in your book. So everyone should check it out. Where can people learn more about you? And I assume the book is going to be available pretty much everywhere.

Erica Keswin :

So you can find me, my email is my name, ericakeswin.com, which is K-E-S as in Sam W-I-N.com. You can sign up for my monthly-ish newsletter to hear more about the book. On the website, there's lots of places, as you said, to order the book from Amazon to Barnes & Noble to the Strand, I'm trying to support local bookstores. And I really do believe that rituals now more than ever can help us through these turbulent times. They don't have to cost a penny, but the impact is priceless

Bobbi Rebell :
Very well said. Thank you so much.

Erica Keswin :
Thanks, Bobby. I can't wait to see you in person.

Bobbi Rebell :

All right my friends. What was your favorite ritual that Erica talked about? For me, definitely dessert before dinner. But most of you guys would guess that pretty quickly. Taco Tuesday though, definitely a classic we can all go for. I would love to hear from you. DM me on Instagram @bobbirebell1 or on Twitter @bobbirebell, let me know what rituals you and your family and your coworkers use. A lot of the stuff is for work, but frankly, work and home is kind of the same thing these days.

Bobbi Rebell :

Anyway, I'm also really excited about the changes that we're making to the Grownup List. It's going to be coming out pretty reliably I hope, that's the plan once a month. And I want you guys to join ASAP by going to my website, bobbirebell.com because we are going to be doing a lot of giveaways, including author books like Erica's. We're going to be giving away a number of signed copies of that. And also other authors that are appearing on the show. We have a lot of really amazing ones.

Bobbi Rebell :

And as I mentioned at the top of the show, we are developing some merchandise and some really cool stuff that we are going to give away at first, because we're still setting up the store and we want to see what you guys like and get some feedback. So you can be our beta testers and win some free merch. Just get on the Grownup List again at my website. And of course, don't forget to pick up a copy of Erica Keswin's book, Rituals Roadmap. And if you like it, recommend it to friends. We could all use some calming rituals right now. And of course, big thanks to other Erica Keswin for helping us all be financial grownups.

Bobbi Rebell :

Financial Grownup with Bobbi Rebell is edited and produced by Steve Stewart and is a BRK media production.

Episode Links:

• Erica’s website - https://ericakeswin.com/

Follow Erica!

• Instagram - @ericakeswin

• Twitter - @erica_keswin

• LinkedIn - @ericakeswin

Follow Bobbi!

• Instagram - @bobbirebell1

• Twitter- @bobbirebell

• LinkedIn-https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobbirebellkaufman

• Website- http://www.bobbirebell.com/

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own.

Author Barbara Huson joins the Financial Grownup podcast to share her research and insights on a new way to approach learning about money and wealth, as well as preview her latest book Rewire for Wealth: Three Steps Any Woman Can Take to Program Her Brain for Financial Success

Get Barbara’s new book, Rewire for Wealth here.

Get all of Barbara’s books along with other books by Financial Grownups here.

Barbara’s Steps to Rewire Your Brain for Wealth

Step #1 -

Start observing those negative or unhealthy or maladaptive thoughts that go through your mind. Observe these thoughts with curiosity. Not judgment, not negativity. Separate yourself from the thought.

Step #2-

The second step is reframing your negative thoughts to see it differently. It could be as simple as looking at the opposite of that thought.

Step #3-

The third step is you respond differently. The key is to respond differently over and over and over again. Each time you respond differently, you weaken the neural pathway that says there's never enough to build a new neural pathway that says there's more than enough.

Episode Links:

• Barbara’s website - https://www.barbara-huson.com

Follow Barbara!

• Instagram - @thebarbarahuson

• Twitter - @thebarbarahuson

• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbarahuson/

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own.

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT-

Bobbi Rebell:

Part of being a financial grownup is making sure you have a plan for how you spend your money and how you pay your bills. Now, we have a new tool for that. It is called Splitit. It will take a lot of the stress away from those big purchases and really allow you to plan ahead. Here's how it works. You shop online, and when you're ready to pay, you just choose Splitit at the checkout to split your payment on your credit card and pay over time. There's no interest, no application, no fees. It is fast and easy. So, if you buy something for $500, you can split it into five smaller payments of $100 a month without any interest or fees, much more manageable and you're in control of your costs. By turning your payments into smaller installments over time with no interest, Splitit gives you more spending power. I know I don't like to have to pay interest if I can avoid it, and I also don't want to always be opening new lines of credit. Split your payments and live big with the credit cards you already have. Go to splitit.com today. That's splitit.com.

Bobbi Rebell:

Three ways to rewire your brain for financial success with Rewire for Wealth author Barbara Huson. You're listening to Financial Grownup with me, certified financial planner, Bobbi Rebell, author of How to Be a Financial Grownup. You know what? Being a grownup is really hard, especially when it comes to money. But it's okay, we're going to get there together. I'm going to bring you one money story from a financial grownup, one lesson, and then my take on how you can make it your own. We got this.

Bobbi Rebell:

Hey, everyone. Hope you guys are well despite all the chaos going on in the world. It's pretty hard to just keep functioning in daily life, but that's what a lot of us have to kind of find a way to keep doing. I've been continuing to work on my book, tentatively called Launching Financial Grownups, and I'm really taking some time to focus, to refocus, I should say, more on this podcast, which I love doing this podcast for you guys. Some of you know I made a big decision coming into this new year to take a sabbatical from my other podcast, Money with Friends with Joe Saul-Sehy. There was literally no way I was going to get my book done anywhere near the spring deadline, so I needed a jolt and this is what I had to do.

Bobbi Rebell:

Coming into the new year, I think a lot of us can benefit from a jolt and just kind of waking up and seeing things maybe a little differently. We've been dealing with a lot of the same old, same old. A lot of us have gotten into ruts, not surprising given everything going on, but look, we've been quarantining and sometimes this can be a good time for a change in mindset, even though yeah, the new year is sort of an artificial way of marking it. But I think there's something about coming into a new year that can motivate us to change our mindset. So on that note, this week's guest is really perfect for all of that. You guys that want to join me in changing your mindset and getting remotivated, Barbara Huson is an author. She has written seven books. The best one is probably, the one that's really best-known, I should say, is Prince Charming is Not Coming. By the way, it was written not under her current married name, it was written under Barbara Stanny.

Bobbi Rebell:

She now is coming out with her number eight book, Rewire for Wealth: Three Steps Any Woman Can Take to Program Her Brain for Financial Success. When I first heard the title, I was a bit skeptical, but her team sent me an advanced copy, and not too far into it I was on board. That's why I'm so excited that she made the time to come on the podcast and talk about the themes in the book and how we can all integrate them into our lives. And by the way, even though the book is technically aimed at women, I really believe these strategies are truly for any gender. Before I roll the interview, I'm doing big things this year that I want to make sure to keep you guys informed about, because I'm hoping they can really help you reach a lot of your grownup goals this year.

Bobbi Rebell:

The first thing is I'm going to really be upping the ante with The Grownup List. It's been coming out... well, I've been trying to do it once a month. That hasn't really happened, so we're going to, first of all, try to have it actually come out once a month. We're going to have some big giveaways that I'm really excited about, starting with the one that's going to come out soon in January. So please get on the list. It is free. You just go to my website, BobbiRebell.com to sign up. Please also follow me on Instagram @BobbiRebell1. If you go there, just send me a DM just to say hi so I know that you're there and you've heard this on the podcast. And by the way, apologies in this interview for any audio glitches. Barbara was coming to us from an area with really weak signals, wifi, whatever you want to call it. So the audio is not ideal, but the interview is well worth it. Here is Barbara Huson.

Bobbi Rebell:

Barbara Huson, welcome to Financial Grownup. We're so glad to have you here and we're so excited to hear more about your new book, Rewire for Wealth: Three Steps Any Woman Can Take to Program Her Brain for Financial Success. Welcome.

Barbara Huson:
Thank you, and thank you for having me.

Bobbi Rebell:

Before we get into that, I want people to know a little bit about your background, because it is one of a kind. You come from a very unique perspective in your approach to wealth and basically how we should be thinking about it.

Barbara Huson:

I grew up in a wealthy family. My father was the R of H&R Block. The only advice he ever gave me about money was, "Don't worry," which I thought was great advice. I didn't understand money. I just wanted to spend it.

Bobbi Rebell:
I don't want to worry about money. I would love to just spend it. Sounds good to me, Barbara.

Barbara Huson:

Yeah. It sounded great to me until I found out very early in my marriage that my husband, who was a stockbroker, was a compulsive gambler. Over the course of our marriage, he lost a fortune of my inheritance. Here's the insane part, I continued to let him manage the money because that's how terrified and intimidated I was by anything to do with money. After our divorce, I decided I didn't want to deal with money, it's not my thing. Well, I have learned that if you don't deal with your money, your money will deal with you. Then the next year, I got tax bills for over a million dollars for back taxes my ex didn't pay for illegal deals he got us in. My signature was on everything. I hired lawyers, I got the tax bill down. I sold what was left in my trust. I was left with nothing. I had a few properties. I had a few properties…and so if I lived frugally, I'd be fine. I had three daughters. I was not going to raise them on the street. I was determined to get smart.

Bobbi Rebell:

Yeah. That's what we call a financial grownup moment, is having your husband gamble away your fortune and having to figure it out with young children. For sure. So you have a lot to teach us. I know that from that moment, you went on this mission. For years, you've really dedicated your life to educating women, to coaching women about wealth. You now have seven books out. Your eighth one is coming out and now you're here talking to us, which I'm so grateful for. You brought us three tips to rewire your brain for financial success. First, talk a little bit before we get to that about the whole concept of that, because this is a whole different way to think about money, starting with how our brains work.

Barbara Huson:

About six years ago, I stumbled on an article about neuroscience. If I could integrate neuroscience, the principles of neuroscience, of rewiring your brain into the work that I was doing with finances, helping women become financially empowered, that can expedite the learning curve and get them past the resistance in a very short time.

Bobbi Rebell:
Give us an overview of the three tips, and then we can talk about what each one is.

Barbara Huson:

So the three steps are simply recognize, reframe and respond differently. Recognize, reframe, and respond differently. I'll explain these steps in a minute, but you must do these over and over and over and over again, because the key to rewiring your brain, to changing the habits, is repetition. So the first step, recognize. What that means is you start observing those negative or unhealthy or maladaptive thoughts that go through your mind. Start observing them. "Oh, I'm having a thought about not having enough. Oh, I'm having a thought about I have to have those shoes. I have to have that designer handbag," or whatever. Or, "I'm not enough." But you start observing, and you observe these thoughts with curiosity. Not judgment, not negativity. "Oh, isn't that interesting? I'm having a thought," because by doing that, you separate yourself from the thought.

Barbara Huson:

The second step is taking that thought, "There's never enough," and reframing it, seeing it differently. It could be as simple as looking at the opposite of that thought, "Oh, there's enough. There's enough," or maybe it's, "oh, here's an opportunity to rewire that thought." The third step is you respond differently. You [inaudible 00:09:24] do. What you do want to do, which doesn't feel right, which doesn't come naturally. In that case, there's never enough and you could go into fear and not want to open your bills and not want to look at your checkbook. Therefore, the thing to do is open at least one bill or start looking at your checkbook. The key is to respond differently over and over and over again. Each time you respond differently, you weaken the neural pathway that says there's never enough to build a new neural pathway that says there's more than enough.

Bobbi Rebell:

What do you say to people that maybe have people around them that are counter-effective? I don't know if that's quite the right word. They're not supportive of this rewiring idea. That are filling people with the wrong kinds of thoughts. How do you do that? Especially, we're in quarantine, sometimes we don't have much choice with who we're with.

Barbara Huson:

It's really, really important that you, at least while you are rewiring, while you want to shift from being one way to being another way, it's really important to surround yourself with people who are supporting you and not trying to rain on your parade. And that may mean if your husband is being a naysayer, simply not listening, walking out of the room. But it's really important, it's a really good point you made, because you become who you're with. There is a tendency to become who you're with. It's very important to distance yourself emotionally, if not physically, from the people who are not there supporting you.

Bobbi Rebell:

That is such good advice. Tell us more about... The book is coming out in January. Tell us more about where people can find out more about the book and about you and be in touch with you.

Barbara Huson:

Well, you can go to my website, which is Barbara-Huson, H-U-S-O-N, .com. Barbara-Huson.com. The book is actually for presale now. I know it's on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but yes, you can come to my website. There's just lots of stuff on there, and I have wonderful offerings on there. I invite anyone to come.

Bobbi Rebell:

Well, thank you so much for joining us. I love the book. In fact, I endorsed it, so that's truly something that I don't do very often, but this book really struck me as something very important that we should all be embracing in the way that we approach money. I think a lot of people can benefit from this different way of thinking about wealth and our money. So thank you so much for being here and thank you so much for this newest book.

Barbara Huson:
Thank you so much for having me.

Bobbi Rebell:

So, are you guys ready to rewire for wealth? Let me know how you like the book and what other authors you'd like for me to invite on the Financial Grownup podcast. We actually have a lot of big author interviews coming up this winter, and most of them are going to be donating books to be given away to those of you on The Grownup List. We're also giving away branded merchandise as a sneak peek to what we're going to be fully launching a little bit later on, probably early spring. And you can enter and win only if you are on The Grownup List. Super easy to join. Go to my website, BobbiRebell.com, and just sign up. See you guys there. Big thanks, of course, to Barbara Huson, for helping us rewire for wealth and be financial grownups. Financial Grownup with Bobbi Rebell is edited and produced by Steve Stewart and is a BRK Media production.

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own.

 

Clever Girl Finance’s Bola Sokunbi is famous for saving $100k on a $54k salary in about 3 years. But then she started dropping $3,000 on a massive collection of luxury handbags, most of which she never even used. 

In Bola’s money story you will learn:

-How she saved more than $100,000 on a salary of just $54,000 in three and a half years

-The side hustle that helped her reach that goal

-How after she reached that goal, she made a very unexpected spending splurge

-The fascinating reason, looking back, that she went down that path and kept going!

-The moment she woke up and realized she had to make a change

-Exactly what she did to get back on track and make a profit in the process

-The regret she had despite making money on her debacle

-Why she thinks so much about Amazon stock

In Bola’s money lesson you will learn:

-Why keeping her handbags in top condition was the key in getting a solid return when she went to sell them

-Other ways to maintain the value of resale able luxury goods like handbags

-Her take on investing in goods like handbags compared to the stock market and corporations

In Bola’s money tip you will learn:

-Ways to get luxury goods like handbags for less money without compromising quality

-Bola’s favorite pre-owned goods resources

-How friends can trade or sell handbags to each other

-Bola’s new strategy for buying expensive handbags

In my take you will learn:

-Why I compare Bola’s handbag venture to winning the lottery

-The difference between saving money and building wealth

-How to sell luxury goods like handbags, as well as other things you can sell, like baby strollers

-Why I do not promote buying fake goods as a cheaper option

Episode links

Bola’s website: CleverGirlFinance.com

Bola’s podcast: Clever Girls Know

Follow Bola!

Twitter Clever Girl Finance

Instagram Clever Girl Finance

Facebook Clever Girl Finance

LinkedIn Bola Sokunbi

 

Also mentioned in the show:

Vestiare Collective

Fashionphile

Rent the Runway

---

Transcription

Bobbi Rebell:
Support for Financial Grownup with Bobbi Rebell and the following message come from TransferWise, the cheaper way to send money internationally. TransferWise takes a machete to the hefty fees that come with sending money abroad. Test it out for free at transferwise.com/podcast or download the app.

Bola Sokumbi:
I've always been a handbag junkie. It's just something about leather. Like the smell of fine leather that just ... I don't know.

Bobbi Rebell:
You're listening to Financial Grownup with me, certified financial planner, Bobbi Rebell, author of How To Be A Financial Grownup. You know what, being a grownup is really hard especially when it comes to money, but it's okay. We're going to get there together. I'm going to bring you one money story from a financial grownup, one lesson, and then my take on how you can make it your own. We got this.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey, friends. This is one of those, "She did not do that," episodes. My guest was a champ at saving money on a very low income, but once she had that money, things took in unexpected turn and then there was yet another unexpected twist to the story. Bola Sokumbi is a certified financial education instructor and the force behind the very popular, Clever Girl Finance, a website and podcast that empowers and educates women to make the best financial decisions for them. Here is Bola Sokumbi.

Bobbi Rebell:
Bola Sokumbi, you're a financial grownup. Welcome to the podcast.

Bola Sokumbi:
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Bobbi Rebell:
I am such a fan of yours. First of all, in addition to being a money expert, you are the force behind Clever Girl Finance, which is a website and a podcast. It started after you. I don't even know how you did this. You saved $100,000 in three and a half years on a salary of, I want to say, about $50,000?

Bola Sokumbi:
Yeah. I was making $54,000 before taxes.

Bobbi Rebell:
Wow. Give us just the high level. How you did that.

Bola Sokumbi:
I basically got lean and mean with, probably, my finances. I contributed to my retirement fund from my employer because I knew they were offering a match and that was a way for me to get some free money. I kept my expenses super low. I avoided my friends and stayed home. I wasn't going out to eat very much. I wasn't buying alcohol. I was the-

Bobbi Rebell:
Temporarily, right?

Bola Sokumbi:
Temporarily.

Bobbi Rebell:
Right.

Bola Sokumbi:
I was in a steady ramen noodles and coke diet. I focused on saving 40 to 50% of my paycheck and anything extra.

Bobbi Rebell:
Wow.

Bola Sokumbi:
I save my tax returns, my bonuses. I try to save as much as possible. I also started a side hustle. I started a wedding photography business, which really helped to increase the amount of money I was bringing in. That helped contribute to me being able to save that amount of money. Finally, I avoided credit cards as best I could. I, instead, used a charge card that require me to pay my balance in full every month. That kept me really mindful about my spending, but overall, it was really just setting the intention that I wanted to save and I wanted to challenge myself to save six figures. I put my mind to it. I gone to that focus and three and a half years later, I was able to save that $100,000.

Bobbi Rebell:
So smart. In full details, if anyone wants, go to Clever Girl Finance. I want to talk about your money story that you brought because Bola, this is like an incredible story given what you just said.

Bola Sokumbi:
Yeah.

Bobbi Rebell:
Here you are. You got $100,000. You're hustling with a side hustle. You're eating ramen noodles. You're doing everything intentionally, maxing out your retirement account to get the max. What do you do? You start buying $3,000 handbags. Tell us what, what.

Bola Sokumbi:
Holla.

Bobbi Rebell:
What?

Bola Sokumbi:
Let me break it down. Basically, I got to this point where I had saved a ton of money. I had a lot of money in the bank. Actually, at the end of the four years, I had about $150,000 saved. I was making more money. I had my business. I gone raising at my job. I was earning, now, well over six figures at this point. I was like "Wow, I have all this money. I maxed out my retirement savings. I'm still meeting my savings obligations. I just have to treat myself." I've always been a handbag junkie. It's just something about leather, like the smell of fine leather that just ... I don't know.

Bobbi Rebell:
I personally would've bought a pint of Haagen-Dazs if I wanted to treat myself but okay. $3,000 handbags.

Bola Sokumbi:
I went all the way, yes. I got my first designer handbag like "Oh my God, this is amazing. It's beautiful. I bought this in cash. I love it."

Bobbi Rebell:
What was it? Describe it.

Bola Sokumbi:
It was a Channel Jumbo in black caviar leather with gold hardware, classic, beautiful.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay. I wouldn't know.

Bola Sokumbi:
I got the one. Should've been enough, but then I was like well, few months later, I have all the spare money. I'm still saving. I didn't know what to do. I want to invest, but I don't need to invest that much. I'm going to buy another designer handbag. I got to the point where I was buying several handbags for maybe three or four years. To me, it was fine because I was still saving. I was still meeting my obligation.

Bobbi Rebell:
How much do you think you spent in total, Bola, on the handbags?

Bola Sokumbi:
Oh my goodness. I don't know. If we were to have an Instagram competition on who could grab their handbags steady for the next 30 to 60 days, I would win, every time.

Bobbi Rebell:
Wait. Wait. You're going to have a different handbag every day for 30 to 60 days?

Bola Sokumbi:
Yeah, I could. Yes.

Bobbi Rebell:
Oh my gosh.

Bola Sokumbi:
I could've. I have a lot of handbags. I had them in different colors-

Bobbi Rebell:
Were they just sitting in the closet? Were you taking them to work? What was going on with the handbags?

Bola Sokumbi:
That's the sucky part. I maybe use like two or three. Well, I was exaggerated. I didn't have 60. Exaggerating. About a month. Let's say, a month. I didn't really use them. That was a disappointing factor. I'm one of those people that believe that if there's something that you like and it's something that you're going to use, go for it as long as you plan it out financial, but I wasn't using them. They did not make financial sense for me. I was using like one or two of them, and then maybe the others, I would look at or wear to a baby shower for 25 minutes and it goes right back into the closet. It did not make any financial sense. Fortunately, for me, at the time that I purchase them, for those of you who are into handbags, knew that there have been a flurry of price increases especially with the higher end luxury brands.

Bola Sokumbi:
At the time I bought the handbags, I bought them before the crazy price increases started. I got to a point where I was like "Okay, this doesn't make any sense." I will look in my closet and all I would see would be dollar bills stacked up. My husband is like "You need to let these go. You don't even use them. It doesn't make sense. You feel so guilty about having them because you're not using them." I took it upon myself to sell almost every one of them. I still have a few. The ones I use. It was really hard to sell them because I felt like I was selling my children. It's crazy. When I think about it, it's ridiculous, but I sold them. Luckily, for me, because of the price increases, I was able to sell them for a lot more than I purchase. That very first Channel handbag, the black jumbo I just described with caviar hardware, I paid $2,900 for it and I sold it for $5,500.

Bobbi Rebell:
Oh my goodness. Only you, Bola, would actually turn a cringeworthy shopping habit into a positive investment experience.

Bola Sokumbi:
However, Bobbi, to the point you asked me before we started recording was, I made money but when I think about it, I really didn't make that much money because one of the things that trigger me to start selling those handbags was Amazon stock. I realized that if I had spent all that money I spent on those handbags on Amazon Stock, I would've had times 100 of what I had spent on handbags. Not just doubling my money. I would've like times 100 it, right?

Bobbi Rebell:
If you had actually bought Amazon Stock, but truthfully, how much do you think ... do you think you spent $90,000 on handbags?

Bola Sokumbi:
Oh, I don't know. Over a three to four year period, I spent a lot of money.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay. You bought 30 handbags at $3,000 each.

Bola Sokumbi:
Yeah. I had about 30. They were not all the same price.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay.

Bola Sokumbi:
They were not all $3,000 handbags.

Bobbi Rebell:
What was the most expensive one?

Bola Sokumbi:
The Channel handbags I had. They were about in the $3,000, $3,500 range at that time. Now, they're not anymore. They're about 6 to $7,000 now.

Bobbi Rebell:
Wow.

Bola Sokumbi:
I don't own any more handbags by the way.

Bobbi Rebell:
What is the lesson from this beyond the fact that there was a time in life when investing in handbag was actually an appreciable asset? Still, they probably know. I don't know the market, but anyway, beyond the fact that it actually turned on to be a good investment.

Bola Sokumbi:
I wouldn't even describe as an appreciable handbag because for me, it was just purely for the fact that I was not using them. No one is going to pay you top dollar for a handbag that has been worn and beat up. If you're buying something, I believe that you should be using it. Lesson for this is cost per wear. You can have 100 Channel handbags if you want to have them and if you can afford them and you're paying for them in cash and it's not taking off your financial goals, but what is your cost per wear. How often are you using them? Are you getting your money's worth? If you buy a handbag for $3,000 and you wear it once, then that one time you wore it cost you $3,000 and that makes no sense. If you buy this handbag and you wear it 3,000 times over four years, then that handbag cost you $1 or maybe it comes down to cents and pennies and that starts to make more sense because as opposed to buying $25 handbags over that three-year period and use that one handbag over that time and you get your cost per wear.

Bola Sokumbi:
To me, cost per wear is really important. That's how I plan out my wardrobe. I still buy fancy things, but I have to be using them. I have to get my cost per wear down to pennies for it to make sense. I know when I see something if I'm going to use it or not. Understand your cost per wear. People may think, "Oh, buying handbags is crazy," but people spend their money on different things. For me, it was the handbag thing. Some people spend their money on electronics, on cars, on things that they don't necessarily use like having a second car in your garage that you drive on Saturday is not good to drive per wear.

Bobbi Rebell:
The handbags make you feel good.

Bola Sokumbi:
Yeah. I would pick a handbag over a lot of things. That was me. That was a lesson I learned. I put the money right back into my investment accounts. I was better for it.

Bobbi Rebell:
Let's stick with the handbag thing. What is your money tip, your everyday money tip for everyone?

Bola Sokumbi:
I would say that if you are a handbag girl like me, no shay, no judgment, find ways to get the handbags that you like at a cheaper cost or without putting out so much money. For instance, Bobbi, you and I talked about Rent the Runway. You really like that. If you want to actually own them, you can think about getting them preowned from sties like Fashion File or Vestiaire Collective. There's a bunch of different ones that are reputable that sell authentic products or even local consignment stores in New York. There's a ton of them. Or buying them off of friends who are trying to let go of their handbags or trying to recycle their wardrobe. Those are great ways that you can get luxury at a lower cost. You can also wait until some of these handbags go into the sale and purchase them that way.

Bobbi Rebell:
Right. Because a lot of them are really classic.

Bola Sokumbi:
Yes. It's all about buying something that you know you're going to use for a long time. I tend to avoid any trend pieces because I don't want to be out of fashion next year after spending all this money on it. I buy bags that I can carry forever. That's what I do. Every purchase I make right now, I carry that bag to shreds, basically.

Bobbi Rebell:
Definitely. Get that cost per wear down. Where can people find you and learn more about Clever Girl Finance?

Bola Sokumbi:
Yeah. You can find me on my website at clevergirlfinance.com, on Instagram at Clever Girl Finance, on Facebook, Clever Girl Finance. I also have a podcast called, Clever Girls Know. You can search for it on iTunes, Stitcher, Sound Cloud. You'll find it there as well.

Bobbi Rebell:
I think everyone should definitely check all of that out. I am a big fan. Thank you so much, Bola.

Bola Sokumbi:
Thank you for having me, Bobbi.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey, friends. Except for the fact that she was ironically able to sell the handbags at a profit, this whole thing reminds me of what happens when people inherit a ton of money or they win the lottery and then they just don't know what to do, so they go shopping. Financial Grownup tip number one, Bola was great at accumulating money but she was selling herself short when it came to building wealth. She was meeting her goals in terms of saving and investing and all that, but that doesn't mean she couldn't move the goal post given the resource that she had and make even more ambitious goals. Not a problem to buy a bag that you can afford, but she wasn't even using most of them. Bola is very specific that, well, they ironically went up in value if she had invested the money. In her case, she talks about Amazon Stock, she would've made a lot more money. Of course, you could lose money in the stock market. There's no guarantee of that. It's just something to consider.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial Grownup tip number two, if you do buy luxury goods and you aren't using them, it is easier than ever to sell them, so many resources online. You may not make as big a profit as Bola did, you may lose money but you're still going to get some cash. I have sold some bags on the real wheel. I've been happy to have the cash even though it went for less than I paid. You can also buy slightly used bags there at a discount if you want them. As I've said before, you can rent them at Rent the Runway or other similar websites. I will leave some links in the show notes for you guys. Given these resources, I would also urge you to stay away from the fakes. It undermines the economy and the business of the companies that produce the real thing. Don't buy fake bags. Also, it is illegal.

Bobbi Rebell:
We want you to be a financial grownup. Send us an email to info@financialgrownup.com if you want to be considered for one of our monthly listener episodes. Just tell us what the money story is that you want to share and your everyday money tip. If you have not already, please rate and review the podcast on iTunes, Apple Podcast. That helps others discover us and grow the community. It is truly appreciated. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any upcoming episodes and follow me at Bobbi Rebell on Twitter @ bobbirebell1 on Instagram and on Facebook, I am at Bobbi Rebell. Bola is the best. I am so appreciative that she was brave enough to get really candid. She definitely got us all one step closer to being financial grownups.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial Grownup with Bobbi Rebell is edited and produced by Steve Stewart and is a BRK Media Production.

Naseema McElroy candidly shares her experiences paying off debt and building a financial foundation, and how that journey allowed her to break free from both a toxic work environment and an abusive relationship. 

Naseema’s Money Story:

Naseema McElroy:
When I started on this journey, I was single. I was a single mom with my daughter, and as I was starting to pay down debt, I did get married. It was a very short marriage because it was abusive. He ended up having to go to jail. And then I had to go through that divorce process. But if I hadn't had my finances in order during that process, it could have dragged out. I could have stayed in that relationship because of financial dependency. And so I thank God that I was already on that journey so I could step away.

Naseema McElroy:
Shortly after that, I transitioned to a different facility for the same organization that I was working for and was experiencing and witnessing a lot of medical malpractice, especially in regards to maternal morbidity, not to the point of mortality, but almost.

Bobbi Rebell:
Can you explain what you mean by that?

Naseema McElroy:
Yeah. In this country, we have higher rates of black women dying and being seriously injured from just giving birth. And it's very prevalent in certain areas. And in this particular hospital I was working with, it was prevalent and I was speaking up against it. That wasn't well accepted or received.

Bobbi Rebell:
What was happening? They weren't getting good medical care? Tell us more about that, because that is something that we don't know about. I want to know more about that.

Naseema McElroy:
Yeah. So it's very common and that's probably why I'm not being as specific as you want because everybody knows this, right?

Bobbi Rebell:
No. Are they not getting the right? I mean, look, we're both moms, are they not getting the right medical care? And why? Is it a cost cutting decision in the hospital? What is going on? What's not happening?

Naseema McElroy:
It's implicit bias. It's just the way that you handle two different patients, right? So I'll give you an example. I have a mom that's in labor. She's trying to have a vaginal delivery after she had a C-section, which has serious implications, has to be monitored carefully. She's telling me that she's having a lot of pain and I'm prepping her to go to the OR. This doesn't feel right, let's go. The attending walks in the room and she's like, "Oh, so you're in pain now? You're in actual pain now because you're actually in labor and this is what you wanted." So instead of doing the C-section right then, she waited hours to do the C-section, went and did the C-section. And then the baby was hanging out of her uterus with both her and her baby could have died.

Naseema McElroy:
So these things were happening over and over again, over a short period of time. And when I spoke up about it, I was basically told to shut up, and I didn't know what I was talking about. And I had been a labor and delivery nurse for years and had never had my judgment questioned. And so I know that that was an environment that I had to leave because I already tried to speak out. But I was at a position financially where I didn't have to have that job, and so I left. And then when I left in the back end, I did some actions in order to make sure that they corrected their mistakes.

Bobbi Rebell:
Thank God for that. So you had the choice to leave this horrific job environment, which by the way, thank you for speaking up so candidly, and thank you for following up after you left. Because I know that probably many women benefited, families benefited, children benefited from that. In terms of you, because we want to focus on you on this podcast, you had the financial freedom. So tell us the steps that you went through. You had the financial freedom to leave an abusive relationship. And by the way, divorce is never cheap, as we know.

Naseema McElroy:
Even for that short amount of time. Yeah.

Bobbi Rebell:
Oh, it's almost many divorces last more than marriages. But also leaving so many people are stuck in jobs that they're trapped because they don't have the finances to have the freedom to leave. Tell us, what were you doing specifically, you had $200,000 of student debt and other debt you've alluded to. How did you get control of that so that you could leave both an abusive relationship and a toxic job?

Naseema McElroy:
Well, ironically, I thought it was because I didn't know how to invest my money and that's why I wasn't good with money, and I always thought that investing took like this college degree to learn how to do. And so, I listened to podcasts. I had a long commute and so I Googled investing podcasts and stumbled upon Dave Ramsey, ironically. So I actually started listening to Dave Ramsey and followed his baby steps to start getting out of debt, and that helped me accelerate my debt pay off. And so in just two years, I was able to pay off most of my student loans. Then I was going through my divorce at that time. And then during that divorce, I had to pay, I forgot, $20,000 in debt towards, well, it was basically a car that I had paid off. But anyway, I had to pay my husband, even though it was an abusive relationship, he was in jail. They don't care, so I had to pay him.

Naseema McElroy:
And then, because of the way I was doing and following Dave Ramsey's plan, because I was gung ho, I had a $30,000 IRS debt. So I was almost finished paying off all my debt. And that's just snowballing. I did sell a house in the beginning of the process. That helped accelerate that process, but it was just debt snowballing, zero based budgeting my way. And then finally at the end of it, I had a choice to sell my house and, and people are like, why would you sell your house? I had to really think about this. It's like, a lot of stuff happened in that house, especially with my marriage. And so I was able to walk away from that house pretty easily, even though it was a really nice house. And so I sold my house at the end when I had about $50,000 left in debt and then that cleared out everything.

Naseema McElroy:
And so that's all the debt that I paid off. And so all that stuff took place over a matter of three years. And then at the end of those three years, when I sold my house, I moved, I relocated back to my hometown and that's where I was in that toxic work environment. But at this point I was like, I was on wealth accumulation instead of debt payoff. And so I actually stepped back and only went down to working six days a month. And that was a freedom that I had.

Naseema McElroy:
So financial freedom is not about reaching like this fire number that you might hear out there. It's about the levels of independence that you get to take along the way. And my independence was being able to spend time with my family, be free from this toxic work environment, be out of that bad relationship, be able to recover from all the stuff that happened to me over the years and only work six days a month and still make a pretty good living.

Naseema’s Money Lesson:

Naseema McElroy:
The money lesson is being intentional with your finances unlocks levels of freedom in your life for you to live your life by intention, to be able to walk away from those things.

Naseema’s Money Tip:

Naseema McElroy:
For me, I like nice things. And so I don't skimp on my cars for example. I drive a Tesla. During the whole process of me paying down debt, I took my daughter to Disneyland every other month, but that was super important to me, but it was part of my budget. And so it still fits within whatever financial goals I have, but I don't live in deprivation.

Bobbi’s Financial Grownup Tips:

Financial Grownup Tip #1:

Naseema created choices when she needed them, because she had made the grownup decision ahead of those situations to get control of her finances. Don't wait for the rainy day to have that umbrella handy, guys.

Financial Grownup Tip #2:

As Naseema said, Teslas are pricey, but you know what? If you want an electric car, which will allow you of course, to save on gas and be better for the environment, don't forget there are many other electric cars out there to choose from. Happy shopping.

Episode Links:

• Naseema’s website - www.financiallyintentional.com/

Follow Naseema!

• Instagram - @financiallyinte

• Twitter - @financialintent

• Facebook - @nursesonfire

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own.

Learn how physical therapist Chris Mamula changed his whole financial path after experiencing two major life events. Chris shares the key steps he took to achieve financial independence on his own terms. Plus a money tip that will change how you approach gift giving. 

Chris’ Money Story:

Chris Mamula:
It's kind of funny that I'm on the financial grownup show, because I spent the first decade of my adult life doing everything to avoid being a grownup. The only motivation I had at all for learning about finance was how to escape work. And I wanted to basically be a ski bum or a climbing dirt bag, and that was kind of my motivation in life. My wife and I, we were married right after I got out of grad school. And we didn't think we could have kids, and so we were just looking for a way to escape the normal lifestyle. We were kind of in the process of doing so. We were going to move west in, this was probably 2012. My wife had a job offer in Utah with a company that manufactures ski gear and climbing gear. And it was kind of this dream thing, and I was just going to quit my job and we were going to wing it.

Chris Mamula:
And we had no idea what we were doing financially. And after a decade of thinking we couldn't have kids, we found out she was pregnant. And so that was the first shock. So we decided to kind of stay local where our family was so they could help us raise her and just have some support, and also so we could figure things out financially. And at the same time this was happening, my cousin and one of my favorite people in the world, she was diagnosed with cancer and she had multiple kids. And so we were really involved with helping her and helping her family. She ended up passing away about a month before my daughter was born. And so I just had this confluence of events where the highest of high of having a new child who we didn't think we could have, and this, I don't know how spiritual people are, but I kind of consider it a miracle after a decade of thinking that it wasn't even possible for us.

Chris Mamula:
And at the same time watching my cousin who kind of did everything right and she was in the process of dying, and then, like I said, she actually passed a month before my daughter was born. And it really kind of made me just question everything and say, you only have one shot at life. And I wanted to be there for my daughter and I still wanted to live this dream of pursuing this outdoor passions I had. And so how could I figure out how to just build a different way of life? And that's what kind of drew me into this FIRE community, and we ended up doing that.

Bobbi Rebell:
First of all, I am so sorry for the loss and I can only imagine how painful that must have been. What changes did it inspire in you specifically? I know we can make a blanket statement, it brought you into the FIRE community, which is Financial Independence Retire Early. But what specifically changed because of the birth of your daughter and then the loss of your cousin?

Chris Mamula:
Yeah. Something we worried about in the book is this idea of having an awakening. The gentleman who kind of, his name is Dominic Quartuccio, who discussed this concept when he was on the Choose FI Podcast. But he talked about how a lot of times we're aware of things. We're all aware that eating a terrible diet is bad for us or smoking is bad for us. Awareness though generally doesn't drive people to change their behavior and you need to have this traumatic incidents to have an awakening. And I think for me, that awakening was just stepping back, and these things that I've been avoiding for the first decade of figuring out my finances and figuring out how to design a different way of life, it was always there. It wasn't like it wasn't out there, but I just never went looking for it. I don't think I was dissatisfied enough, I guess.

Chris Mamula:
And then when I saw, I had my daughter, and I had this opportunity and I watched my cousin pass, and it kind of made me just get serious. And so I went out and I started finding this information, like I said, it was there all along, but until I had the awakening to go pursue change and actually take action, I was just kind of drifting through life. And I was following really bad financial advice because I never questioned anything, I just always assumed that it was too hard for me, and you needed an advisor and I couldn't figure this stuff out. And what I found, it was really quite simple once I took the time to sit down and just devote a few hours to it. But I'd wasted a decade and tens of really hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and taxes by following bad advice because I never took the time to learn and to become a grownup.

Bobbi Rebell:
And you were married at this time. Tell me about your wife's role in all of this. Was she on board right away? Had this been something that previously had caused friction in your marriage, the financial, maybe just not paying attention to your money?

Chris Mamula:
My wife and I, we were kind of always on the same page financially. A lot of people think that to become wealthy you have to come from wealth, and we were definitely not that story. I think our biggest advantage is both of us came from fairly meager backgrounds financially, and so within a year or two of starting my career as a physical therapist, I just kind of became, I guess I would say disenchanted with the American medical system and I knew I wanted out. And so for me, saving and becoming this dirt bag ski bum, it was just a way of a totally different way of life. It was kind of a way of escape.

Chris Mamula:
For my wife, she came from a similar financial background, but her family struggled a bit more than mine. And for her saving was just safety, so we always saved. We lived off one salary and saved the other, so we were always doing well there. We just never took the time to learn the technical parts. And once we did start learning, I mean, we were able to save 10 to $20,000 a year in unnecessary taxes and fees that we had been paying without losing anything of quality. So it definitely didn't cause any friction, we were on the same page there all along.

Bobbi Rebell:
Give me one example of something that you changed after your daughter was born.

Chris Mamula:
When we started investing, really the only option we had when we started was to use a commissions based advisory, meaning they're paid on commissions for selling you products. And so the advice he gave us was to invest with him because he could have quote better options than we had in our 401k plan. So we bypassed that 401k plan. So just in income taxes every year we were saving enough we could have maxed them out, but we left probably $20,000 on the table, if not more. And at a 25% tax bracket, right there if it's 20,000, that's $5,000 in income taxes. And then you're investing it in a taxable account, so there now you're going to start generating taxes on your investments, which would be protected if they were in that account. So now we're talking about extra taxes there.

Chris Mamula:
And then over time, those fees, because of the account adds up, the fees that are charged on the assets in that account start to add up. So again, it was between 10 to 20,000. I actually broke down in a blog post how much we were paying, and it was 10 or $20,000 a year just for bad advice. And it wasn't like we did this one time where we got ripped off. It kind of made sense. The way he talked, it made sense and we bought into it, and we did this for a decade.

Chris’ Money Lesson:

I think the lesson there is, I think a lot of people, they wait for that cancer diagnosis, the divorce, the death, something like that to kind of shock them into making changes. What I want to kind of convey and what we're trying to convey in the book is that you don't have to wait to have disaster strike to have this awakening. If you have this awareness but then you see that there is a different possibility on the other side and you know which steps to take, you can start to make change on your own. And that's really what we encourage people to do and that's the lesson I would like to convey.

Chris’ Money Tip:

Chris Mamula:
Figure out what is that thing that lines up with your values. And so for us, it was travel. Instead of taking the time and the money to buy things for gifts, we really took that time and applied it to scheduling vacations and to plan vacations. We took some big trips. So again, I think a lot of people think FIRE is an extreme lifestyle where you give up everything. On our path to FIRE we've been to Africa, we climbed Kilimanjaro and did a safari. We've been to Australia and dove the Great Barrier Reef. We've been to the Super Bowl. So we've done a lot of things that we valued. We value experiences and we value time together, so we spend our time on those types of things.

Bobbi Rebell:
Basically spend time together instead of just purchasing items?

Chris Mamula:
Yes.

Bobbi Rebell:
Well said.

Bobbi’s Financial Grownup Tips:

Financial Grownup Tip #1:

This may sound a little bit harsh. Okay. Well, I am not part of the Financial Independence Retire Early movement, AKA FIRE. I am a big advocate for not spending your life at a job that makes you unhappy just for the money or the prestige. But I do also want to remind everyone that your dream job, which maybe is doing really good things for people that you feel really good about, is actually not a dream job if it doesn't pay you well enough to live the lifestyle you want. And be honest about the lifestyle that you want, my friends. Give yourself permission to take a job for the money within reason. Don't be totally miserable, don't get me wrong here. But if the money gives you the freedom to do the stuff you want to do outside of work, it's called work for a reason guys. That's okay. Work can be a means to an end, meaning get you to the way that you want to live. Things you love to do but don't pay are called hobbies.

Financial Grownup Tip #2:

If you're thinking about or a part of the FIRE movement, I admire your ambition and your drive. I don't have it in me to do the kind of sacrifices that so many of you make. But for the millions of people who are struggling just to pay their bills right now as we go through this historically painful recession, please be gentle on yourselves. Not everyone can save 50, 60, or 80% of their salary, even if you read every book on financial independence and do everything you can to adhere to the FIRE approach. Sometimes just making ends meet is pretty amazing too, so cut yourself a break.

Episode Links:

• Chris’ website - www.caniretireyet.com

• Chris’ book Choose FI: Your Blueprint to Financial Independence

Follow Chris!

• Twitter - @caniretire_yet

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own.

Harlan Landes lost his car, his job, his apartment and his girlfriend all within 6 weeks. But the hard landing became a foundation for building a blog business he would later sell for enough money to be financially independent and start his dream non-profit.

Harlan’s Money Story

Harlan Landes:
One of the things I was interested in was arts management and being part of a nonprofit organization. So that's kind of where my career trajectory went after college. Here's the issue with that though. There's not a lot of money in that, and I came out of college with a fair amount of student loan debt. Not as much as students coming out of college now, that's for sure, but it was a sizable amount. And the role that I had was not a very lucrative role. It turned out that I was spending more money just to go to work, than I was earning, including my small amount of rent, including paying for food and all of my necessities. I just wasn't coming out at the end of the month with more money than I had at the beginning of the month.

Bobbi Rebell:
And had you been taught anything about personal finances before? And when you took out these student loans, were you fully informed? And did you fully understand what you were in for? Did you know the math ahead of time I guess, when you chose this career path?

Harlan Landes:
I knew that I was going to be in debt, and I knew that that was expected when you go to most colleges, and that it would also be expected that you would get a job afterwards and start paying it back. The details though, and the specific numbers, those weren't things that I thought about, or at least it wasn't imprinted into my brain at all. I just knew about these concepts of debt. I knew that I would have to pay it back. I didn't think about, well, what are my household expenses going to be? What do I need to live? What is rent going to look like? What are the groceries going to look like? How am I going to cook for myself? None of this adulting stuff.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay. But then, Harlan, ignorance is really bliss, because you're living your life and the debt is slowly building up, but then, this is where it gets interesting.

Harlan Landes:
Yeah. So as I was going and completely ignoring things, ignoring the money, ignoring my responsibilities, moving from one apartment to another. Because of so many speeding tickets I got because my commute was so long, I was on the road a lot. Those speeding tickets were ignored because I had no money. I found out one day, driving to work, got pulled over and my car was impounded because apparently I had all of these speeding tickets that never caught up with me because my address changed so much and I didn't update the DMV. So many things going wrong in my life. And that was just the start of it.

Harlan Landes:
I also lost my job. I also lost my apartment, and I also lost my girlfriend, all within the same six weeks or so. So this was not a good place for me to be in.

Bobbi Rebell:
So what did you do? You actually did something that not a lot of people were doing at the time. What year was this about?

Harlan Landes:
Oh, this was about 2001, 2002. A couple of things happened then. I was lucky enough that my parents, my parents had been recently divorced. My father was still in the area. He had just moved in with his girlfriend, into her house in New Jersey, and they offered their basement up, well she offered her basement up. And so I was able to get settled and get focused, and find a new job that didn't involve needing a car, public transportation, and get started on the right path.

Harlan Landes:
I found some information online just about managing my money, because that was something that I sat down with my dad and we determined that I needed to make a budget. So I started getting really into it and the nerdy way that I would. And I started writing online. I started a blog. Now I had written blogs before. I had been writing on the internet since basically 1994. So I had a lot of experience writing online, and I decided to write a blog just to focus on what I was learning about when it comes to managing my own money, about investing, about saving money, about using banks and using credit cards and doing all this the right way to help myself, rather than put myself in a worse position. Finally, I was starting to look at my numbers and figure out what I could do to make them better every month. And it became a daily thing.

Harlan Landes:
I started off this blog called Consumers and Commentary, and the first post was basically a banking statement. I showed all of my balances in all of my accounts, all of my debt and just laid it all out there. And I did this anonymously and said, "I'm going to do this update every month. I'm going to post here about different articles and things that I'm learning about money." Really, I was doing it just for myself. I didn't really expect people to read along. Most of the time, people who wrote blogs would just do it for their own journaling purposes and didn't care if they had an audience. Some didn't even have comments, didn't build communities. But at the time I just wanted to focus on how am I going to get better. If anyone wants to read this and join me on this journey, you're welcome to, but I'm going to lay it out, I'm going to do it anonymously, but you're going to know everything about my finances and we're going to figure all this out together.

Harlan Landes:
And then, the recession hit. Suddenly, everybody was looking online for great information about how to save money, how to invest. All of this information started getting really, really popular. Blogs started getting a lot of new readers. Newspapers, with their websites, started looking at the financial blogs as a model, even for their own columns that they would publish online. And it just created this great relationship between bloggers, even some podcasters at the time, and the more traditional media. So it was a great time to be out there and be a part of all this building of financial content that would go on to help so many thousands and thousands of people.

Bobbi Rebell:
But it also became a self-fulfilling thing because your efforts to get yourself out of debt and create your own financial security, actually, that blog, you were able to sell it eventually. Tell us what happened.

Harlan Landes:
Sure. So probably a year, maybe a year and a half into having the site, I decided to put some ads on the website. There were not a lot of ads on blogs before that. And around that time, I was like, "Well, maybe I can put AdSense on my blog," these automated ads, maybe it'll make some money that will cover the cost of hosting the website and give me some satisfaction for the eight hours a day I was putting into writing content for the website, in addition to my eight hours a day at my day job. And it didn't take too long for this to build up. Of course, like I mentioned, people became a lot more interested in what was going on with people writing about money through the recession, companies, advertisers, started getting a lot more interested in getting in front of all of those readers around the same time. So the revenue potential for the website grew pretty quickly.

Harlan Landes:
And I was able to grow that to a point. And I was also looking at the landscape when it comes to earning money online through blogs, when it came to working with different advertisers. And I saw that there was some risk around 2010, 2011, and I became interested in offloading some of that risk by taking advantage of the success that we had through the website and seeing if there would be any potential buyers. And there were several, and I was able to sell the website and that was after it was making, it was earning a significant amount of income for me. I was able to quit my day job. And it became such a source of income that I figured if there's any way for me to offload this risk, it would be best for me at that time. So that's why I sold it.

Bobbi Rebell:
Interesting. And what was your plan at the time when you sold it? Were you going to retire? Did you always want to create some kind of a nonprofit?

Harlan Landes:
My mom had asked me when I was, I don't know, maybe a teenager or a preteen or something, she said, "What would you do if you had a million dollars?" And I said, "Well, I'd start an arts foundation." That's kind of what I said. I probably didn't even know what I was thinking or know what I was talking about at the time. But I was like, I want to support the arts. I've always been a supporter of the arts. And I worked in a music nonprofit after graduation in college and I'm back doing that now as well. But instead of starting an arts foundation or a music foundation, I decided to take what I had been doing the past decade or so, and turn it into a way to support the community that I helped build.

Harlan Landes:
That is why I took the Plutus Awards and turned that into a part of the foundation, the Plutus Foundation. Now I'm doing kind of what I said I would when I was thinking about what I'd do if I had the right amount of resources. It's a little shifted, although I am also spending a lot of my time back in the music field, working with a drum and bugle corps that tours the country in the summer, when there isn't a pandemic, anyway. So I'm doing everything I always wanted to do and I feel really happy about that.

Harlan’s Money Lesson

The lesson that I have is, well first of all, people talk bad about passions these days and they say, "Well, yeah, it would be great to follow your passion, but your passion has to be marketable." I was able to make things work. I got really invested into the whole idea of sharing my stories about money and my money issues. And I was so passionate about it and I made other people passionate about it, and I found a way to make that work. Even though when I started the website, it was never about money. That wasn't even a factor. But like you said, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It became the solution, or at least part of the solution, to my need to at least support myself. So that was good. So yeah, that's an interesting lesson that I like to share that's a little different than everyone else.

Harlan’s Money Tip

Harlan Landes:
What I would love for people to do is to talk out loud. I was able to write about my financial details, and I shared it anonymously just to make it so that I was more protected in case I wanted to ever look for a job again. My salary numbers, I don't want prospective employers to find out some details about my life so I kept that anonymous at least to start. I was as transparent as I could possibly be, sharing my income numbers, sharing my debt numbers, sharing my account balances. And sharing the truth about the decisions that I make every day, not being afraid to be vulnerable. All of these things can help you so much. We don't have to hide behind our numbers, and we don't have to shy away from this idea of talking about money. The more you talk about your situation, and that can be just talking to people in your life, or putting it out there online for the world to see and for you to be absolutely a hundred percent vulnerable, that will not-

Bobbi Rebell:
And you can be anonymous. You can still be anonymous if you choose. You can do an anonymous blog.

Harlan Landes:
Absolutely. You can be totally anonymous. You can put your name out there, whatever you want to do, whatever you're most comfortable with. It's just more about the stories and the truth, and letting people know that they're not alone in their situation. And that is so important because we all look at ourselves, we see that there's no one like us in the world. Of course, every one of us is unique. Our situation is unique. But there are so many things that we have in common, and if more people would talk about it, then it would be so much easier for everyone to feel less alone. And they can see that there are other people who have gotten through whatever issues they have, or are in the process of getting through it, and we can all join together as a team and solve some of those problems for ourselves. And we can solve issues in the world as we come together as well.

Bobbi’s Financial Grownup Tips:

Financial Grownup Tip #1:

It is okay, in fact it is more than okay to take a step back. Harlan had a lot coming at him all at once. He went to live with his family as an adult, to deal with it. I, by the way, did that myself at age 30 when I was having a really hard time in life. Cut yourself a break. Don't be afraid to lean on those who love you for support when you need it. Just make sure to say thank you.

Financial Grownup Tip #2:

Well, Harlan was very public about his financial journey. He also maintained his privacy by writing anonymously on the blog. Sharing doesn't mean revealing personal financial details that can invite trouble. Just be deliberate and thoughtful in what you make public.

Episode Links:

• Harlan’s website - www.plutusfoundation.org

Follow Harlan!

• Instagram - @plutusawards/

• Twitter - @PlutusAwards

• Facebook - @plutusfoundation/

• YouTube

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own.

Former Facebook exec. Paul Ollinger left his job with a pile of money and no plans. But retirement wasn’t all that and he decided to use his financial freedom to pivot to his true love, making people smile as a standup comedian and host of the podcast "Crazy Money". 

“The experience of being retired early was far far less satisfying than I ever anticipated that it would be.”

Paul's money story:

Yeah, I did quit at 42 and I left Facebook without a plan. I just thought, "Hey, I have enough money. I don't want to work and be stressed out all the time. I don't want to be away from my family. I want to be close to my mom who's sick," and I bailed on work and I didn't have a plan, so I thought, "Well, I'll just go be kind of rich for a while." After you take a few trips after you start getting back in shape and work on your golf handicap, one day I came home after dropping my kids at school and I turned on my computer and there was nothing there. It was like, you have no mail. I was like, huh. I was like, I missed work. I missed having a goal. I missed my friends. I missed my colleagues. I missed the challenge of being a part of a team and I was like, well, what now? The experience of being retired early was far, far less satisfying than I ever anticipated that it would be.

Bobbi Rebell:
Yeah, because we talk a lot now, there's this growing enthusiasm for this acronym FIRE, as I mentioned, Financial Independence Retire Early. You have some very strong opinions about that.

Paul Ollinger:
Yeah, I think FI is great, financial independence. I think it's hugely neglected in our country and that we should all work very, very hard to buy ourselves back from the bank and to give ourselves a buffer so that we have the independence to leave a job if it's unhealthy for us, but I think the fascination, the fetishizing of RE, retire early, is hugely misdirected. You don't want to not work. You want to work on your terms and if that's how you interpret RE, then we're on the same page. but you want to be able to do work that's sustainable, that feeds your soul, and that is done in a way that leaves time in your life for things like family and staying healthy. The goal of retiring early and having nothing to do, that's not something any of us should aspire to.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay, so back to the blank computer screen. You're sitting there, you got no mail, you got nowhere to go. What happens next?

Paul Ollinger:
Well, I had done comedy before I worked at Facebook. I worked at Yahoo. I paid off my student loans and I went and I did comedy for two years before I went to Facebook. Then I got engaged and I just happened to end up getting a job selling advertising in Facebook, but when I left Facebook, I didn't have a plan. I was just walking away from something; I wasn't walking toward anything. After a year and a half, two years, of kind of goofing off and not finding what I wanted to do, I sucked it up and I decided I'm going to write every day, I'm going to get back in the open mics, I'm going to figure out how to reinvent myself as a stand-up comedian at, I guess it was 45 or 46 years old by that time.

Bobbi Rebell:
Wow. What was the first thing you did? What was the conversation like with your family because you are now married and you now have children? If you're comfortable, tell us. You're welcome to tell us all your financial details, but give us some context for what this would involve financially.

Paul Ollinger:
On my very first date with my wife 14 years ago, I told her that I was going to quit my job and be a stand-up comedian and she was in from day one. You might also say she was warned on day one, so we've gone through periods of me doing very, very well in the corporate world and me making very little money as an artist. Four and a half, five years ago, when I really started back after Facebook, I said, "I'm going to commit to doing this, to getting after being a full-time comedian." She was fully onboard. Now, full disclosure, working at Facebook as one of the first 250 employees and getting stock options provided us with a size-able nest egg from which we have enough money to live indefinitely if we don't overspend. That certainly puts salve on the wounds of financial... the questions around finances if you don't have to make a living to feed your kids and pay your mortgage,

Bobbi Rebell:
What is it that you think people misunderstand then about the whole FIRE concept?

Paul Ollinger:
What people don't understand is how much they get from work that they're not computing on the positive side of the ledger. They think about work, they think about, okay, I get a paycheck and then it comes with all these costs of stress and hours and travel, but they're not saying, oh, what I get from work isn't just a paycheck. It's camaraderie, it's an identity, it's respect from colleagues, it's the satisfaction I get from learning and solving problems. All that stuff is really, really important. I mean, look at Maslow's Hierarchy. Belongingness is something that takes us one step above where we would be without work.

“I missed work. I missed having a goal. I missed my friends. I missed my colleagues. I missed the challenge of being part of a team.”

Paul’s money lesson:

Find work that you want to do for as long as you can. Find work that doesn't just pay the most, but that you want to do for as long a period as you can. If you have a dream, by the way, it's a lot easier to chase if you've paid your bills first. Putting a little nest egg away before you chase your dream is a far safer way to do it than just saying screw this when you're 32 and then when you're 55 not having anything to show financially for your efforts of the previous two decades.

Bobbi Rebell:
Do you think there is a danger that some of the young retirees are putting themselves in by, especially, we're recording this at a time when the stock market is extremely volatile, so people may have historic calculations in their savings, but they may not necessarily play out as they expect?

Paul Ollinger:
Well, I think there's two things there absolutely. One is, if you think having a million dollars when you're 32 in the market is going to last you forever, then you haven't lived through too many economic cycles and that million dollars can easily be $600,000 after a couple of bad quarters, so there's that. The second thing is that it's human nature that our wants continue to expand and it's not that we can't manage that as people, and I think we should be very aware of how we spend our money so that we're making sure we're spending it on what we value and provides us with more happiness, but however much you have and think you can live on when you're 32, it's not going to be the same number when you're 42 as perhaps your family expands or your parents get sick. There's all kinds of stuff that's going to happen in life that million bucks that could turn into $600,000 probably won't be able to pay for.

“If you have a dream, it is a lot easier to chase if you have paid your bills first.”

Paul's everyday money tip:

Paul Ollinger:
Be on the same page as your spouse. As difficult as it may be, go sit down and talk about where you're spending your money with your partner because there's nothing more expensive than not being on the same page with the person who shares, not just your life and your household, but the money that you all spend together.

Bobbi Rebell:
Yeah, and I'm just going to add, have that conversation ASAP if you're not already and don't be afraid to actually bring documents and go over what you're actually spending. Right?

Paul Ollinger:
Well, that's the first part is to find out where it's actually going and to say, "Hey, do you know that we're actually spending X on this? Do you feel like, are you getting what you want out of it? Because it doesn't feel like that's bringing us as much happiness as the top line number would indicate it should be."

Bobbi’s Financial Grownup tips:

Financial Grownup tip number one:

My favorite line of Paul's in this entire episode was quote, "If you have a dream, it is easier to chase it if you have your bills paid." The truth is that is not so easy, but it is often the harsh truth. We get so caught up in the romance of going for it that we forget the role of financial stability in getting to our goals. No one wants a comedian who is stressed out about his bills, although actually in Paul's case, that could probably work into his act, but you get what I'm saying here.

Financial Grownup tip number two:

After our interview, I asked Paul how we could score discount or even free comedy tickets. He gave me the inside scoop. He said a lot of the shows don't actually sell out and the clubs make a lot of their money on the drinks and then the other stuff that you buy there, like souvenirs, so they really want to fill those seats and they often do this by sending out last minute email blasts offering free, free, free seats. You need to find out where the comedy shows are in your area or where you're going to visit. Get on those email lists, follow them on social media, so you can be on the list or get the social media tweets or posts and find out when those free tickets are happening.

Episode Links:

• Blinkist - The app I’m loving right now. Please use our link to support the show and get a free trial.

• Paul’s website - www.PaulOllinger.com/

• Paul’s podcast Crazy Money
  
  
  
  

Follow Paul!

• Instagram - Paul_Ollinger

• Facebook - @PaulOllinger

• Twitter - @Paul_Ollinger

• LinkedIn - @PaulOllinger

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own.

Big cities have a lot to offer- but can be expensive. Co-host Grant Sabatier, creator of Millennnial Money and author of the new book “Financial Freedom. A Proven Path to All the Money You Will Ever Need” recently moved to New York City despite the costs. He shares his three biggest tips to making it work for your financial grownup money goals, and still live life to the fullest.



Here are 3 tips for expensive city living

• How you can plan for the big fixed expenses

• Why you should balance the convenience of prepped vs non-prepped items

• The importance of getting out of the city

Episode Links:

• Blinkist - The app I’m loving right now. Please use our link to support the show and get a free trial.

• Grant's book - Financial Freedom: A Proven Path to All the Money You Will Ever Need

• Check out the book trailer here

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own.

Jen Hemphill and her husband believe in supporting family, but when the author of Her Money Matters, and the host of the podcast of the same name, was asked to lend money to a relative, she realized it would come at a cost to her own financial well being. 

In Jen’s money story you will learn:

Jen Hemphill: The first time this came up was when we were first married, so this was almost, we'll be married almost 18 years, so this was our first year in our marriage. We're a military family, we were stationed in Clovis Air Force Base in New Mexico.


We were really still trying to get to know each other, all the newlywed stuff. He got a call from my brother-in-law, and he, my brother-in-law apparently had hit a financial hiccup, and he reached out to his brother for help. Now, I grew up in a household that was very giving. My parents literally grew up in Columbia, and they always helped people. There was always people that would stay at our home, with their family, or some friends. My parents were always givers, even when they didn't have to give.

I saw that a lot growing up. I knew the financial struggles that they dealt with.

Bobbi Rebell: Were they dealing with financial struggles because they gave more than they could afford?

Jen Hemphill: I don't think it was that. That might have been a component, but not all of the components. Right? But it was partial, because I saw them giving, and giving, but they were still trying to get their money stuff together. Right? I saw a lot of that. When I met my husband, one of the things that I love about him is his big heart. He is definitely a giver. He's also a spender.

Bobbi Rebell: Are you the saver to a spender, by the way?

Jen Hemphill: I'm also a saver.

When my brother-in-law reached out to him, we had the conversation, granted again, we were newlyweds. We were trying to figure this thing out, and I can't remember the exact $1.00 amount, but it was more than $500.00.

Bobbi Rebell: Do you know what kind of situation it was? Was it like a medical operation? Was it a business situation?

Jen Hemphill: It was behind on bills, collections. Those type of things.

Bobbi Rebell: Your husband wanted to give him a loan, not a gift, a loan?

Jen Hemphill: Well, he told me a loan, but I knew him. He's a giver. He's not going to expect it back. Where I was more, in my mind, a lender. If you're asking us to lend you money, I'm like, “Okay. You're going to pay us back.” We had debt. We had things that we needed to pay for. Things that we needed to purchase. Literally, at that time we just had our checking account, and our savings account and literally whatever savings went into our savings account, so it was the emergency account, it was when we overspent, it was for big purchases, so everything that was needed that wasn't in our checking account came from the emergency fund. It literally got depleted fast, and it also diminished our abilities to have that extra money to pay the debt that we had. Right? It was a very conflicting time. We had this conversation-

We lent him the money, or actually gave him the money, and then never saw it back.

In Jen’s money lesson you will learn:

What we've done is, we included this in our budget, so we set some money aside in a different account, and whenever a family member needs help, we just look at what's in that account, so that way it doesn't really disrupt what we're trying to do financially, and the goals that we're trying to achieve. There's a designated amount that goes in there every month, and currently has just been to help grand mom with some bills, and that's what we work with.

Bobbi Rebell: It sounds like you've basically come to terms with you're just going to gift it.

Jen Hemphill: Yes, because then emotionally we don’t get upset, “Oh, my gosh, we said we were going to lend it, we never got it back,” so I've learned and grownup.

Over the years to really, when it comes to family, and friends, and when it deals with money, it's just a gift.

In Jen’s money tip you will learn:

Basically, my money tip is, what we tend to do, let's say we're at the grocery store, and maybe we have some coupons, always strike up a sale, and we're winning. We celebrate, “Yes. I've saved X amount this trip,” but what's important here is, yes, we can celebrate the $20.00, or $10.00, whatever that amount is that we saved, but what are we going to do with that money? Because we're missing out if we're just celebrating it, that we saved that money, but we're not doing anything with it.

Literally, we have the bank up on our phone. Right? And with so many people having smart phones, you can download your bank app, and whatever that amount of money that you save, transfer it to your savings, or transfer it to pay off some debt. Whatever you deem is best in your situation. But doing that versus just leaving it in there, you know it disappears. That money doesn't have a job, if you will, it just disappears. We've seen it time and again. I know I've experienced it, I'm sure you Bobbi have experienced it yourself.

A little bit about Jen’s book:

The book, oh, my goodness. The subtitle of the book is, The Missing Truths From Traditional Money Advice, so when we think of traditional money advice, we think about, we really hear, “Save more, spend less, and get out of debt,” but I know from my own experience, I had the financial books, I've read those financial books, I applied what the experts told me, and I was still finding myself stuck. In the book, I really share the lessons that I learned, and what I found out that really kept me stuck after doing all the things right.

In my take you will learn:

Jen's story was a reminder that family really can be everything, however you define family. We should bend over backwards to help out the people that we care about in our lives. In Jen's case even though her brother-in-law did not pay back that loan, as time went on the asks for financial help from family did go down.

Financial Grownup tip number one:

Remember it's hard for people to ask you for help, so factor that in when deciding what to do when someone comes to you asking for help. If you are able to help them with their financial troubles, it's usually a better idea to just give them money. If you lend them money, it becomes yet another thing that they need to pay back in a very stressful time. Of course, it can also put stress on your relationship with them. They might avoid you. They might feel like you're judging them, if they buy something. It's better to just keep it clean, give them the money. You know what? Someday you may be in a position where you need their help, and they'll be there for you.

Financial Grownup tip number two:

Jen talked about compartmentalizing money. Setting funds aside in different accounts for different purposes. This can be a great way to deliberately save for certain things like a slush fund for relatives that need help. Another thing that I have found can make a lot of sense to do is to put a certain amount of money, or allocate a certain amount of money, maybe on an annual basis to support friends, charities, causes that they care about.

That way when people ask for you to support whatever they're involved in, it might be a charity run, or some other fundraising effort, a benefit, you can take the money out of that fund, and if at some point in the year, I mean, you got to be real, here, the funds could run out, you can tell them, “Look, I've completed my giving for the year, but I will send a donation in January.” People understand. Your resources are not unlimited even if your heart is.

 

EPISODE LINKS

Get Jen’s book Her Money Matters

Jen’s website - www.JenHemphill.com

Follow Jen!

Twitter - @jenhemphilll

Instagram - @jenhemphill

Facebook - @Jennifer.Hemphill

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own.

After a nasty split from his 11-year business partners at the Art of Charm podcast, Jordan Harbinger found himself putting his own networking lessons to work as he started a new business from scratch with the Jordan Harbinger show and the Advanced Human Dynamics  platform.

Jordan's money story:

Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah, so it was supposed to be an amicable split. I got sick of being the dating guy, because I'm pushing forty, and I'm married, and I'm in a healthy relationship, and I just wasn't interested in that anymore. And a lot of the shows that I was doing were interviews with athletes, and generals, and all these really high-profile people, and they were always shocked, like 'oh, this is what this podcast is about?'

Bobbi Rebell:
Well the show was evolving, with you.

Jordan Harbinger:
The show was evolving with me. And my business partners were not super happy about that, and so they decided that we were going to split, and then when they proposed a split, we all agreed on it, and then later on, they decided, 'actually, we're not going to give you anything,' because ... I think that they had ... well it's only one guy, really ... I think he had hoped that I wouldn't leave, because I was doing all of the stuff that they needed to do to generate revenue.

Jordan Harbinger:
And so, I think he really, kind of had a little bit of an ego melt-down.

Bobbi Rebell:
When you say they didn't give you, is this about money? That he didn't give you the money, the buy-out?

Jordan Harbinger:
Right, I still own a third of the company.

Bobbi Rebell:
Right.

Jordan Harbinger:
But I'm locked out of everything. So instead of fighting for that, I said, you know what? I'm just going to start over. So I started my show, social media, email list, website, all from scratch.

Bobbi Rebell:
For people that don't know, can you talk a little bit about those assets, the value, and how they're created and what it takes to rebuild it?

Jordan Harbinger:
Sure. So, I had, essentially, created social media, Twitter accounts, since 2008 or whatever. An email list that had over, at that point, hundreds of thousands of people on it. A website that was getting millions of visits per month, and shows that were getting millions of downloads per month. And then, when all that was locked, I just basically ... I mean I literally created a new account on Twitter, called friends and said, 'hey man, can you whip up a website?' Put an email collection plug-in, in there, that was from a friend, Noah Kagan over at sumo dot com.

Bobbi Rebell:
Oh I love Noah Kagan, he's terrific.

Jordan Harbinger:
He's great. Yeah. And so, I started The Jordan Harbinger from episode one, after doing the other show for eleven years.

Bobbi Rebell:
Was there a way to make people aware of this, other than, you're suddenly not on this show? And they're just being silent about it?

Jordan Harbinger:
No, there was no way for me to tell anyone. The listeners all had to come and look for me. And that's actually what happened.

Bobbi Rebell:
Where does this stand now? I mean, is there any recourse when this happens. Because people ... it's unusual, but it's sort of not.

Jordan Harbinger:
It's actually not that unusual, yeah. Now that I'm telling my split story everywhere, almost every successful entrepreneur is like, 'oh yeah, this happened to me a while ago,' or 'that happened to me a while ago, and I've never been happier.' It's really, really interesting to see. And, I've actually never been happier, myself, either. It's strange, you never realize how toxic environments are until you're out of them, because, it's that whole boiling frog thing, right? If they turn the temperature up by a notch every year, you're there for ten years, you don't realize you're on some sort of crazy funhouse ... funhouse is not the right word, a funhouse mirror-covered crazy-house, more like.

So when you get out of there, you go, 'oh! This is how normal people treat each other on teams, and this is how people celebrate wins together, and this is how people reinvest in a company.' Instead of causing stress, and blowing it. And so, it's actually just really, really been nice, for me, to pull the plug and start over. It's been rough, but it was absolutely worth it.

Bobbi Rebell:
There's a human element to this. So you lost ... your website, you lost your branding, you lost your email list in that. But, you've took humans with you. Tell us about that.

Jordan Harbinger:
When everything hit the fan and fell apart, what I did is I made a list of people I wanted to call, and the first ten or twelve phone calls that I made were to people I know would say yes to helping me. CEOs and other entrepreneurs, and people that were really, really great to me, in the past. And they said, 'yeah, we're going to help you!' So I had this massive support network. I went on over a hundred other podcasts this year, along, well over that, actually, at this point. And rebuilt the show up to millions of downloads a month, from zero, in February. And now it's better than ever.

And it's just been so strange, because, oh! I also took a lot of the team with me. Because when I left, a lot of the other team, that was at the old company, was like, 'well, we came to work with you, man.' So they all left. And I said, 'I can only pay you half of what you're worth for the next foreseeable future,' and they said that's fine. So that's what happened, and I've made them whole since, but that was a massive vote of confidence.

Because all of this qualified staff left the old company. They all bounced.

Bobbi Rebell:
Well they followed you, more than they left. They went to where they saw the opportunity, and that's human nature.

Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah, that's true. I mean, I still have my production team, my [inaudible 00:08:14] team, everything. Everybody came with me.

Bobbi Rebell:
And, probably, many of your listeners are gradually migrating over, if they have not already. And because you have adjusted your format, and constantly evolve it, that's probably expanding what your opportunity is, and they see that.

Jordan Harbinger:
Exactly. There's been a lot of people that have said, 'oh, I didn't even know about the old show.' And I'm like, that's good. That's what I like to hear. Because, I don't necessarily just want to bring the same crowd, from the last show. There's great listeners from the last one, but The Jordan Harbinger Show is just a much better interview. It's a much more interesting project for everyone involved, and I've done a lot of the things that we used to do in the old company, like try to run live events, and do all this, and do all that. And I've realized, I actually don't like doing it.

So, it's pretty fun to just be on my own.

Bobbi Rebell:
How do you move past something like this? Or do you not? Do you just work it into your life, and use it as part of who you are now?

Jordan Harbinger:
You work it into your life and use it as a part of who you are now. And granted, look, this is ten months since this thing. The lawsuit is still in full swing. So, it's not exactly, something I'm going to forget about this year, or probably even next year. But, that's all fine and good, I mean, this is trial by fire in a lot of ways. And I've certainly been through worse with less resources. Losing a business is a problem, but it's not losing a kid, it's not losing a spouse.

In fact, I look at it this way ... this isn't just rationalization either ... when I look at this, I think, if the deal that I had signed with the old company, had actually been honored, I would have been forced to gradually disentangle with them, over the period of three years. I would have had to promote their stuff, their products, the low quality stuff that was coming out now, I would have had to promote on my new show.

Instead, since they didn't honor anything, I have no non-compete, I can do whatever I want, I can make money however I want to do it. I can do anything in any niche, they have no say in anything. I can run any ads that I want and I don't owe them anything. In fact, they owe me thirty-three percent of the company share value.

So, it really ended up being like, the dumbest thing they possibly could have done. And for me, it was really scary, and then it turned out to be the best possible thing that could have happened.

Jordan’s money lesson:

I'm here to tell you, dig the well before you get thirsty. Because, if you try, when this stuff all happens to you, to reach out to everyone, and you're going, 'hey, look, I'm having a really hard time,' some people will be understanding. But a lot of people will be like, 'we haven't spoken in two, or five years, or whatever it is. I don't know what you want me to do. Best of luck.' Right?

But, since I'd done such a job ... I won't say great job, but such A job ... building and maintaining network connections, giving value, offering people things that can help them, without the expectation of getting something in return, when I did need help, people were coming out of the woodwork.

I mean, it was just, people I didn't even know were like, 'hey, heard what happened. Let me know if you want to come on my show and tell the story.' 'Hey, can I write an article about this for Ink?'

Jordan's everyday money tip:

I see a lot of people doing things like, spending ninety minutes, round-trip, driving to this produce farm, because they get cheaper stuff. And look, maybe you like organic produce from that farm, that's fine. But I see a lot of people doing really silly things to save money. Little, I wouldn't say scams, because they don't elevate that far, but I'm going to move the car eighty-five times, instead of renting a parking spot in my building in San Francisco. I mean I see stuff like this.

And they're lucky to break even on the cost of parking tickets at the end of the month, let alone all the time they spent, getting up at 5 AM so they can move their car, or driving around for twenty minutes, and then going back to sleep. I mean it's ridiculous, right? Pathological in some people.

Bobbi Rebell:
Oh yes.

Jordan Harbinger:
But we like to focus on the big wins. And when I say that, what I mean is, the same people that will not rent the parking space in their building, in the city, so that they can park, and will drive around all day looking for parking spaces? These are the same people who will often keep credit card debt, so that their credit score takes a little bit of a ding, and then when they go to buy a house, they get a lower ... I should say higher ... interest rate, on that mortgage, and it ends up costing them sixty-eight thousand dollars. Right?

So we have to be really careful and focus on the big wins.

Financial Grownup tip number one:

Show up. Guys, we edit these podcasts, because, as you know, I really value your time. I want to keep them to around fifteen minutes. So, sometimes those edits are pretty severe. But we also edit out things, just to make the podcast better, not just for time. And in this case, we cut out a lot of Jordan coughing, and fighting to sound his best, for this interview.

Not that you would notice, he's a pro.

Jordan was battling a cold, and probably, at some level, exhaustion. He had just returned from a big speaking engagement, and was really not feeling well. But Jordan showed up. The man has done over one hundred podcasts promoting his new venture, not to mention, keeping to an aggressive appearance schedule, and other projects, building out his new business.

The guy shows up, and he works hard. No pity party, no year off, finding himself, blah blah blah. Jordan Harbinger works, and that is why his business is, and will continue to, grow, exponentially.

Financial Grownup tip number two:

Did I ever tell you guys I was married in my 20s, and got a divorce? And believe me, I was the one that always said I did not believe in divorce. But it happened. The best thing I did, was give stuff up, because you know what? You can get it back, or you know what? You really don't need whatever stuff you're fighting over, in the end.

So if you have a split, business or personal, of course, fight for what is yours, to some degree. But eye on the prize. Be like Jordan and move on. Take the long road, and most of all, get to work building your new life, or your new business. Do not let your ex walk all over you, but don't get stuck fighting for some material item, or every last cent, so much so, that you get caught up in your past, and don't move forward.

Bobbi and Jordan also talk about:

• How Noah Kagan was instrumental in helping to get Jordan's business off the ground. To learn more about Noah, check out his website here - https://okdork.com/about/

Check out Jordan's website - www.jordanharbinger.com
Here is a link to his course we mentioned - https://www.jordanharbinger.com/course

Follow Jordan!

• Instagram

• Linked In

• Twitter

• Facebook

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own.

Millennial entrepreneur, podcaster, and author Nathan Latka shares how his love of pizza hut, his friends and willingness to put his money and savings where his mouth is got him what he wanted as a 5 year old child. Latka also previews his new book "How to Be A Capitalist Without Any Capital” and the strategies and systems that have grown his many ventures. 

In Nathan's money story you will learn:

• Why it's so important to let children make decisions

• Why he feels like his parents helped to make him an entrepreneur

• Why he feels like his success is due to his parents never telling him no (and when they did instead)

• What he learned at the age of 5 by being given the option between Pizza Hut for dinner or a sleep over with friends

In Nathan’s money lesson you will learn:

• Why he feels like the idea of only focusing on one thing isn't practical

In Nathan's everyday money tip you will learn:

• How you can use an app to book a hotel room for just a few hours during a day trip rather than spending money for an entire night

In My Take you will learn:

• Take 5 minutes each day this week and create a system for something that happens regularly

• By letting your children make choices- you empower them

Episode Links:

• Nathan's book How to be a Capitalist Without Any Capital

• Nathan's podcast The Top Entrepreneurs in Money, Marketing, Business and Life

• Recharge app for booking a stay for just a few hours

Check out Nathan's website -

www.NathanLatka.com

Follow Nathan!

• Instagram - @NathanLatka

• Twitter - @NathanLatka

• Facebook - @NathanWLatka

• LinkedIn - @NathanLatka

Millennial entrepreneur, podcaster, and author Nathan Latka shares how his love of pizza hut, his friends and willingness to put his money and savings where his mouth is got him what he wanted as a 5 year old child. Latka also previews his new book "How to Be A Capitalist Without Any Capital” and the strategies and systems that have grown his many ventures. In this Financial Grownup podcast episode you will learn a very important tip on how you can help to raise a successful child. #RaisingChildren #SuccessTips #Author

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own.

Transcription

Nathan Latka:
You have to copy aggressively, and once you copy what your competitors have already paid to learn, right, you're getting free money there. They've already paid to learn it. Then you add your own twist at the end, and that's when people create a lot of success.

Bobbi Rebell:
You're listening to Financial Grownup with me, certified financial planner, Bobby Rebell. Author of How to Be a Financial Grownup, and you know what? Being a grownup is really hard, specially when it comes to money, but it's okay, we're gonna get there together. I'm gonna bring you one money story from a financial grownup, one lesson, and then my take on how you can make it your own. We got this.

Bobbi Rebell:
Controversial advice from our guest millennial entrepreneur, podcaster, and author, Nathan Latka. He is everywhere, so if you haven't heard of him yet, that's probably gonna change pretty fast. He is high energy and will get you motivated to make more money after listening to him. This guy is all about systems and strategies. Welcome all, so glad to have you here. As our returning listeners know, we talk to high achievers about key money related events in their life that played a role in growing up to be financial grownups. Lessons learned and simple everyday money tips you can use right away to make your life richer, all in around 15 minutes. Big treat today. Nathan Latka founded his first company at the ripe old age of 19 with just 119 dollars in the bank. He now considers himself retired, but I would question that given how much this now 29 year old has on his plate between his podcast, his new bestselling book, How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital, a TV show in development with CNBC that he's gonna tell us about, and oh, so much more, here is Nathan Latka.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey Nathan Latka, you're a financial grownup, welcome to the podcast.

Nathan Latka:
Bobbi, thank you for having me on.

Bobbi Rebell:
I am so excited because I have in my hand an early copy, and it may be out by the time this happens, of your new book, How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital: The Four Rules You Must Break to Get Rich. And let me tell you, I think you are the Tim Ferriss of your generation, that is a huge compliment because I'm a massive Tim Ferriss fan. So congratulations on the book.

Nathan Latka:
Well, we'll see what happens. The publisher, which is the biggest I think in the world, Random House, they go, "Nathan, we don't know if we like this book because it's not timeless. These strategies, you know, we can't sell a thousand of this book a decade from now." I'm going, "Yeah, it's urgent." The first person who purchases will have the biggest advantage because these things will not work five, 10 years from now. And this is true about life.

Bobbi Rebell:
You are very specific and a lot of the tools and methods that you talk about, and will even drop some names of some websites that I was not really aware of, are really awesome, some apps I should say. So for example, we were referencing the four hour work week, so it is very much of the moment, but I want to take a step back in time Nathan, to a story that you mentioned briefly in your book, but we are going to expand on, and it is your money story. So people know that I am a huge Cheesecake Factory fan, you were a fan of Pizza Hut. So we're gonna talk about Pizza Hut for your story. Go for it.

Nathan Latka:
I remember I was like five years old, we were in this blue mini van, my mom loved it, and we were driving home and I go, "Mom, dad, can we go to pizza tonight for dinner?" Which was like a treat for me, and I also had a sleep over coming up, and yeah, I think that weekend, where there was four or five playmates I had coming over, and both of these things obviously cost money. They're dinner or I had my friends over, my parents have to pay to feed all of them, and then take them home in the morning and clean up messes. So my mom basically wanted to say no to pizza hut or no to the sleepover, and so she gave me, instead of saying no to either, she just gave me a choice and said, "Nathan, you know you can either choose, we can either choose to do pizza tonight or do the sleepover, but we can't do both. Right, 'cause they both cost money." And I thought for a second in the backseat and then said back, "Mom, can I choose to get into my piggy bank and take us pizza out tonight?" And they laughed after that realizing what I was doing, and ultimately both decided to take us out to dinner and I still did the sleepover, but the lesson there is clear, which is, give your kids decisions, not answers.

Bobbi Rebell:
And also, you as a child wanted to find a solution, which in this case, and maybe you would not say this as an adult, was to tap your savings. Maybe as an adult you would let's say, try to up your income.

Nathan Latka:
Yeah, or all kinds of things, right? I mean, the trick is there, is you're not giving your children the answer, you're setting up a decision and you're teaching them to build that decision making muscle. This is very rare in today's world, in my opinion.

Bobbi Rebell:
So tell we, what is the takeaway for our audience there looking back? What did you learn and how does it apply to your life now?

Nathan Latka:
Well look, I mean, today I'm very different than I was when I was five years old, right? I mean, I have many, many different things going on, and so one of the things I talk about is, and I live this out every day is, there's a lot of people, in college for example, you're forced to essentially pick a major, right, when you're a sophomore, or you want to be forced into one thing. And this doesn't make a lot of sense to me, 'cause think about a bridge your going over, right, in your city. If it had one point of failure when the winds hit 20 miles per hour, you don't want to be going over that bridge, but a lot of us build our lives around a single point of failure. So the idea that you should only focus on one thing, and there's a lot of bestselling business books that sell this concept.

Bobbi Rebell:
I think there's actually a book called, The ONE Thing.

Nathan Latka:
The ONE Thing and Essentialism, because it sells. It's a really good story, and by the way, I love those guys. I know them all, but it's not practical, and that's because you never want a single point of failure. You want to always be throwing spaghetti noodles up the wall, you don't know which are gonna stick, and then when you see which ones stick, you double down on those.

Bobbi Rebell:
Let's talk about your everyday money tip, because this is something more and more people are traveling, we're not always working in an office, whether we're moving around, whether we work from home or we're going to see clients or traveling with our clients, and there is downtime, which can be wasted time.

Nathan Latka:
Yeah, so I travel a lot and like to be efficient, and I would usually, I'd always go to New York on day trips, and I used to have to buy a hotel room because when I landed at 7:00 or 8:00 or 9:00 AM in the morning, I had to go take a shower somewhere. I would leave the hotel room and only use it for four or five hours. It was a total waste of money for 300, 400 bucks. Now there's this app called Recharge which I use, where when you land in any city really, you can go on Recharge and book an amount of hours in a hotel room. So you go in, get some sleep, get a shower, do you makeup, do your hair, and get ready to go to that meeting.

Nathan Latka:
The old concept in this book is, the folks that are really wealthy in the world today, they climbed a certain ladder, and any time someone climbs a ladder to power or wealth, they then remove rungs from that ladder. They make it more complex so that no one else can climb it and challenge them. And so this group has sold us on four rules, and ultimately these are rules that you shouldn't believe that you must break, and we've talked about a few of them. The first, you don't want to focus on one thing, right? The second is, you should totally feel comfortable copying your competitors.

Bobbi Rebell:
Which has been used. To give examples in your book of how this has been used so successfully by some of the biggest companies in the world.

Nathan Latka:
But Bobbi, I bet your audience listening right now when they hear this, they're thinking, "Ugh, I feel dirty. It feels unethical. It feels slimy to copy my neighbor." I bet you they feel that. This is the problem with this tactic. People do this all the time 'cause it's smart, but humans, your natural emotion when you hear the word copy, is it feels bad. But here's, I mean, Facebook rips off every Snapchat feature, right? Steve Jobs went into the Xerox research lab and pulled a bunch of research out of there and basically copied that and that's what made the Lisa. That's what made the Mac and the iPhone and things like this. So you have to copy aggressively, and once you copy what your competitor has already paid to learn, you're getting free money there. They've already paid to learn it, then you add your own twist at the end, and that's where people create a lot of success.

Bobbi Rebell:
One of the things that I love about this book Nathan is the detail. You made a decision to put a lot of your own personal data out there. Tell me about that approach to writing this book.

Nathan Latka:
Yeah, I mean, it's very risky, right? Because the stuff will get old after four or five years, so again, this book is urgent. Say, you know, in page six I have my income statement and my tax return. My actual corporate tax return from 2013, where I was in my dorm room at 21, and we did 939,378 dollars in sales, and I started hiring my team. I put my board deck on page 35, and then I get into more personal finance stuff, right? Where I talk about how I used my very small Instagram following to get a free Rolls-Royce with an email striped on page 118. Or I used, how I did my first real estate deal, it was a 280 thousand dollar deal, where I only had to put essentially five grand down, and it [inaudible 00:08:31] 16 hundred dollars a month. That PNL is on page 149. So there's all kinds of examples here and there's not a big theme. They don't really connect. They're really individual stories that your audience can pick up, flip through and learn to drive their own side hustle and create some more financial independence.

Bobbi Rebell:
So what scares you? You have such wonderful confidence. You are how old now?

Nathan Latka:
29, just turned 29.

Bobbi Rebell:
The ripe old age of 29. What have you not done that you are hesitant about?

Nathan Latka:
Nothing really scares my in business, but I'll tell you what scares me in life. I don't know if anyone in your audience has ever gotten mono, but it basically knocks you out. You have to sleep.

Bobbi Rebell:
So it's your health.

Nathan Latka:
Well, no, no, no. Health is one thing, but let me be more specific. When you're laying in bed for seven days straight, and your brain is the brain of an entrepreneur, you actually start to go a little insane because your brain goes a million miles an hour in that quiet time, but your body can't keep up with it. So my biggest fear is I get to some point in life where my mind is still going a million miles an hour, but my body can't keep up and execute.

Bobbi Rebell:
We'll leave it there, but I want to hear from you. Where can people find out more about all of your ventures?

Nathan Latka:
Yeah, well we're excited. We just signed a TV deal with CNBC, which we didn't talk about. We're very excited about that. It is called Million Dollar Road Trip. So it will be like Shark Tank on the street, basically me walking up to random companies on the street, and in under 20 minutes or less flipping up my checkbook and buying the whole business or investing on the spot.

Bobbi Rebell:
It's kind of like a cross between The Profit and Shark Tank, and by the way, we've had both Barbara Corcoran and Kevin O'Leary on this podcast.

Nathan Latka:
Both great, love them both. So anyways, we're very excited. Again, this book guys, it'll get old. You can't wait. It's one of those things, like the first person who reads it has the biggest advantage. So you want to grab it now. You go to nathanlatka.com/book to get it, and the best way to stay in touch with me, I am on Twitter every day, I'm @NathanLatka. That's L-A-T-K-A.

Bobbi Rebell:
Thank you so much Nathan. This has been amazing.

Nathan Latka:
Bobbi thanks.

Bobbi Rebell:
Oh my gosh, Nathan's energy is contagious. Here we go. Financial grown up tip number one. Nathan is all about systems because he is at a point where things would literally fall apart almost instantly if he didn't have those systems in place, but for most of us, myself included, we can muddle by. So they're kind of haphazard because we don't have to have, but we would be so much better off if we had the right systems. And we know we'd be better off with them in place. Even something as simple as automatic reordering of coffee that we drink at home, that we make at home that we ran out of, but we don't have a system in place to reorder it, and then you know what happens. We go out to get the expensive coffee at the coffee shop, but we're too busy. So take five minutes each day this week, okay? Everyone do this. Take five minutes each day this week and create system for something small but that happens regularly, like the coffee. So if you run out of coffee all the time or you run out of whatever it is that you use on a regular basis, or it could be bill paying, bills that come every month, automate that. DM me on the socials and let me know what you did. I need ideas myself. On Instagram @bobbirebell1 and on Twitter @bobbirebell. You can also email at hello@financialgrownup.com.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial Grownup tip number two. I love what Nathan learned from his parents that he talked about in his money story, because by not telling children what is happening when it comes to a money decision, but letting them make a choice, you empower them. This can apply to so many other situations in our personal lives and in our careers. Empower others to make decisions by giving them the specific options and the outcome that would happen based on the choice they make, and let them run with it.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay everyone, Nathan's book is called How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital: The Four Rules You Must Break to Get Rich. It is an intense book everyone, but it is good. It is very specific. He literally gives you screen grabs of data that is very personal to him. I was a little shocked but he put it out there, and good for him, and good for us 'cause we learn from it. Go check it out along with his podcast The Top, and of course, big thanks to Nathan Latka for helping us all get one step closer to being financial grownups.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial Grownup with Bobbi Rebell is edited and produced by Steve [Steward 00:12:57] and is a BRK Media production.

Tanja Hester explains why she had to call it quits on the side hustle she loved in order to create new opportunities at her primary job. Plus her big money tip on how to save big on medical expenses while traveling the world. 

In Tanja's money story you will learn:

• The flip side of the side hustle

• When to call it quits

• Why she decides to leave her side hustle as a yoga instructor

In Tanja’s money lesson you will learn:

• Being aware of your options

• If you're side hustle is going to hold you back

• Realizing that a side hustle may not be forever and that's okay

In Tanja's everyday money tip you will learn:

• The surprising places you can schedule your dental and eye exams to save you money

In My Take you will learn:

• Why it’s important to be clear about your purpose if you have a side hustle

• The importance of knowing if your healthcare is valid overseas
  

Episode Links:

• Tanja's book Work Optional

• The Fairer Cents podcast

Check out Tanja's website -

• Our Next Life

Follow Tanja!

• Instagram - @our_nextlife

• Pinterest - @our_nextlife

• Twitter - @our_nextlife

• Facebook - @ournextlife

Tanja Hester explains why she had to call it quits on the side hustle she loved in order to create new opportunities at her primary job. Plus her big money tip on how to save big on medical expenses while traveling the world. In this Financial Grownup podcast episode you’ll learn how you can retire early without having to pinch pennies doing so. #Author #RetireEarly #FIRE

Tanja Hester explains why she had to call it quits on the side hustle she loved in order to create new opportunities at her primary job. Plus her big money tip on how to save big on medical expenses while traveling the world. In this Financial Grownup podcast episode you’ll learn how you can retire early without having to pinch pennies doing so. #Author #RetireEarly #FIRE

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own.

Transcription

Tanja Hester:
Within that year of quitting, I got promoted. I was able to take on a lot more interesting assignments at work. I was able to start traveling more, which I did really enjoy. Ultimately for me, it's crazy, but yeah. As much as the side hustle served me earlier, it was giving it up that really let me get ahead.

Bobbi Rebell:
You're listening to Financial Grownup with me, certified financial planner Bobbi Rebell, author of How to be a Financial Grownup. You know what? Being a grownup is really hard, especially when it comes to money, but it's okay. We're going to get there together. I'm going to bring you one money story from a financial grownup, one lesson, and then my take on how you can make it your own. We got this.

Bobbi Rebell:
Do you guys have side hustles, multiple income streams? It's kind of becoming the normal thing to do these days, but they are also, if we're being honest, second jobs, and sometimes it just becomes too much. Welcome everyone. The show is growing and we have a lot of new listeners. Thank you for checking us out. I would love to learn how you heard about the show, so special ask here. Let me know how you heard of the podcast. DM me on Instagram at BobbiRebell1, or on Twitter at BobbiRebell, and you can always email at hello@financialgrownup.com and feel free to give other feedback as well.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right. Let's get to our guest. She is Tanja Hester. First of all, she has one of my favorite podcasts, The Fairer Cents, with Kara Perez. She also is an award winning blogger. Her blog is called Our Next Life, and we were able to get her on the show because of her new book. It is called Work Optional, and based on the story she shared, it also could be called "And Side Hustles Optional," because it seems like everyone expects you to have a side hustle these days and sometimes you just don't or you just can't anymore. And learning when it is okay to say no is definitely a very Financial Grownup thing. Here is Tanja Hester. Hey, Tanja Hester. You're a financial grownup. Welcome to the podcast.

Tanja Hester:
Hey Bobbi. I'm so happy to be here.

Bobbi Rebell:
And I am happy to be talking to you about your new book: Work Optional, Retire Early. A lot of people already know you though because you're an overachiever, Tanja. You have, first of all, your blog. Beyond the fact that you're a part of the FIRE movement and you are financially independent, you are retired. This is some busy retirement by the way, just saying. Your blog, Our Next Life, was Blog of the Year for the Plutus Awards, which is huge. I am not a Plutus Awards winner. I was nominated though. This podcast was nominated, I should say. You're also the cohost of really one of, if not my very favorite podcast, Fairer Cents, so love all of them. So happy to have you.

Tanja Hester:
Thank you. Wow, that was the best intro ever, I think.

Bobbi Rebell:
But it is all sincere and all true. I really loved your book. I actually have asked you to talk about a money story from your book that really hit home with me and I think is really relevant to so many listeners, and something we're going to be talking more about, and that is the flip side to the side hustle and when to know when to call it quits basically, because in the book you talk about leaving your side hustle as a yoga instructor, and I really wanted to hear more. So tell us your money story, Tanya.

Tanja Hester:
Yeah. I started my career in DC and then LA, and at the time I was making not no money, but close to no money, especially considering how expensive those places are to live. And so I started teaching yoga when I think I was 23 or so. I loved yoga. I needed a side hustle. It was relatively low startup cost. I really do recommend actually teaching fitness for folks who want a side hustle, because you get paid to work out, and the overhead, you don't have to invest a whole lot to get certified, and it also makes you really comfortable on your feet and makes you a better public speaker, which are all my side effects. I did that for a long time. I also then started teaching spinning to supplement that, so I was doing both yoga and spinning. Yeah. About eight or nine years in I started realizing, for my main job, which was as a political consultant, I was having to travel a lot and I was starting to sub out more classes, or I was occasionally having to say no to things at my main job because of my class schedule, or I felt like I was subbing out too much stuff.

Bobbi Rebell:
Because you had to have a commitment to that people. You were on the schedule.

Tanja Hester:
Yeah. Yeah, and I had students who were my regulars who expected me to be there. It just got to a point where my main career and my side hustle were really in direct conflict with each other and I realized that continuing to teach yoga on the side was actually holding me back in my career, and was preventing me from being able to be a full team player, being able to say yes to things, so I made the really hard choice to give it up, which was hard because I love teaching yoga. I loved that community that I built, but within that year of quitting I got promoted. I was able to take on a lot more interesting assignments at work. I was able to start traveling more, which I did really enjoy. Ultimately for me, it's crazy, but yeah. As much as the side hustle served me earlier, it was giving it up that really let me get ahead.

Bobbi Rebell:
How did you prepare to lose that income stream? Because that is something a lot of people worry about.

Tanja Hester:
The truth is, I want to be clear that I'm in a financial unit, so my husband Mark was also working really hard through all of this and he had earned more. I think that this, I'm not remembering exactly, but I think he may have gotten a little bit of a promotion that year that I quit, so that kind of smoothed it out a little bit. But the truth is, by that point, we were both earning significantly above what we were spending, and so it was just a question of maybe taking a tiny temporary hit in what we were saving, but we were living so far below our means that it wasn't a question of constraining any spending because of it.

Bobbi Rebell:
What is your lesson for our listeners who are getting such a very strong message, many of us, about having those multiple income streams, having those side hustles? There's downsides to it.

Tanja Hester:
Yeah. There potentially are, and I think it's just being aware and intentional about what all of your options are. So if you're in a low level job right now and you want to stick that out, I think it's just paying attention to, is there a point at which having a side hustle is going to be too big a distraction? Is there a point at which it's going to start to hold you back? You know, I really am very pro side hustle, but I think it's just noticing that this may not be forever, or there might be stages in my life when I need to focus on one thing. So that's really I think what I'd advise, is just be smart about it. Just keep your eyes open.

Bobbi Rebell:
And side hustles don't have to be forever.

Tanja Hester:
Absolutely not. They can be a great chapter of your life. I think of the decade when I taught yoga as a really special thing, but that doesn't mean I still have to be teaching it now.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right. Let's move on to your everyday money tip. This has to do with health care, actually.

Tanja Hester:
It's a better time to be early retired with healthcare than it used to be. Before the Affordable Care Act, people who didn't have a traditional job, and that could be freelancers and side hustlers and gig economy folks too, but we didn't necessarily have good ways to get it. Now with the Affordable Care Act, you can buy insurance, but for most of us that is not going to include dental or vision, and so a great way to save some money if you especially love international travel anyway, is when you're traveling, to schedule a dental cleaning, or schedule an eye exam, or do some of the predictable medical stuff that you know you can schedule when you're abroad.

Tanja Hester:
I think as Americans we tend to think of the rest of the world as not having high quality care, but that's just really not true. You can do a lot of the stuff for pennies on the dollar compared to what we pay here when you're already taking a trip, and if you're older and you need something like a hip replacement, it's worth pricing out what it would cost in a place like Thailand or India versus at home. Often, even if you have insurance, the total cost out of pocket in another country will be less than what you'd pay after copays and everything here.

Bobbi Rebell:
What's been your experience? Have you done it?

Tanja Hester:
You know what? I have not yet. We just haven't had the opportunity because we're only a year into early retirement, but for the book I interviewed a bunch of people who had and really heard nothing but positive experiences.

Bobbi Rebell:
We'll have to look into that. Alright. I want to talk more about your book Work Optional: Retire Early the Non-Penny Pinching Way, because it really draws from your experience. You mentioned FIRE, which stands for "financial independence, retire early." Is that correct?

Tanja Hester:
That is correct.

Bobbi Rebell:
By the way, your blog also won best FIRE blog I think the previous year, so you're an all star on all levels, but there's a lot of things that I like about the book, and one of them was, as a parent myself, that you also address the challenges that parents face when they have this goal of FIRE.

Tanja Hester:
Yeah. I did not want the book to be, "Here is the story of how Mark and I did this." I think that's pretty boring. We also recognize that a lot of our circumstances are not applicable to everyone or easy to replicate. We got really lucky in some key ways. We didn't have huge student debt. As you just said, we don't have kids, so I wanted to make this a book that was accessible to just about anybody, so I included a lot of case studies with parents. In fact, most of the people featured in the book have children, because I just felt that was so important to cover. Some people are couples who are earning under six figures combined, some single folks, so it's really trying to cover the bases.

Tanja Hester:
But yeah, I'm a huge believer that you can build a plan that works for you and you can, even if full retirement isn't an option, you can at least create a life where work is more optional, whether that's being able to cut back or take a year off or just work in a job that's fun for you as a part-time thing. I really do believe that it's accessible and so that's really what I set out to do with the book.

Bobbi Rebell:
Another thing that really stood out to me in the book is a data point that you bring up, and that is that most people, we talk about the idea of choosing to retire early, but the truth is, data shows that most people don't actually even retire when they plan, so we think this is a choice, but really a lot of us just have to be ready whether we like it or not.

Tanja Hester:
Oh, it's so true. I feel really strongly about this because I get frustrated when there are new stories about early retirement that sort of go like, "Hey, look at these young weirdos." Because I think the discussion about early retirement should be inclusive of everyone, because as you said, that's just reality. We know that most Americans intend to work to 66 or 67, but end up having to retire at 62 or 63 on average. Although for many workers it's a lot younger, because companies are generally pretty cruel to those over 50. They lay people off without really much regard for how it's going to affect them, and so a ton of us, two-thirds are not retiring when we plan, and we also know that more than half of Americans are wholly reliant on Social Security as their only retirement income, which the very highest social security checks only give people about $30,000 a year.

Tanja Hester:
So we're talking about a real crisis and a real problem that just being able to put yourself in a position where you can retire securely is already enormous, and if you can put yourself in a position to be able to retire even sooner, all the better, because we just don't know what the future holds for all of us.

Bobbi Rebell:
Wow. All right. Everyone needs to check out Work Optional. Tanja, before I let you go, please tell us more about where people can follow you, your blogs, your podcasts, your books, all of you. There's so much happening in your retirement, Tanja.

Tanja Hester:
I know, I know and I know there are those who will say I'm not retired, but this is all stuff that I'm choosing to do that feels like play, and I feel lucky every day. My main site is ournextlife.com. From there you can find everything else. The podcast is The Fairer Cents, C-E-N-T-S on iTunes and all the podcast places. On social, I'm @Our_NextLife, mostly Twitter and Instagram, but from Our Next Life, you can kind of find all the different tentacles I have out there, get info on the book. The book is in all the normal book places, so yeah. It's a fun, fun thing to do.

Bobbi Rebell:
Amazing. Thank you so much Tanja.

Tanja Hester:
Thanks Bobbi.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right, my friends. Let's do this. Financial Grownup tip number one. If you have a side hustle, be clear about its purpose. For Tanja, it no longer was a needed income source. It was fun. She liked it, but it was holding her back. If the point of your side hustle is to build a business so you could leave your job and things are on track, of course you should stick with it, but as we move up in our primary jobs, side hustles can be a distraction, and you could be missing opportunities even just by not being as focused on the main job as you could be.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial Grownup Tip number two. Tanja talked about medical procedures overseas that are planned. Even if you don't plan to have something done, it's a good idea to note if your health care insurance is valid overseas, especially in the case of an emergency. In many cases, insurance will cover an emergency but will only reimburse you once you get home, so you have to pay out of pocket while there, keep the receipts and file afterwards. This actually happened to my family. We were vacationing in Jamaica and my son cut his head after falling getting out of the shower. We had to go to an emergency clinic and pay 100% out of pocket. The insurance company would not promise whether or not they would pay, and in the end they did pay as an out of network expense, but there you have it. By the way, Harry was completely fine. If you are traveling internationally, know what your health care coverage is and make a plan just in case you have to see a doctor while you are traveling.

Bobbi Rebell:
And thanks to all of you, my Financial Grownup friends, for joining us. If you like the podcast, please help us grow, please, by sharing with your friends, and take a moment to leave a review as well. We read every one and they really mean the world to us, and they help us get discovered. Big thanks to Work Optional author Tanja Hester for helping us all get one step closer to being Financial Grownups.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial Grownups with Bobbi Rebell is edited and produced by Steve Stewart and is a BRK Media production.