Life gets too busy, and sometimes even financial grownups drop the ball on making sure their bills don’t balloon out of control. Bobbi gets real about how this happened to her, and how she managed to downsize her family’s cable and phone bills. 

We’re going to do a deep dive into why my cable and phone bills were so high, and what I did to stop the madness. And how you can hopefully make the changes that are right for you. 

I do want to remind everyone that I am in New York City- and as I discovered there is a high amount of mandatory taxes added to the bill- that may or may not be true where you are. But you will also see some taxes CAN go away if you know what they are for, and make some choices. 

First- why did it take so long for me to take a deep dive into these bills: a combination of inertia, and family pushback. My kids were insisting they needed very high unlimited data plans- and my family felt strongly they needed to have every single channel on the tv. We don’t go out a lot because of all the things so there was a lot of resistance when I spoke of cutting the cord. After all, as expensive as it is, the amount we would save, is still a lot less than even going out to dinner and a movie for a family of 5- even once. 

But still. 

What prompted it? My 12 year old getting a phone and my 22 year old stepdaughter is out of college with a great job, and  should be transitioning to paying her own bills. 

So- with fear and trepidation, I looked at the bills for my family of 5 and it was bad. 

The monthly wireless bill for my family.. was $347.77

The monthly cable bill- which also includes, internet and a landline, was $309.77 for a total of more than $650. A month. 

And for the record it is not an oversight- I’m not going to name the provider- because this applies really to any bills.. and I don’t want to point fingers. 

So there were three main areas that I was able to cut- and we’ll get into each one. 

The first place was the micro cuts- little- and sometimes not so little things that add up. 

The second place was making choices about what we really needed

The third place was device management- looking at whether we really need to be on the latest and best phones- for which we pay hefty monthly payments. 

So first let’s get into the micro cuts. There are things almost everyone can find and execute simply by looking at their bill and working through it with customer service. 

First: The plans. Most wireless carriers have shifted their business model. It used to be the phones were free-ish as long as you committed- and locked into-  an expensive plan. So we were paying about $60 a line for unlimited- those plans have now dropped to as little as $35 a line, because more people are paying for their phone separately, in some way. They may own it outright, or it may be a separate rental or payment plan,

As I mentioned, my stepdaughter now has a great job- that comes with a phone. But she still wants a phone for personal use. We dropped that phone to the lowest plan at $35 a month because she simply does’t need that much data. My stepson and son are now also on the lowest possible unlimited phone plans. I’m on the second to lowest at $45 a month because I do use a lot of data for business- but that comes with a subscription to Apple Music. That is key. I had been paying $10 a month for Apple music- so that brings my net cost in line with the $35 everyone else is paying. 

And that is an important side note- many phone carriers have deals with Apple Music, Hulu, Spotify etc. Make sure you are taking advantage of them. I was paying $10 a month for something I could get for free through my phone carrier.  So painful. 

Let’s keep going. 

There were a series of $5 and $10 bill reductions I was able to get- I asked if there was a loyalty discount for using both the company’s wireless service and their cable/internet service. Why yes- $10 for each for a $20 savings. Was there a discount for auto pay- because I was on auto pay but didn’t see it on my bill. I was informed that the auto pay discount does not work if you put it on your credit card- which I had done to get points. You must do it as a debit from our account. I switched- and got the discount- from both wireless and from cable/internet. 

Customer service volunteered that there was a military discount of $20 a month. I said that neither my husband and I were military- but apparently we are eligible because both our fathers were military- we just have to add them to the account- they don’t have to have a phone line. So we saved that. 

We were also still paying $5 a month to monitor my now adult stepchildren- so that went away. 

Let’s move on to the second thing we did and that is to make some choices. 

I have been pushing to just cut the cord, and I had been losing. 

But given that the kids basically watch youtube, this was getting silly. 

We not only had 100% every single premium channel, we had infinite other channels that never get watched. And we have Hulu. And Netflix. And Amazon Prime. Seriously. And we are too busy to watch that much TV. 

I made a deal with my husband that if I cut anything he missed, we could bring it back. 

Here’s where it got challenging. I asked the cable representative about the skinny bundles. Can she send me a list of the channels on them. They made this very hard. She just had lists of some channels that were ‘representative’. And when she sent me via email a link to the complete list, it did not work. Keep in mind, this project was moving past the 4 hour mark, complete with hang ups and call backs. 

I also had to push back against some assumptions she was making. She told me of course I did not want to live MTV. Of course I did not want to lose local sports. Actually- I was ok with that. I also was- to her surprise, ok losing every premium channel, thought I did keep HBO for now. But it was a frustrating push. We finally did settle on a skinny package that I think will work- though I never was able to get a specific list of the channels on it. It can always be changed. And by the way, bonus- by losing the local sports channels, we also lost a $9 a month tax that we pay in New York for the privilege of paying for local sports. Not making this up. 

I also asked about our internet speed- and guess what, we could get a better service, for the same price as the older plan we were on.. so we did that. 

Here’s another tricky thing. We had been getting our landline through our internet/cable provider- for $5 a month. But we never use it and only get spam calls on it. I’ve wanted to get rid of it anyway. Once we moved to the cheaper cable plan, the landline cost went up. Also with a ton of taxes, it was now going to be close to $40 a month! So we cut that. No more land line. 

Also - when we switched to the skinny cable bundle we were informed our cable boxes were out of date, so they charged us a one time $50 fee for that change. I was not happy. 

Let’s get to the third thing- and this made me really mad. As I mentioned earlier- the business model has been shifting away from having the phone plans subsidize the devices. We were paying $40 for each fo 3 phones in a monthly payment plan. Total $120 a month. Renting phones.  One phone has one month left and the other 2 devices have 4 months left. When that is over, I plan and hope to get out of the monthly renting game- we’ll be holding on to our devices and so saving $120 a month on that bill. And if the older kids want the latest and greatest phones and choose to rent them- that will become their bill. 

So there you have it- the bills, once we get those phone device payments off will be about half what they were.. and my bet is that my family will not come back to me asking for all those cable channels back. 

Episode Links:

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If you are a fan of Shark Tank- our guest may look familiar. We here at the Financial Grownup podcast were so excited to see Tanya Van Court and her company, GoalSetter on the show recently trying to make a deal with the sharks.

At 29 years old Tanya Van Court thought she had more than a million dollars on hand to change the world and live the life of her dreams. Until it vanished in a few hours. 

Tanya's money story:

Tanya Van Court:
I was 29 years old, it was in the first tech boom where all of the Silicon Valley companies had stock that was just rising uncontrollably. I happened to be one of the first 200 employees at a company in Silicon Valley that was doing extraordinarily well.

Bobbi Rebell:
What company?

Tanya Van Court:
The company was Covac Communications. Before any of the telephone companies or cable companies were offering high-speed data I had a great job, a meaningful job, and I had a lot of stock that went along with that job.

Tanya Van Court:
I got all this stock in Covac, and some of the stock I couldn't cash out yet, but a lot of the stock I could cash out. I could have sold that stock and went and diversified my portfolio and bought mutual funds, or invested it in many, many stocks, as opposed to having all of my eggs sitting in one proverbial basket. But I didn't, because it was literally the first stock I had ever known or owned-

Bobbi Rebell:
Wait, let's just back it up, so you were given, as part of your compensation, shares in this company. Did it go public? Where was this stock? Explain exactly what you were given, and how it was valued, and did you have opportunities to sell it?

Tanya Van Court:
Yes, I had opportunities to sell the stock, many opportunities. The company had gone public, and so I had the opportunity to sell the stock when the company went public, I had the opportunity ... not exactly when it went public, because we had a certain window. But that window had passed, and so I had many opportunities to sell the stock, but I had no idea that I should sell the stock.

Tanya Van Court:
The stock kept going up, and I thought, "Wow, this is great. The stock just doubled in the past six months. I should just hold onto it, and I guess it will double again."

Bobbi Rebell:
At its peak what was the value of this stock, and how old were you at that time?

Tanya Van Court:
I was 29, and the value of the stock at its peak was about 1.2 million dollars.

Bobbi Rebell:
At that time how did you feel?

Tanya Van Court:
You know, I was so excited, because since I came from a household of two parents who were elementary school educators, all I ever wanted to do was make a difference in the world. I knew that having that 1.2 million dollars in my late 20s was going to enable me to make different choices and different life decisions to help people and to give back instead of just working in corporate America and doing things that were kind of interesting to me, but weren't impactful to other people. I felt free, Bobbi. I felt really free and empowered.

Bobbi Rebell:
You're 29 years old, you have stock that on paper is worth 1.2 million dollars. What happened then?

Tanya Van Court:
The big Dotcom bust happened. Literally in hours stock just started to tank for company, after company, after company. I watched the stock literally go from being in the teens, each share was trading in the teens, to trading for less than a dollar. When I say less than a dollar it went from the teens to like .50 cents in the course of a few hours. Every bit of that 1.2 million was wiped away in a matter of hours.

Bobbi Rebell:
Wow!

Tanya Van Court:
Yeah.

Bobbi Rebell:
How did you feel then?

Tanya Van Court:
Then I felt stupid, I felt deflated, I felt panicked, depressed, it was almost as if you had 1.2 million dollars sitting in your living room, and you just left the front door to your house open and walked out and went to the park, right?

Tanya Van Court:
It was, like, wait a minute. I had been living this life and treating this money so casually, as if it would always be there.

Bobbi Rebell:
As you say, it was the dotcom bust. This was happening to everyone?

Tanya Van Court:
It was happening to everyone, and it's interesting, because while I suffered a tremendous loss with that stock that I could've diversified, what I still had was ... I still had a home that I owned, I had bought a condo, and I still had that. What I found with many of my colleagues who experienced that same bust, is that they had actually leveraged their stock to buy lots of other things, so they bought cars, and they bought multiple houses.

Tanya Van Court:
Because they had borrowed against that stock, once the crash happened, they then had to pay back the money that they had borrowed by going and selling off all of their assets, including the assets that they had come to the company with.

Tanya Van Court:
If they came to the company with a big million-dollar home in Silicon Valley that was passed down to them from their parent, or that they had worked really hard in a previous company to be able to buy, now all of a sudden, they not only lost all of their stock, they lost every other asset that they had, because they had to payback loans that they had made against their stock.

Tanya’s money lesson:

Oh my gosh. Diversify, diversify, diversify. Don't ever put all of your money into one basket. I don't care if that basket is a real estate basket, and you have found a hot, booming real estate market that's working really well for you, and so you're, like, "Let me just buy it."

More apartments here in X place, or more houses in X place, don't do that. Diversify your money. If you have found that your golden goose is a stock that is doing really well, don't do that. Diversify your money. You really have to weigh and measure your risk, and think about the worst case scenarios. If that particular company, if something happens to that company, if something happens to that area of town that you're investing in, and every asset you have goes under water, what happens to your entire portfolio?

Tanya's everyday money tip:

My everyday money tip is actually a money tip that kind of goes back to my time in college. I would always watch people who ... I don't happen to drink, but I would watch people who would do progressives. Where they went from one bar to another, or one restaurant to another, and progressively partied from one place to the next. Like, the party would follow them. Like, a group of people would go and they'd hang out in one place, and they'd do that for 20 minutes, and then they'd go and hang out at another place.

I thought, "Wouldn't that be fun if we did that just with our friends, and did it in order to swap and exchange stuff that we no longer needed at our respective homes." Look, we all look in our homes and we go, "There are 10 things here that I don't use anymore, that I don't need." If you happen to have kids there may be things that your kids don't use anymore, or your kids don't need. If you happen to be a sports fan there may be equipment that you don't use anymore. "Hey, I'm not golfing as much as I used to anymore."

There are things in all of our homes that we don't want or we don't need, and so it's a great way of getting together with five or six friends, scheduling it on a Saturday, and going to each other's houses where you put everything that you don't want in your living room, and it becomes a virtual shopping spree.

Bobbi Rebell:
I love, first of all, that it's social, and I love, also, it's always delicate, because when you want to gift to somebody something that maybe you don't need anymore it's an awkward thing to give them something that you don't want. Because it's kind of like, "Oh, you're giving me your leftovers." But if you just put it there and they can just decide to take it, then it takes away that sort of negativity and makes it a positive thing.

Tanya Van Court:
It absolutely does. I think it makes it a positive thing for everyone, like, you're super happy to get rid of it, but they're super happy to get it.

Financial Grownup tip #1:

One things Tanya mentioned that stood out is that, while she lost money that she had on paper, I know it still hurts a lot, others had leveraged against their stockings and lost so much more. In addition to her advice to diversify, we also want to be very careful when borrowing against actual assets. Do not over leverage.

Financial Grownup tip #2:

This holiday season take it a step further than what Tanya was talking about. Think carefully about the physical stuff that you are buying for other people, not just children. Unwanted gifts are a total waste of money. There are so many new ways that technology is allowing us to give differently. Apps like Goalsetter are great, especially for kids that have too much stuff. But when you want to send a physical gift, and sometimes this is even for business purposes, there are new services, like, GiftNow. That's my personal new favorite that I'm obsessed with.

Basically, the way that one works is that instead of a boring gift certificate you virtually send someone a specific gift from a retailer to their email, so you don't need their physical address, you don't have to send them an email asking where should I send this, who will receive it, blah, blah, blah. It opens in a virtual gift box, and they can select their size, so you don't have to be guessing. They can change the color, if you don't know what color they want. They can even exchange it all before it gets delivered, so you don't have the whole hassle of the return and all that stuff.

I just used it for my friends' baby's one year birthday. It was so great to not have to carry a gift to the party, not worrying about it getting lost in the pile, and to know that my friend could swap it out without me even knowing it, not worrying if she would hurt my feelings, if she didn't love the fabulous dress that I got her daughter.

Then again, you can never have too many little frilly little girl dresses, right? I'm sure it was a huge hit.

EPISODE LINKS

Check out Tanya's company GoalSetter here!

Tanya Van Court is on Shark Tank!

Follow Tanya!

Instagram: @tvancourt

Linked In: @Tanya Van Court

Twitter: @tvancourt

Follow Goalsetter!

Instagram: @goalsetterco

Twitter: @goalsetterco

Facebook: @goalsetterco

Learn more about GiftNow

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.

Entrepreneur and Investor Barbara Corcoran explains why she believes spending money in a deliberate way even before you earn it is a smart business strategy, and shares the story of her first really big investment. And yes, she committed to it before she had the money.

 In Barbara’s money story you will learn:

• How she bought her first house at age 29 (which had 8 bedrooms!)

• The importance of discussing big purchases with a significant other

• How Barbara saved $7,500 in three months

In Barbara’s money lesson you will learn:

• How she motivates herself to save money

• Why she chooses to ignore rational and take risks

• Her advice on committing to a goal

In Barbara’s everyday money tip you will learn:

• Why she spends money before she has it

• How she puts herself under pressure in order to produce financial results
  

In My Take you will learn:

• Why it's always good to listen to different opinions and take advice from successful people

• Two negotiation tips that will save you money and help your career

Bobbi and Barbara also talk about:

• Chef Boyardee and Ramen noodles, the quick dinner that helped save Barbara money and reminded Bobbi of her childhood

EPISODE LINKS:

• Listen to Barbara Corcoran's podcast Business Unusual here, and on iTunes

• Watch Barbara give more business advice on the multi-Emmy award winning show Shark Tank on ABC
  
  

Follow Barbara!

• Twitter: @BarbaraCorcoran

• Instagram: @BarbaraCorcoran

• Facebook: @TheBarbaraCorcoran

Entrepreneur and Investor Barbara Corcoran explains why she believes spending money in a deliberate way even before you earn it is a smart business strategy, and shares the story of her first really big investment. And yes, she committed to it before she had the money. In this Financial Grownup podcast episode you’ll learn how to commit to your goals. #Goals #GoalSetting

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

Barbara Corcoran:
I always spend money I don't have. If I see money coming in new receivable, three months out, I committed that day, what I'm going to spend it on, and I start spending it even before it arrives.

Bobbi Rebell:
You are 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.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hello, my Financial Grownup friends, brace yourself Barbara Corcoran is here and she is going to give it to us straight up, no beating around the bush and she said some things that frankly I was pretty surprised with. They go against almost everything that I've been taught about building a solid financial foundation for your life, for your business, but she made it work. I'm still not sure I could make it work for me, but I'm thinking about it because she makes a good case and I'm interested to hear what you guys think after you hear her interview.

Bobbi Rebell:
So glad you are here. As I said, this episode is a really big one, so if you're new, you're joining it a really good time. We do something by the way called flex time for podcast, the episodes are kept pretty short, around 15 minutes. The idea is no excuses you can always fit it in, make it easy for you while you're running a quick errand, what have you, but if you have a longer commute, you can also stack them. We have a library now of more than a hundred episodes so you can listen to a few on your commute if that's what worked for you. Make sure that when you subscribe and hopefully you are subscribing, we really need the support that you set the downloads, go into the manual settings and set it so that you automatically get the downloads so that you don't miss any and you're good to go.

Bobbi Rebell:
And we love automation because that way things just happen and it's one less thing to remember. Alright, let's get to Barbara Corcoran and you know her from Shark Tank and now she has a new podcast called Business Unusual, also really short, so that's a good thing. She gives a lot of advice that seems shocking until you listen to it and listen to her reasons and then think that is part of how Barbara Corcoran is successful. It's the unusual. She approaches things in a different way from the way that we're always used to approaching it and it works for her. It may not work for you. The big takeaway from this episode, which you'll see I'm going to talk about after her interview. I don't know if I could do it, but I can see how it worked for her. So with that, here is Shark Tank's Barbara Corcoran.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey, Barbara Corcoran you're at Financial Grownup welcome to the podcast.

Barbara Corcoran:
Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Bobbi Rebell:
I am such a fan of your new podcast. For many reasons, of course also because it's a short podcast, but you have the best wisdom and you share so many lessons from your life, so thank you for that.

Barbara Corcora:
My pleasure. I enjoy doing it, but it's a scary proposition as I'm sure you will know, you have to earn people's ears while you're talking to them.

Bobbi Rebell:
You do, well you've been earning it for many years and you're going to share a money story from early in your life, your very first real estate purchase or I should say your first house and it sounds like it's going to be a story, but there's something that happened that I think people want to hear. Go for it.

Barbara Corcoran:
Yeah, and it has a valuable lesson. When I committed to purchasing my first home with my first husband. I was about 29 years old. I didn't have a pot to pee in as they say, but we sat across the dinner table for a man who said he was selling a certain house that was like a magical house from what I heard, and my mouth said, I'll take it. And why it was magical. It was a house that anybody would think you could only dream about, which was a house with eight bedrooms two guest cottages, a wet and a dry boat house facing a brand new lake.

Bobbi Rebell:
Did you have kids at this point, Barbara?

Barbara Corcoran:
No, of course not.

Bobbi Rebell:
Who was moving into this mansion?

Barbara Corcoran:
Listen, I figured I'd have fun with friends, but I had no rights saying we'll take it to which my husband was more startled than I was over my own mouth. Because we didn't have a dime to our name, we were struggling to just meet our bills. We're still kind of kids coming up the ranks, but-

Bobbi Rebell:
Wait, so tell me what happened. How did you buy the house?

Barbara Corcoran:
Once I said we'd buy the house, we had the problem of coming up with the down payment, 7,500. And so my husband and I started eating tomato noodles every night that I think they're chef Boyardee or something in a can and bring them lunch every day and we saved every penny of what we were earning in our lives, short of the rent we had to pay for our studio apartment. Well, three months hence we had most of the down payment but not quite and we're out for dinner with the same big boss of his and he mentioned that his father, he wanted to close, which was putting ... Was scaring me to death because I still didn't have enough money.

Barbara Corcoran:
But he said his father was reluctant to leave the house and I volunteered. Well, why don't you let your father stay there, but in trade for that, I got four months extra time. So we were able to save the down payment of $7,500. No problem. But when we got to the closing, the closing costs too, which I didn't have, but he was so in dear to us for keeping his elderly dad in the house that he paid for the closing costs for us. And we moved into that beautiful house and we had it for seven years until I decided to leave my husband and he got the house.

Bobbi Rebell:
Why did that happen? How did you let that happen?

Barbara Corcoran:
You know why? Because I got the apartment in the city by then we had bought a one bedroom apartment in the city and I sold that one bedroom that I paid $80,000 for two years later for 250. And he sold that house that we had paid $75,000 for two years after our divorce for $75,000.

Bobbi Rebell:
So what is the takeaway for our listeners?

Barbara Corcoran:
I'm a believer in always committing throwing it out there and say I'm going to do it. Because when you have that kind of pressure and you've publicly committed, you find a way to get there. If you can commit to something, you'll find a way of getting there. If I had said, give me a couple of months, let me see if I could save for the house, believe me, my rational side would have kicked in and said, what are you doing? But because I said I would, I found a way that could do it and that's the truth, and most people are better than they think. If they're willing to be courageous enough to state it as low as fact and then make it happen versus the other way around.

Bobbi Rebell:
And eat a lot of canned noodles.

Barbara Corcoran:
Oh yeah,[inaudible 00:06:40] Yeah, you can do anything if you know it's temporary.

Bobbi Rebell:
Tell us your everyday money tip because this is also a real Barber tip because this is something that works for you may not work for other people, but it is a strategy that people might want to consider. Again, for you it works it may not be for everyone. Go for it.

Barbara Corcoran:
It's a particularly good strategy if you're out to those your own business, and I'll tell you why. My strategy is this. I always spend money I don't have. If I see money coming in new receivable, three months out, I committed that day, what I'm going to spend it on, and I started spending it even before it arrives. The reason for that is I have no choice but to actually make it happen whatever I'm doing. Because I know I've already committed the money. It's like putting a gun to your own head where you have to produce. If instead you wait for the money to come in and then say, okay, I've got this little extra cash. We've had a profit this month. Let's see the best use of it. That sounds rational, but I'm telling you the fever with which you attacked the best use of it is nothing compared to knowing that the bank is going to come in and chop your head off if you don't produce.

Barbara Corcoran:
So. I've always consistently put myself under pressure by spending money long before I have it and I've never let myself down. There's something magical that happens in the universe when you really under fire when you have no choice that you find a way to get there, and so I'm a big spender and on top of that I can also say, although I was born a poor kid and have my thousand dollar loan from my boyfriend, thank God, or we have been able to quit my waitress job and starting a business nowhere. Okay.

Barbara Corcoran:
But once I had that thousand dollars, I just thought, you know what? This is found money. It's a gift from God and I'm just gonna run this thing up the flag pole until somebody stops me and my most assured policy of making sure no one stopped me was to spend money in advance of having it because I had no choice but to make good on it. I had no choice and ran like a devil with a limited timeframe and I was able to accomplish 10 times more than all my competitors simply because of the pressure I had put on my own back. All right, so it's not what you read in accounting book, but I can tell you when you're building a business, it's a smarter way to go than to be calculated and do it a step at a time.

Bobbi Rebell:
It's the real world. One other quick question though, did you ever have trouble and how did you handle it collecting those receivables?

Barbara Corcoran:
No, I wrote off about 10% of my receivables because you have to appreciate. My business was selling co-ops in New York City and we had about 10% of our deals that didn't approve the Co-op association. They were turned down by the board, so I knew what that average was the first year, by the typical may be the second year in business, I realized I lost 10% of my deals, so I just wrote off that 10%. So that was realistic in suddenly a good accountant would do, but that's where my relationship or any resemblance to an accountant definitely ended in my attitude to it and everything else.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right. I want to talk quickly about your, still relatively new podcast even though who would know it because it's always at the top of the charts where to I'm trying to climb, but you're there and that's a lot because your podcast is so good. It is a short one, so dear to my heart, but you also really deliver personal and as you have here very honest and straightforward advice about your life and the lessons that you have learned and your bold with it. Your most recent episode talked about quitting jobs. You quit 22 jobs Barbara, you also talk about negotiation skills. Tell me more about this podcast and why it is so different and people are really responding to it?

Barbara Corcoran:
I think people are responding well simply because I tell it like it is. And it doesn't mean if it's the person listening, but I think they leave trusting that they heard the truth and I also think I'm impatient by nature. So if you're gonna ask me what about negotiation? Most people can write a book on that. I can't. I can tell you in eight minutes flat, what the key to negotiation, what are the key moves and what doesn't work. And really I don't have more to say after the eight minutes. So I think because I have such a short attention span and because I'm so impatient by nature myself and listening, I want to know what you want out of me and what do I gotta do. And that's pretty much how I am with everybody. Get to the point and then tell me how you get there.

Barbara Corcoran:
So I do get to the point and then tell you how I get there and then the eight minutes are up and I'm signing off. I wish I was more verbose and had more great delicious detail, but I just say the main things that worked for me and I leave it at that and my sign off until the following week. So I hope it works. We'll see. It's very scary as I'm sure you know, to merit someone's eight minutes. I feel it's such an abuse or a trust that I feel like every word has to really, really count or I have no business doing its own. I'm Mostly scared, I'm scared to six days. Then I do the podcast, then I get scared all over again.

Bobbi Rebell:
Well you're doing a great job. I don't find you scary at all. I love it. I think you're worth investing every one of those eight minutes, so thank you for all that you do. Everyone knows where to find you, but just in case because I ask everyone, tell us where you can be found, where people can follow you on social and what else is important that's going on in your life that we should know about.

Barbara Corcoran:
Well, of course it's a Business Unusual, which is the podcast, my newest baby, but as usual, any social platform @BarbaraCorcoran is very easy.

Bobbi Rebell:
Love it. Thank you Barbara.

Barbara Corcoran:
I love you back. Bobbi. Thank you so much. And Go back to your real name, Barbara, it's such a pretty name.

Bobbi Rebell:
So if you're like me, you want to hit rewind and listen again. She's that good. And before I get to the financial bonus tips, just want to make a little comment about the food because we spend so much time agonizing over all of this organic fancy food and when we're saving money, everyone talks about the ramen noodles. I want to talk to you about the chef Boyardee that she and her husband were eating to save up money because you know what, that's fun childhood memories for me. My mom was a working mom and you know what? Sometimes we have something called spaghettios. Do you guys even know what that is? It's basically this like circle pasta in a can and tomato sauce and it's delicious. It may not have any nutrition, but if you see spaghettios in the store, I have no affiliation with them. Pick them up and try them instead of ramen noodles if you're trying to save money.

Bobbi Rebell:
Just for variety, be a little bit bad. Like I said, they're probably not nutritious at all. All right, let's talk about my tips. Finance grownup tip number one. Sometimes financial advice like Barbra's goes against common stereotypical things that we hear. Here's the thing though, always listen to different opinions especially when they're from someone like Barbara Corcoran who has been so successful in so many different fields, to not only real estate where she started out, but also now with Shark Tank. She's an entrepreneur investing in so many different companies, so listen to her and give it some thought. Now I'm not telling you to go out and spend money that you don't have or even to spend on receivables, which is really what she was doing. It was money that she had contracts for but had not yet received so she believed that money was coming, but I see her point and I also see how that can create a really strong motivation so before totally rejecting it or even accepting it, play out how that would work for you.

Bobbi Rebell:
How are you going to cover things for example, if someone does not pay or if they pay, but they are on a delayed schedule so they're not paying in 30 days like your bill says they're paying 60, 90, 100, 20 days out. How are you going to finance that? You have a line of credit with your business. Are you throwing that on a credit card where you might be paying interest, late fees? What have you, factor that in. Are you going to charge a late fee to them? Barbara factored in that 10% of her expected commissions receivables were not going to happen so even she was doing that.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial Grownup tip number two, be creative and flexible. When you're negotiating. Barbara, let the sellers elderly dad stay in the house longer than originally planned. Again, you have to give Barbara props for being open minded and in return by the way, she got precious time and the goodwill was so strong and her gesture was still appreciated that the closing costs were paid by the seller.

Bobbi Rebell:
That is huge. Thank you all for being part of the Financial Grownup community. We bring this to you for free. The only payment we ask is that you share it with someone that you care about and that you believe would enjoy and benefit from the podcast. Your reviews and your feedback. I'm just going to tell you guys straight up there is really important. I read everyone, we don't get as many as I would like. There aren't that many there and I know a lot of you are out there. A lot of you are DMing me, which is actually really great. Still DM me, gave me the feedback, but if you can also leave reviews on Apple podcasts, that is also really helpful to get the show notice because that's how people discover the show.

Bobbi Rebell:
If you do want to also be in touch on social media, it's not either or guys. Follow me and DM me on Instagram @BobbiRebell1 that's the number one on twitter I'm @BobbyRebel and on Facebook, Bobbi Rebell as well. And big things of course to the amazing Barbara Corcoran, the ultimate Financial Grownup. Everyone check out her podcast Business Unusual and watch her on Shark Tank and thank you Barbara Corcoran for getting 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.

Wealth coach Adeola Omole got a do-over she didn’t want when she got laid off a second time- but by being financially prepared she was able to land on her feet. The author of “7 Steps to get out of Debt and Build Wealth” shares her story of how she came out stronger the second time around. 

In Adeola's money story you will learn:

• How she prepared herself for a second lay-off

• What the Super-Charged Financial Strategy is and how it helped her to pay off $70,000 in consumer debt in less than 3 years

• Why you should negotiate interest rate reductions

In Adeola’s money lesson you will learn:

• What she did to layoff proof her life

• Why debt is the only thing that holds you back from living the life you want

In Adeola's everyday money tip you will learn:

• What it means to triple-check your way to wealth and why it's important

In My Take you will learn:

• Why no ask is too great when negotiating interest rate reductions

• Why it's so important to pay attention to what's going on in your industry on an economic level

Adeola has generously sent, from Canada no less, two signed copies of her book 7 Steps To Get Out of Debt and Build Wealth to give away- all you have to do it DM me your takeaway from this episode- bobbirebell1 on instagram bobbirebell on twitter or email us at hello@financialgrownup.com

Episode Links:

Check out Adeola's website - https://www.adeolaomole.com/

Adeola's book 7 Steps to Get Out of Debt and Build Wealth

Follow Adeola!

• Instagram

• 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.

Transcription

Adeola Amole:
Because of my first layoff experience I actually created my entire career to layoff-proof my life. In essence, I built up my asset base so I have these rental properties that are cashflow positive, I have money coming in from my investments from the stock market. I really had already set myself up to take care of that subconsciously.

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. 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:
Hey, financial grownups. No matter how much we talk about being ready for something like a layoff who really is? Right? For today's guest, wealth coach, author, social worker and lawyer, Adeola Amole, getting laid off for the second time still caught her off-guard even though the signs were all there.

Bobbi Rebell:
This time she was a lot better prepared and I think you are going to be very interested in what she did to layoff-proof her life. It was not just having an emergency fund, although that also matters a lot.

Bobbi Rebell:
Happy holidays to everyone and special welcome to our newest listeners. So glad you found us. We keep the episodes on the short side, about 15 minutes, with the idea that you can stack a few together to fill the time that you have to listen. Feel free to listen to a few episodes at a time if that's what works for you.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right. Let's get back to Adeola. She is also the author of a really readable book and I don't take that lightly because it is true to the title 7 Steps To Get Out of Debt and Build Wealth in that she really walks us through exactly what to do. Action steps, not just theories. She comes from experience as you will hear in our interview. Here is Adeola Amole.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey, Adeola Amole. You are a financial grownup. Welcome to the podcast.

Adeola Amole:
Thank you for having me, Bobbi.

Bobbi Rebell:
We practiced saying your name because I am terrible at pronunciation. I just want to say for people curious about the name Adeola Amole it is of Nigerian origin. I just learned this. It means crown of wealth, which we love, so welcome.

Adeola Amole:
Well, thank you. Yeah. No. I love it.

Bobbi Rebell:
You are the author of 7 Steps To Get Out of Debt and Build Wealth. You are a money coach but by trade your background is as a lawyer and you have a graduate degree in social work. You know a lot about a lot of things.

Adeola Amole:
Well, thank you for that. I like to think that I'm a person who just wants to learn and I love learning about so many different things as my background shows. Now I'm living my passion. This wealth coaching thing is right up my alley. I also am able to still use the legal background as well as the social work background. It marries brilliantly.

Bobbi Rebell:
Let's get to your money story. It has to do with the art of the do-over. Let's call it that. Go for it.

Adeola Amole:
I got laid off and I literally had no backup plan, no clue how to do it. Long story short, I figured out a strategy. I call it the Super-Charged Financial Strategy. I figured out how to pay it all off and luckily for me [crosstalk 00:03:30]

Bobbi Rebell:
We should say you had quite a bit ... You had $70,000 in consumer debt when you suddenly had no income of your own and your husband had a smaller income. You had the larger income.

Adeola Amole:
Exactly. You are absolutely correct. $70,000 was paid off in the first three years of the plan. Just shy of three years.

Bobbi Rebell:
What is the plan? When you say the plan what is the plan?

Adeola Amole:
The Super-Charged Financial Strategy is a two-part plan. The first part of the strategy I call it the Super-Charged Debt Repayment Plan and that literally is the snowball method on super-charged. Hence, the fact that I call it the Super-Charged Plan.

Bobbi Rebell:
Because you would pay but you would also negotiate a lot with the credit card companies.

Adeola Amole:
Exactly. I would negotiate like crazy. This is where the legal background truly did pay off because I literally knew ... I setup the system for myself and I knew exactly what processes I would have to use. If I didn't get what I wanted from the rep I would just ask to speak with a manager and usually got what I wanted. I knew how to negotiate myself to as low a rate as possible.

Bobbi Rebell:
What I love about this is you at times went for the 8% or 9% but you even went for 0% sometimes. You can ask for that. It's a little bit bold, you won't always succeed, but you can ask for 0%.

Adeola Amole:
Exactly. It works. It helps you crush that debt faster.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right. You had the first layoff. You learned from the idea of not being prepared. Then life goes on, you get a new job, the recession, we move past the recession, past that 18 months of being unemployed, things are good, you now have a child, your husband is home now taking care of the child. What happens next?

Adeola Amole:
Yeah. To add onto that story we have a child but now we have two rental properties. We have money in the markets. We built up assets after having paid off the $70,000 consumer debt. Now things are looking fabulous, my husband is a stay-at-home dad. He's been with our son for four years.

Adeola Amole:
Then we get pregnant with a second child but I didn't tell my employer this because most women know this, first trimester you just stay hush hush until you go into the second trimester. Long story short, I get laid off again.

Bobbi Rebell:
Had you had any idea this was coming?

Adeola Amole:
No. Well, I shouldn't say no. What happened is I worked in an industry where it was really contingent on oil prices. Oil prices had just crashed. This was I believe last quarter of 2014. I was in a position where we got rumors as to, "Things aren't looking so good. Oil is going down." People talked about it but no one knew that it was going to happen. We had suspicions but obviously I didn't think I was going to be one of them.

Bobbi Rebell:
Do you feel looking back you had a sense of denial maybe about it?

Adeola Amole:
Absolutely. Absolutely. However, I have to tell you because of my first layoff experience I actually created my entire career to layoff-proof my life. In essence, I built up my asset base so I had these rental properties that were cashflow positive. I had money coming in from my investments from the stock market. I really had already set myself up to take care of that subconsciously.

Bobbi Rebell:
Excellent. What happens?

Adeola Amole:
Yeah. I'm laid off. My employer at the time doesn't know that I'm three months pregnant. I should have been absolutely terrified but I wasn't because, as I said, we set ourselves up. We had cashflow in properties. We had investment properties.

Adeola Amole:
My husband and I were figuring out what to do next and we had five months to think about it. Guess what? There was money to take care of everything. We had a 12 month emergency plan. It was really my financial do-over.

Bobbi Rebell:
Love that. What is your advice for our listeners? What's the takeaway here?

Adeola Amole:
The biggest takeaway is, guys, plan for these what ifs. These what ifs it's not if they're going to happen. It's when they're going to happen. It's best to just put a plan of action in place. Crush that debt. Like get it off your plate, get it off your balance sheet.

Adeola Amole:
At the end of the day, that's what's holding you back from really creating the life that you want to live. If you get that out of the way you can truly start planning where you want to go.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right. You brought with you a great everyday money tip that's something we kind of all should know but we just ... I don't do it. I totally take the short way and I'm sure I've made so many bad decisions, I know I have, because of it. Teach us.

Adeola Amole:
You're awesome. The tip that I have is triple-check your way to wealth. It's a really simple tip and it's something that you can totally use today and it means that when you're looking for any item, like any big ticket item, even a little ticket item, always at least refer to three merchants or three service providers for pricing and also for service. This is boiling down to people as well as prices. I think it matters to work with good people. I always want to work with good people. I always want to get the best prices.

Adeola Amole:
I recently had some auto body work that I had to do. I was referred to one company and when I called them ... They're a reputable company and I've heard about them so I knew that they were good ... I called the service provider and they set a price that sounded wonky to me. It was like $3800 to get this done. I literally almost lost my mind.

Adeola Amole:
I thought, "Okay, let's just call around" so I called a few other folks, got some references. Long story short, after doing the check I found an incredible company, extremely reputable, used by the best dealerships where I live, and they came up with a price that was just $1000 shy of the price so it was $2800. The people were incredible, they were extremely friendly, and because I'm a lawyer I decided I'm going to negotiate an even better rate.

Adeola Amole:
I spoke with the guy and told him, "Okay, what can we do here? I really want to go with you, I really like you guys. What more can you do for me?" Sure enough he gave me $200 less than it was originally quoted. $2600 and change. Long story short, guys, triple-check your way to wealth. That extra money now can go into my investment portfolio.

Bobbi Rebell:
What is your favorite go-to source for even finding vendors or people that you can work with? Sometimes it's really hard just to get referrals.

Adeola Amole:
It's the truth. It depends on what it is. In this instance, because it was auto body I've worked with a few companies in the past so I went to the companies I trusted. My husband and I drive Acuras and Hondas. I went to the dealerships, the Acura dealerships that I like and that we've dealt with in the past and I spoke with the guys and said, "Who would you refer?"

Adeola Amole:
They gave me some auto body shops. Then I went to the Honda dealerships, "Who would you refer?" I had a list of a bunch of them. Go to the source. If you're looking for even if it's just furniture and stuff go to the sources. Go to the people you know who have fabulous furniture or go to the companies themselves and just start talking to the people who are working there. Sometimes they'll tell you, "Don't buy it here. Go here."

Bobbi Rebell:
Is there an advantage to talking to them in real life versus just calling around or looking at an app?

Adeola Amole:
You know, I think there is. Always that human connection will get you the better referrals and then you can connect with them, right? So they're willing to give you that information. Absolutely.

Bobbi Rebell:
I think being in person makes a huge difference. Tell us more about where we can find out more about you and your book.

Adeola Amole:
Oh, absolutely. My book 7 Steps To Get Out of Debt and Build Wealth, guys, it's available everywhere. Go to my website www dot Adeola Amole dot com and there you can choose your retailer of choice because I'm on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books A Million, Indigo, pretty much anywhere you can buy books it's available.

Bobbi Rebell:
Love it. Thank you so much. Social media, where can we follow you?

Adeola Amole:
Instagram is my stomping ground. I'm everywhere but Instagram is my stomping ground. I'm at Adeola Amole B.

Bobbi Rebell:
Thank you so much. This was great.

Adeola Amole:
Aww. Thanks for having me, Bobbi. I appreciate it.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey, friends. Let's get right to it. Financial grownup tip number one, when it comes to things like cutting your debt no ask is too aggressive when you negotiate for interest rate reductions like Adeola. She went for the 0% interest rate. Kind of surprised me but I'm impressed. While she didn't always get there she sometimes did so why not ask?

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial grownup tip number two, listen to the whispers at work. Pay attention to the larger macro economic climate and what's going on in your industry. Adeola in her gut knew that there was a good chance she was going to get laid off but she was still surprised. Financially, though, with her multiple and largely passive income streams she was ready.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right, everyone. Adeola has generously sent, from Canada no less, two signed copies of her book 7 Steps To Get Out of Debt and Build Wealth to give away. All you have to do is DM me your takeaway from this episode on any of the social channels. On Instagram at Bobbi Rebell 1, on Twitter at Bobbi Rebell, or if you prefer email you can email me at Hello at Financial Grownup dot com. Big thanks to Adeola Amole 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 Stewart and is a BRK Media Production.

When financial advisor, podcast host and author Linda P Jones started trying to build wealth- she was not happy with the investment returns she was getting. So she hit the books and the lessons she learned added up to a $2 million bank account by age 39.  

In Linda's money story you will learn:

• Exactly how your ability to become a wealth heiress is already within you- and how you can make it a reality.

• The book her father gave her that changed her mindset as a young child

• Exactly how to emulate the strategy she has used of finding role models and learning their steps to success.

• How she made $2 million by the age of 39

In Linda’s money lesson you will learn:

• Why saving can be detrimental to building wealth.

• The most important indicator to watch when you are investing.

In Linda's everyday money tip you will learn:

• Why she focuses more on what she does with her money than how much she makes.

In My Take you will learn:

• The one thing you can do to make sure you don't hold yourself back, even if you are in a job that seems hopeless.

• The benefits of doing an end-of-year assessment of where your money actually is

Episode Links:

• Check out Linda's website - www.lindapjones.com

• Link to her book on Amazon - You're Already a Wealth Heiress

• Linda's Be Wealthy and Smart podcast

• Link to Tony Robbins book Awaken the Giant Within

• Link to Think and Grow Rich

Follow Linda!

• 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.

Transcription

Linda P Jones:
The first person would have $48,000. The second person would have over a million dollars. Yet, they both earned the same amount of money. So it's really not about how much money you make. It's about making the right choices.

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.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey, financial grownups. Okay, saving money, absolutely important. Key advice this holiday season, my friends, but you can't stop there. As you heard from our guest, financial advisor, podcast host, and author, Linda P. Jones, because, as she tells her listeners on her podcast, Be Wealthy and Smart, and readers of her book, You Are Already a Wealth Heiress, you need that compounding. In other words, you need to invest it, and you need to be smart about it.

Bobbi Rebell:
And by the way, happy holidays to everyone, whatever holidays you celebrate, even if that holiday happens to be just taking a break from work around New Year's. I want to thank everyone for their support of the show. It is hard to believe it's been almost a year, and if you like the show, let me thank you. If you have a minute, post a screenshot on social media and tag me so I can do so. And if you are not already, please remember to subscribe, and thanks to everyone that leaves reviews as well. They are so meaningful to me and really the only payment that I ask if you enjoy the show. And with that, I want to share with you guys a gift from Linda P. Jones, this episode where she shares her journey to becoming a wealth heiress and how we can all create our own fortunes. I adore her, and I know you will too. Here is Linda P. Jones.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey, Linda P. Jones. You're a financial grownup. Welcome to the podcast.

Linda P Jones:
Thanks, Bobbi. I'm so excited to be here.

Bobbi Rebell:
Many of our listeners know you as the host of the podcast Be Wealthy and Smart, and more of them are getting to know you as the author of You're Already a Wealth Heiress, Now Think and Act like One, Six Practical Steps to Make it a Reality Now. The good news is it's selling really well. The bad news is it's sold out and on back order. Linda, what is going on?

Linda P Jones:
Well, it got a lot of popularity and is resonating with people. They love the idea that their ability for wealth is already within them, just like the small seed of a tree can grow to be a very large tree. It's already within that seed. It's a law of nature. And so I make that point that women can go from nothing to wealth, and I have lots of stories in the book about that. So that's really what I believed is that it's already within you.

Bobbi Rebell:
I love that, and it's so perfect that you became a successful author among your many accomplishments, which we'll talk about later, but a lot of this came from a book that your dad gave you when you were only 10 years old. Tell us your money story.

Linda P Jones:
Yeah, so my dad handed me a copy of Think and Grow Rich when I was 10, and I was already interested in financial things. And he handed me that book, and it really, Bobbie, set me off on a different course because a lot of that book is about mindset and thinking big and thinking positively and affirmations, a lot of mindset. And so it really started me in that direction, but it was really when we would get in the boat and go around the island where I grew up, Mercer Island near Seattle, we would look at these huge homes along the waterfront and say, "Look at that house. I want to live in that house. Oh my gosh. Look at that mansion." And we'd say, "How do people get rich? How did these people be able to afford this kind of a home, and how does that happen?" And it became my life's purpose to really study, "What are the steps to wealth? How did this happen?"

Linda P Jones:
I read all these autobiographies and biographies of millionaires, studying it all, and then-

Bobbi Rebell:
Like who? What other books did you read?

Linda P Jones:
Oh, everything from I mean way back to old things, like Earl Nightingale. I don't know if you remember these really old classics, way back, that came out of Think and Grow Rich, about Carnegie and Rockefeller and Aristotle Onassis. A lot of the people that were mentioned in that book, I actually went and did some more research on. Benjamin Franklin even. I mean, I went way back, and then I would also cover some of the people of the day. But I really just wanted to see what were the common points of those people, and that's when I come up with the six steps to wealth, and that's actually when I started following them and that is what enabled me to make my $2 million at age 39.

Bobbi Rebell:
How did you make $2 million by age 39?

Linda P Jones:
I worked on Wall Street for a long time. After I graduated in business, I went into working for a Wall Street firm and represented investment firms, money managers. I wasn't a financial advisor. I did get my CFP and have had it all along, but I decided I didn't want to work with individual clients. I wanted to work with the people who actually invested the money and, again, find out what are they doing to be successful making this money grow? I realized my money wasn't compounding fast enough.

Linda P Jones:
The mutual funds were working fine. I started investing in real estate and got my compounding rate up to about 15% a year buying real estate with partners and doing flips, and this is years ago. This is a long time ago. That market eventually dried up because a lot of that came out of a banking crisis, and when the economy recovered, a lot of the opportunities to buy low really disappeared. And so I thought, "Okay, now what am I going to do because this is ending, and I need to find something else?"

Linda P Jones:
Well, back to the stock market. It started going up. In a particular year, it went up about 30%, and I thought, "Well, gosh, no flipping houses, no dealing with contractors, realtors, paying commissions, cleaning toilets, anything like that. That sounds like it could be a much better way to invest." I thought, "Well, maybe I can learn how to invest in stocks." So I got this book called How to Make Money in Stocks by William J. O'Neil. Because of my background in the financial world already, I had a lot of knowledge to build on, and I was able to teach myself through trial and error how to invest in individual stocks, and I was investing in a time that was the technology time, technology bubble, internet bubble, what I call bubbles and cycles where you can really find where is the fast compounding place of the particular day, of a particular year, or few years-

Bobbi Rebell:
So you were trading? You were really trading?

Linda P Jones:
I was not trading, actually. I was buying and holding, but I was identifying companies that would be the winners of the future and identifying them pretty early on.

Bobbi Rebell:
So doing a lot of individual stock research.

Linda P Jones:
Correct. Yes. And so that is how I grew my investment account to $2 million.

Bobbi Rebell:
Well, congratulations, and here you are now sharing that knowledge with so many people. What is the takeaway from this for our listeners?

Linda P Jones:
Well, I think you have to start getting obsessed with compounding. I think a lot of financial experts are barking up the wrong tree in a way because they're very focused on being frugal, and they're trying to save their way to wealth. And that's very difficult to do because you have to make a lot of money in order to be able to save enough to be financially independent. The reality is most people are going to become financial independent through compounding and through their investments. And so if you get really good at investing and get really focused on your compounding rate, that's going to serve you much better than trying to save a few pennies here or there, in my opinion.

Bobbi Rebell:
And that brings us into your everyday money tip.

Linda P Jones:
Yeah, so my everyday money tip is that it doesn't matter how much you're making as much as it matters what you do with your money, the decisions that you make, the way that you invest your money. And let me give you an example, Bobbi. So let's say there's two people, and they each earn $40,000 a year, which by today's standards is an average to modest income. But let's say they make very different choices with their money. One person saves the average savings rate in the US, which is 2.8%. That's $1,120 a year for a total of $33,600 saved over 30 years. If they put that into their bank account and earn 2% annually over 30 years, their lifetime, let's say, their money will grow to about $48,000.

Linda P Jones:
Let's say the other person earning $40,000 a year is a better saver. They save $5,500 a year, which is the maximum you're allowed to put into your IRA if you're under age 50. You can save more if you're over 50. And they earn 10% a year in a long-term stock market portfolio, and they're able to do that for 30 years. That person's money will grow to over a million dollars.

Linda P Jones:
So, to summarize, the first person would have $48,000. The second person would have over a million dollars. Yet, they both earned the same amount of money. So it's really not about how much money you make. It's about making the right choices, decisions, and investing well so that you can achieve financial freedom.

Bobbi Rebell:
Right. The ultimate mistake that people make is they save money rather than invest it. If you have it, once you have your emergency fund, it's really important that it not just sit in a savings account because you're waiting for, for example, the right time to invest it or something like that. It's a great point that you make. And you make a lot of great points like that in your book. So let's talk about your book. It has a fabulous title. You Are Already a Wealth Heiress. I feel better just hearing that, Linda.

Linda P Jones:
Well, you are already a wealth heiress. It's already within you, as I said, and you're already the bright, successful, confident person. There's one within you. You don't have to have a brain transplant. You don't have to have some magic spell put upon you. It's already within you, just like that little seed grows into a big tree. It's a law of nature. And so in the book, I talk about a woman who was basically destitute in China, no education, was responsible for her family, worked in a factory, made very little money, and eventually became the richest woman in the world. And that was not because some exterior force came and did something to her. That was within her all along. And so I just want to encourage people that you do have financial brilliance within you already. You just have to develop it, learn, get some knowledge, and take action.

Bobbi Rebell:
And you share that three times a week on your podcast, Be Wealthy and Smart, which I am a new fan of and obsessed with. And Linda, your podcast is in 181 countries. You've had more than two million downloads, and now you're expanding into video.

Linda P Jones:
We are. We're doing Wealth Heiress TV on YouTube. There were a lot of people that wanted the video format, and I felt I could reach a completely different audience on video. My Be Wealthy and Smart podcast is also on YouTube, so it plays to both, but I really wanted to have a video component where I could see people, they could see me. I guess I can't see them, but they can see me, and I just felt like we could do some fun things. We could go on trips together. I could take them places with me. I could show them wealth-building ideas in a different way. So it's going to be something that will evolve over time. Right now, I'm in the basics, but I hope to expand it over time.

Bobbi Rebell:
Well, it is all a gift, and thank you so much for all of it. Where can people find you? Give me all your social handles and all that good stuff.

Linda P Jones:
Well, let's see. They can find all of my podcasts at LindaPJones.com/podcasts. They can, of course, find Be Wealthy and Smart on iTunes or Stitcher Radio, wherever podcasts are. They can find my Instagram page, which has wealth tips twice a day at Instagram.com/LindaPJones and as well as Twitter, Linda P. Jones and on Facebook Linda P. Jones fan page.

Bobbi Rebell:
Amazing. You are one busy lady. Thank you for it all, Linda.

Linda P Jones:
Thank you so much, Bobbi.

Bobbi Rebell:
The first thing I want to talk about may catch some of you off guard, and that is Linda's offhand comment, you may have even missed it, about cleaning toilets. Financial grownup tip number one, do not let any job or wherever you start in life hold you back. For those of you who read my book, How to be a Financial Grownup, you may have noticed a story in the book from a guy who also, by the way, contributed the foreword, named Tony Robbins. You know what he did before he was Tony Robbins? Well, he was a janitor. He cleaned toilets. Also, he was broke and from a really dysfunctional family and so on. If Tony Robbins can create his own wealth dynasty, so can you. Go read Linda's book, and while you're at it, check out Awaken the Giant Within. That's one of Tony's books that I love.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial Grownup tip number two, do an end-of-year assessment of where your money actually is. Sometimes we save it and we forget it, and it's not actually invested in something that is going to grow. Make sure that your money is where you think it is. Sitting in an investment account is not the same as actually being invested in, for example, a stock, a mutual fund, an ETF, whatever is right for you. Make sure it actually got there.

Bobbi Rebell:
Thanks everyone for your time. I value it, and this is why we keep the episodes short. If you value this podcast, please help it grow by doing all the things, rate, review, subscribe, and definitely share it in social media. Be in touch [inaudible 00:14:25] on Instagram. I am @BobbiRebell1 on Twitter @BobbiRebell, and you can always email us your suggestions at hello@financialgrownup.com. That includes guest suggestions. By the way, if you enjoyed this episode with Derek and want to see more people like him, send us some ideas. We'll see what we can do. And of course, tell your friends so we can keep spreading the word about the podcast, and let's all thank Linda P. Jones for such great advice helping us all get one step closer to being financial grownups.

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

Performance coach Jen Cohen is a master at ab crunches— crunching numbers. She shares the story of how she talked her way into a job at Olive Garden before she was even old enough to work- and then reveals her secrets to eating healthier on a tight budget. 

Jennifer’s Money Story:

Thanks, Bobbi. When you asked that question, it makes you think and go back into your brain a little bit to think why someone is the way they are, subconsciously. I think it really goes back to when I was really small, four, five years old when my mom and dad did get divorced, and I guess money was quite tight. I do remember my mom, to make extra money, my mom is a psychiatric nurse, and she had a full-time job, but she had now two kids also, and it wasn't enough, so she would have these odd jobs.

Jen Cohen:
I don't remember all the details, but I do remember her working to sell stuff. She sold Mary Kay cosmetics on the side. She would also cut out pieces of the carpet in our apartment where she was selling them, and I think that vision or that imagery really stuck in my brain in a negative way. It told me right at that moment, "I don't want to be poor, or I always want to make my own money and feel financially stable and secure, not to rely on somebody else for my financial security."

Jen Cohen:
From that moment, I guess even as a small, small child, I went through life thinking of ways of having side hustles or working and doing things. When I was 12 years old, I remember bargaining and hustling with the manager of the Olive Garden down my street about working for him.

Bobbi Rebell:
Wait, you were 12 years old, and you were working at Olive Garden?

Jen Cohen:
I was. I was a greeter. They wouldn't allow me at 12 because you're too young to get ... I wasn't allowed in the actual restaurant because it was illegal, but I negotiated my way with this guy and just begged him and just hawked him enough where he gave me a job as a greeter. I was able to open up the front door for customers when they walk in. When they first get there, the first person you see was me, and I'm like, "Hello, welcome to Olive Garden." That was really my first real legit job when I was in nine, no, seventh, eighth grade, something really ... I was young, where I remember people in my neighborhood be like coming to the restaurant and be like, "What are you doing here?" It was very odd.

Bobbi Rebell:
But it sounds like you were actually really proud to be earning money, even at that young age. You weren't embarrassed about it. You were excited.

Jen Cohen:
Oh, God. No. I loved it. I always loved having my own money. I always loved having that option, never having to ask my mom or whoever. If I wanted something, I would have it, but here's a caveat. I would never spend my money, so all of this was for me to have savings. It wasn't for me to actually buy stuff. I've never been a very materialistic person. It's really about having in my head knowing that I had that backup, having that security blanket. I would literally save everything.

Jen Cohen:
Then through high school, through college, I always had multiple jobs just so I had it where very comfortable later on, but it was never about that. I've been very rich, and I've been poor, or in the middle, but it's never been that story that's driven me. It's really about that I think one experience when I was a little girl that just has always been subconsciously in my brain where I'm driven to make and create financial security just to have it.

Jennifer’s Money Lesson:

The takeaway is, A, number one, always spend below your means, not above, just so you have that ability, and find and figure out ways to save money. There's so many ways now. You can eat cheaply. You can figure out ways. You can work out for free. You can eat for less than $7 a day. There's a lot of ways to be crafty and resourceful if you want to be.

Jennifer’s Money Tip:

People can actually be much healthier on a very restricted budget. First of all, eating canned salmon. Canned salmon is automatically wild.

Bobbi Rebell:
I didn't know that.

Jen Cohen:
Yeah.

Bobbi Rebell:
And wild salmon is better. That's not just a myth to charge you more at the store.

Jen Cohen:
Absolutely not. Farmed salmon has a lot of toxins and maybe a lot of mercury. It could have a lot of different things in it. That's why people say limit your fish intake to maybe once a week, twice at max.

Bobbi Rebell:
Right, and that wild salmon is really expensive near me.

Jen Cohen:
It's expensive everywhere, but if you buy canned salmon, just make sure you look on the can. If it says wild Alaskan, that can of salmon would be maybe $2.50 to $3 at most, and that's higher quality than salmon that you would buy that would normally cost about $14 a pound anywhere else, maybe $17 a pound, depending on where you live. That is the perfect portion. That in itself is a meal.

Bobbi Rebell:
How do you usually eat it? Do you put it on a salad? What do you do with it usually?

Jen Cohen:
You could do anything. You could put it on a salad. You could actually ... When I'm starving and I need something to satiate me, I could just take the can of salmon, mash it a little bit of Vegenaise or mayonnaise whatever you'd like, or just put it in a bowl or whatever, eat out of the can as a snack. When I was on a budget I would eat that all the time, and I still eat that.

Jen Cohen:
The other thing is frozen vegetables. Frozen vegetables are a higher quality-sourced produce than what you find at the store because by the time it's at the store, it's been sitting on trucks, it's already half rotten. When you buy frozen vegetables, they flash-freeze them when it's at its peak, so the quality is better.

Bobbi Rebell:
So frozen vegetables, but not canned vegetables? What's the difference there?

Jen Cohen:
Listen. Canned corn, there's nothing wrong with canned corn. I mean, the reality is this: I don't like canned vegetables as much because I think when you do that in the cans, they have to add sodium. I try to stay away from that, but when it's the frozen vegetables, it's typically just the vegetable in itself flash-freeze in a bag so there's no added anything. It's just the vegetables. Canned vegetables typically have to have a preservative to keep it because it's not frozen, and also added salt. That's why I choose to have the frozen vegetables.

Bobbi Rebell:
I love that all.

Jen Cohen:
And frozen fruit, by the way, too.

Bobbi Rebell:
Yes, and I do that in smoothies a lot, actually. I did that even today in a smoothie.

Bobbi’s Financial grownup tips:

Financial grownup tip number one:

Don't be a food snob. Jen talked about eating frozen veggies and canned fish and how, quote, "fresh" isn't always better even if it's organic. Oh, my goodness. Could you imagine? Organic not being the absolute best? You need to pay attention. You can really get burned paying up for all that so-called fresh food because when you take away all those chemicals, which you should, we don't want the chemicals on our food, of course, but sometimes, the shelf life is just really short.

Recently, I splurged on these organic grapes at Whole Foods, and they went bad so fast. I had paid $8 for a bunch because I really wanted the grapes and I wanted to feel like I was eating healthy, and they barely lasted. That is also, by the way, a reason not to go shopping with your kids because I was with my son, and he also felt we should get the grapes, even though they were really expensive, and it's really hard to say no to a kid with they ask for food that's actually not junk food. Even if it's not the absolute healthiest fruit, it's not junk food, and that hard not to encourage, so try to leave your kids at home when you shop, although that's not always realistic.

Financial grownup tip number two:

The power of persuasion is very real. Good for Jen. Jen really shouldn't have been working at the Olive Garden at age 12 because it was not actually fully legal, but she got her way because she was creative and she found a way to get to yes with a reluctant manager and find a way to work there without technically working there and not technically breaking the law. That was a great lesson for all of us, Jen. Be persuasive and find a way around obstacles.

Episode Links:

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

• Jennifer’s website - jennifercohen.com

• How to save money and cut calories on your morning coffee from Starbucks

• Jen's book Badass Body Goals

Follow Jennifer!

• Instagram - @TheRealJenCohen

• Twitter - @TheRealJenCohen

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.

Performance coach Jen Cohen is a master at ab crunches— crunching numbers. She shares the story of how she talked her way into a job at Olive Garden before she was even old enough to work- and then reveals her secrets to eating healthier on a tight budget. #EatHealthy #EatHealthyOnABudget #Author

At 29 years old Tanya Van Court thought she had more than a million dollars on hand to change the world and live the life of her dreams. Until it vanished in a few hours. 

Tanya's money story:

Tanya Van Court:
I was 29 years old, it was in the first tech boom where all of the Silicon Valley companies had stock that was just rising uncontrollably. I happened to be one of the first 200 employees at a company in Silicon Valley that was doing extraordinarily well.

Bobbi Rebell:
What company?

Tanya Van Court:
The company was Covac Communications. Before any of the telephone companies or cable companies were offering high-speed data I had a great job, a meaningful job, and I had a lot of stock that went along with that job.

Tanya Van Court:
I got all this stock in Covac, and some of the stock I couldn't cash out yet, but a lot of the stock I could cash out. I could have sold that stock and went and diversified my portfolio and bought mutual funds, or invested it in many, many stocks, as opposed to having all of my eggs sitting in one proverbial basket. But I didn't, because it was literally the first stock I had ever known or owned-

Bobbi Rebell:
Wait, let's just back it up, so you were given, as part of your compensation, shares in this company. Did it go public? Where was this stock? Explain exactly what you were given, and how it was valued, and did you have opportunities to sell it?

Tanya Van Court:
Yes, I had opportunities to sell the stock, many opportunities. The company had gone public, and so I had the opportunity to sell the stock when the company went public, I had the opportunity ... not exactly when it went public, because we had a certain window. But that window had passed, and so I had many opportunities to sell the stock, but I had no idea that I should sell the stock.

Tanya Van Court:
The stock kept going up, and I thought, "Wow, this is great. The stock just doubled in the past six months. I should just hold onto it, and I guess it will double again."

Bobbi Rebell:
At its peak what was the value of this stock, and how old were you at that time?

Tanya Van Court:
I was 29, and the value of the stock at its peak was about 1.2 million dollars.

Bobbi Rebell:
At that time how did you feel?

Tanya Van Court:
You know, I was so excited, because since I came from a household of two parents who were elementary school educators, all I ever wanted to do was make a difference in the world. I knew that having that 1.2 million dollars in my late 20s was going to enable me to make different choices and different life decisions to help people and to give back instead of just working in corporate America and doing things that were kind of interesting to me, but weren't impactful to other people. I felt free, Bobbi. I felt really free and empowered.

Bobbi Rebell:
You're 29 years old, you have stock that on paper is worth 1.2 million dollars. What happened then?

Tanya Van Court:
The big Dotcom bust happened. Literally in hours stock just started to tank for company, after company, after company. I watched the stock literally go from being in the teens, each share was trading in the teens, to trading for less than a dollar. When I say less than a dollar it went from the teens to like .50 cents in the course of a few hours. Every bit of that 1.2 million was wiped away in a matter of hours.

Bobbi Rebell:
Wow!

Tanya Van Court:
Yeah.

Bobbi Rebell:
How did you feel then?

Tanya Van Court:
Then I felt stupid, I felt deflated, I felt panicked, depressed, it was almost as if you had 1.2 million dollars sitting in your living room, and you just left the front door to your house open and walked out and went to the park, right?

Tanya Van Court:
It was, like, wait a minute. I had been living this life and treating this money so casually, as if it would always be there.

Bobbi Rebell:
As you say, it was the dotcom bust. This was happening to everyone?

Tanya Van Court:
It was happening to everyone, and it's interesting, because while I suffered a tremendous loss with that stock that I could've diversified, what I still had was ... I still had a home that I owned, I had bought a condo, and I still had that. What I found with many of my colleagues who experienced that same bust, is that they had actually leveraged their stock to buy lots of other things, so they bought cars, and they bought multiple houses.

Tanya Van Court:
Because they had borrowed against that stock, once the crash happened, they then had to pay back the money that they had borrowed by going and selling off all of their assets, including the assets that they had come to the company with.

Tanya Van Court:
If they came to the company with a big million-dollar home in Silicon Valley that was passed down to them from their parent, or that they had worked really hard in a previous company to be able to buy, now all of a sudden, they not only lost all of their stock, they lost every other asset that they had, because they had to payback loans that they had made against their stock.

Tanya’s money lesson:

Oh my gosh. Diversify, diversify, diversify. Don't ever put all of your money into one basket. I don't care if that basket is a real estate basket, and you have found a hot, booming real estate market that's working really well for you, and so you're, like, "Let me just buy it."

More apartments here in X place, or more houses in X place, don't do that. Diversify your money. If you have found that your golden goose is a stock that is doing really well, don't do that. Diversify your money. You really have to weigh and measure your risk, and think about the worst case scenarios. If that particular company, if something happens to that company, if something happens to that area of town that you're investing in, and every asset you have goes under water, what happens to your entire portfolio?

Tanya's everyday money tip:

My everyday money tip is actually a money tip that kind of goes back to my time in college. I would always watch people who ... I don't happen to drink, but I would watch people who would do progressives. Where they went from one bar to another, or one restaurant to another, and progressively partied from one place to the next. Like, the party would follow them. Like, a group of people would go and they'd hang out in one place, and they'd do that for 20 minutes, and then they'd go and hang out at another place.

I thought, "Wouldn't that be fun if we did that just with our friends, and did it in order to swap and exchange stuff that we no longer needed at our respective homes." Look, we all look in our homes and we go, "There are 10 things here that I don't use anymore, that I don't need." If you happen to have kids there may be things that your kids don't use anymore, or your kids don't need. If you happen to be a sports fan there may be equipment that you don't use anymore. "Hey, I'm not golfing as much as I used to anymore."

There are things in all of our homes that we don't want or we don't need, and so it's a great way of getting together with five or six friends, scheduling it on a Saturday, and going to each other's houses where you put everything that you don't want in your living room, and it becomes a virtual shopping spree.

Bobbi Rebell:
I love, first of all, that it's social, and I love, also, it's always delicate, because when you want to gift to somebody something that maybe you don't need anymore it's an awkward thing to give them something that you don't want. Because it's kind of like, "Oh, you're giving me your leftovers." But if you just put it there and they can just decide to take it, then it takes away that sort of negativity and makes it a positive thing.

Tanya Van Court:
It absolutely does. I think it makes it a positive thing for everyone, like, you're super happy to get rid of it, but they're super happy to get it.

Financial Grownup tip #1:

One things Tanya mentioned that stood out is that, while she lost money that she had on paper, I know it still hurts a lot, others had leveraged against their stockings and lost so much more. In addition to her advice to diversify, we also want to be very careful when borrowing against actual assets. Do not over leverage.

Financial Grownup tip #2:

This holiday season take it a step further than what Tanya was talking about. Think carefully about the physical stuff that you are buying for other people, not just children. Unwanted gifts are a total waste of money. There are so many new ways that technology is allowing us to give differently. Apps like Goalsetter are great, especially for kids that have too much stuff. But when you want to send a physical gift, and sometimes this is even for business purposes, there are new services, like, GiftNow. That's my personal new favorite that I'm obsessed with.

Basically, the way that one works is that instead of a boring gift certificate you virtually send someone a specific gift from a retailer to their email, so you don't need their physical address, you don't have to send them an email asking where should I send this, who will receive it, blah, blah, blah. It opens in a virtual gift box, and they can select their size, so you don't have to be guessing. They can change the color, if you don't know what color they want. They can even exchange it all before it gets delivered, so you don't have the whole hassle of the return and all that stuff.

I just used it for my friends' baby's one year birthday. It was so great to not have to carry a gift to the party, not worrying about it getting lost in the pile, and to know that my friend could swap it out without me even knowing it, not worrying if she would hurt my feelings, if she didn't love the fabulous dress that I got her daughter.

Then again, you can never have too many little frilly little girl dresses, right? I'm sure it was a huge hit.

EPISODE LINKS

Check out Tanya's company GoalSetter here!

Tanya Van Court is on Shark Tank!

Follow Tanya!

Instagram: @tvancourt

Linked In: @Tanya Van Court

Twitter: @tvancourt

Follow Goalsetter!

Instagram: @goalsetterco

Twitter: @goalsetterco

Facebook: @goalsetterco

Learn more about GiftNow

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.

At 20-years old, Lauryn Williams CFP® was the fastest woman in America, and suddenly faced some very grownup financial decisions. Lauryn shares how she put together a team of advisors including her coach and an agent, how they vetted different sponsors, and how she learned to get paid to run for a living. 

In Lauryn’s money story you will learn:

-Why one of the fastest women in the world chose to slow down and carefully make her financial decisions

-How much money a three-time Gold medalist really makes 

-What goes into an olympic sponsorship deal

In Lauryn’s money lesson you will learn:

-How keeping an open mind prepared Lauryn for the opportunity of a lifetime

-How to cope with money anxiety when making a big financial decision

In Lauryn's everyday money tip you will learn:

-The one person who will always save you money

-How to listen to others talk about finance with a grain of salt

In My Take you will learn:

-The number one question you always need to ask yourself before making a financial decision

-Why Certified Financial Planners need to be your best friend

EPISODE LINKS

Check out Lauryn's website here

Listen to Lauryn's podcast here

Follow Lauryn's company! 

Instagram: @worthwinning

Twitter: @worth_winning

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

Lauryn Williams:
And so you can put the Adidas contract next to the Nike contract, next to the New Balance contract, et cetera, et cetera, and see one is offering a higher salary but the other one is offering a lower salary but is also going to pay for your school. Which I had one semester of school left when all this was taking place and that was really important to me, that I be able to finish my education and finish it for free.

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.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hello, my financial grownup friends. That was fellow Certified Financial Planner, Lauryn Williams. Her company, by the way, is called Worth Winning. She also just happens to be a three-time Olympic medalist, the first American woman to medal in both the Summer and the Winter Olympic Games. Lauryn was a track star and then just kind of decided to get into the bobsledding thing, because why not, and of course she won a medal there to. By the way, she's a four-time Olympian. And Lauryn not only is a CFP, she is an MBA, she has an MBA in Finance. Talk about a role model.

Bobbi Rebell:
So welcome, everyone. So glad you are investing the time. And for those of you that are new to the Financial Grownup podcast, we try to keep it short, about 15 minutes, because we know how busy you are. But if you have a little more time, feel free to stack a few episodes together. Let's get right to Lauryn, I met her through our mutual friend, Jamila Souffrant, of the Journey to Launch podcast at Podcast Movement, where else, this past summer. And immediately I adored her, I know that you will too. In addition to all of the accomplishments that I just mentioned, and many more, she's just the coolest and most lovely person, and also a fellow dog lover. Here is Lauryn Williams.

Bobbi Rebell:
Lauryn Williams, you're a financial grownup. Welcome to the podcast.

Lauryn Williams:
It's so good to be on. Thanks for having me, Bobbi.

Bobbi Rebell:
And I'm so excited to have you because not only are you a four-time Olympian, the first woman to earn a medal in both the Summer and the Winter Olympics, you get the biggest gold star from me because you're an actual CFP, Certified Financial Planner. So, so great to have you, Lauryn.

Lauryn Williams:
It is really good to be on the show. I'm looking forward to telling my financial story today.

Bobbi Rebell:
I do want to just mention, you also are a financial professional, you are the real deal. Your company, Worth Winning.

Lauryn Williams:
Yeah. I started a company to be able to help young professionals, people specifically in their 20s and 30s, organize their finances because I felt like there was such a big gap there. During my career as a professional athlete I had some advisors that didn't do a good job for me, and it was mainly because they didn't get what I needed at that age. So my company is specific to helping young professionals organize their finances.

Bobbi Rebell:
And we'll give all the information for that. And by the way, your podcast, Worth Listening, after your money story. But we want to get to this because this is really a unique perspective into the world of a money-savvy athlete. Because when you were in college, just 20 years old, you won a very big, big race and that brought you to a big financial milestone in your life. Tell us your money story, Lauryn.

Lauryn Williams:
Yeah, so I was a junior in college at the University of Miami, having a blast. Made it to nationals my freshman and my sophomore year, but didn't have success. So on my junior year, I was on a tear. What do I need to do to win this national championship, I wanted to be the fastest girl in all of college. And I did, I achieved that. I ran the fastest time that day, won the race. It also happened to be the second fastest time in the world, for the whole year.

Bobbi Rebell:
Just happened to be.

Lauryn Williams:
Just happened to be. And it was 2004, the Olympic year. So immediately I had to turn my focus from this one goal that I had of wining college nationals to, oh my goodness, America is counting on me to go to the Olympic trials a month from now and win that thing and represent Team USA.

Bobbi Rebell:
But also, there was a money element to this.

Lauryn Williams:
Exactly. So immediately after running that time I started to be approached by agents and they started approaching mostly through my coach. She was kind of the middle woman and she just had to sit me down and say, "Lauryn, as much as I'd like you to stay in college, I think it's going to be more lucrative for you to leave school. And the first part of that process if for you to get an agent."

Bobbi Rebell:
Right. What happened was you were being approached by a bunch of companies who wanted to sponsor you.

Lauryn Williams:
Exactly. So, with track and field, the shoe companies are usually the main way that we earn a means of income. So it's not a situation where you earn a W3 employment somewhere with Team USA and then you get this as extra. If you don't have a sponsorship, you don't have an income and you're not really a professional athlete. That was the main thing, so I had to decide which shoe company I wanted to go with, which contract was going to be the best. And the agent helped a lot with putting in the restrictions and the bonuses and making sure everything was really good.

Bobbi Rebell:
Right. So let's take a step back. You finish the race, what happens then? Does a shoe company just call your mom? How do they first get in touch with you? Break down exactly what happens and, if you feel comfortable, who was approaching you and how they value an athlete early on.

Lauryn Williams:
Yeah. So the shoe companies are there at the meet, they're walking by you, they're shaking your hand, telling you good luck, we'd love to talk to you. And you don't have any long conversations in that moment, you just have kind of shorter ones. And then, like I said, my coach was very protective, made sure that first step is to get an agent, find someone that you trust, and let those shoe companies go through the agent instead of you having to talk to them directly. Because they're trying to woo you and tell you all these great things, but really it's going to come down to what's on that pen and paper and whether or not we should sign that. So we've got to get someone that's a professional, that knows about these contracts, in order to get the information we need. So that was the first step in the process really.

Bobbi Rebell:
So your coach guided you in choosing an agent. And what was that conversation like? Were you just swarmed by agents? How did you vet the agents?

Lauryn Williams:
I had to make a list of questions. I had to find out what I was looking for, what do I need from being a professional athlete, what can I expect from you? Because I'm 20 years old, I'm not even legally a grownup grownup yet. I'm going to need your guidance but I also know that I'm hiring you and you're going to make a living from this. So what can I expect from the money that you'll be paid to provide this service to me? And in track and field, an agent takes 15% of whatever they get for you, and that's a pretty hefty chunk of change. It's not 1% or 2% like it is in the other professional sports, so you'd better make sure that it's somebody that you trust and that's going to be making the best earnings for you so that they too, in turn, can earn.

Bobbi Rebell:
Wait, is that true? So in track and field they take 15%, what sports do they take only 1% or 2%? That seems really low.

Lauryn Williams:
Pretty much the big three sports. So the Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, NFL. All of those have much lower percentages, but they also have much higher earnings.

Bobbi Rebell:
Fascinating.

Lauryn Williams:
Yeah, our income fluctuates quite a bit in track and field. And so, for me, I was at around $200,000 as a 20-year-old. Like you said, fastest woman in the world in 2004. With, like I said, different bonuses and prize bonuses, if I ran a certain time I could get a bonus, if I won the Olympics I'd get an increase in salary. All those different sorts of things had to be negotiated.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right. So let's back it up a little. So you get the agent, then what happens? Did you just get a pile of offers and you just picked one? How did it work? Were there other factors? Was it just money? What kinds of things were you seeing, as a 20-year-old just getting these first money offers?

Lauryn Williams:
Yeah. So the agent comes to me kind of with a summary of here's what Adidas is offering, here's the salary, here's the bonus structure, and here's the ... You know, he was just going with the main things. Of course, you know, the final contract is 20 or something pages long, but the initial part is just here's a summary of what it is. And so you can put the Adidas contract next to the Nike contract, next to the New Balance contract, et cetera, et cetera, and see one is offering a higher salary but the other one is offering a lower salary but is also going to pay for your school. Which I had one semester of school left when all this was taking place and that was really important to me, that I be able to finish my education and finish it for free.

Bobbi Rebell:
And so you went with Nike. What were the factors that made that the winner for that first sponsorship endorsement deal?

Lauryn Williams:
Ultimately it was, like you said, the schooling was one of the big keys for me. Because, like you said, education was not optional. So for them being willing to support me, one, financially with a really good salary, then also pay for my education, they had a really good prize and bonus structure that if I did in fact run fast I would be compensated accordingly, which I thought was very fair. Every year that I won, I got a nice rollover or a nice salary increase. It was the most lucrative of the different contracts that were offered.

Bobbi Rebell:
Tell me what was your feeling when you signed that first contract. Did you have a new sense of financial security when you signed with Nike, at age 20, for $200,000?

Lauryn Williams:
As a finance major, I think my biggest feeling when I signed that contract was anxiety. It's like you've been given a really cool opportunity, don't blow it. And so the first thing I wanted to do was go and find a financial professional to help me, because I knew even though I was a finance major that I didn't have what it took just yet to be able to organize such a large amount of money that I'd never seen before, no one in my family seen before. It was excitement but mostly anxiety.

Bobbi Rebell:
What is the takeaway for our listeners from your story? From signing that first big contract at age 20?

Lauryn Williams:
I would say the takeaway is you never know when something really awesome is going to happen, when that windfall is right around the corner, but it's really about being prepared all the time. When opportunity knocks, be ready to answer the door and be prepared to take life at whatever it is, because it can immediately change. And my life changed overnight, I was a broke college student to hundred-thousandaire. Literally overnight.

Bobbi Rebell:
Amazing. All right, let's get your everyday money tip, because this also relates back to those early experiences and some good habits that you learned early on.

Lauryn Williams:
Yeah, I would say everyday money tip, make sure you have questions for whatever it is that you're going through in life. Whether it's hiring a financial professional, an accountant, an agent, when you're talking to your friends, ask questions. It's so important to be pulling information out of others as opposed to just taking the information as being fed to you. I found frequently during my career that people would give me information and they were only giving me the information they wanted me to have, and that ended up being catastrophic in a lot of different situations. So really having the ability to ask questions, look for red flags, and educate yourself in all aspects of life is the most important everyday money tip that I think your listeners need to hear.

Bobbi Rebell:
Wonderful. Tell us a little bit more about your business now. So you did have some tough experiences with financial advisors and you've talked about that widely, that really helped pivot your career when you moved away from full-time being a professional athlete into being a full-time financial advisor.

Lauryn Williams:
Yeah, I just had to find a way to fill the gap. Like you said, there was so many basic things, from budgeting, to understanding first-time home purchase. I needed help with just those basic things and I realized that as young professionals, there's a gap in the industry. There's these big wealth managers that require you have at least a million dollars before you can get help and then there's these other guys that sell you crappy products. And I was like we deserve something better, we deserve just unbiased advice that could help us build wealth, sort through our student loans situation, sort through the financial basics so that we can get on the right track. And that's how Worth Winning was born.

Bobbi Rebell:
And what inspired you to become a CFP and not just a financial advisor? Because you don't have to be a CFP to do this.

Lauryn Williams:
You don't have to be a CFP but I feel like it's the standard. I wouldn't go to someone who said, "I read medical books all the time, so certainly I can perform this surgery on you." Yeah, you may be really smart, but I'm going to go with a doctor that's actually been to medical school. And CFP to me is the same sort of standard, where you've gone through rigorous education, you've gotten a certain amount of experience, you've taken a hard, hard, hard exam, and you're held to a level of ethics that is not what the whole industry is held to right now. So it was really important to me to be able to put that seal of approval and that stamp on, to be able to say I'm competent to serve people and do my best job for them.

Bobbi Rebell:
Awesome. Where can people find out more about your and Worth Winning, and Worth Listening, your podcast?

Lauryn Williams:
Yes. Worth Winning is worth-winning.com and the podcast is worth-listening.com. And you can get to Worth Listening by going to Worth Winning, so I'd love to have you go and check out my website and see if something there rings true with you.

Bobbi Rebell:
And your social channels, you have a great following, by the way.

Lauryn Williams:
Oh, thank you. @worthwinning on Instagram, @worth_winning on Twitter. And then if you're looking for me, Lauryn Williams the Olympian, you can do lauryncwilliams on Instagram, Twitter, and you can find me on Facebook as well, by typing in either of those.

Bobbi Rebell:
Awesome. Thank you, Lauryn.

Lauryn Williams:
Thank you.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey, everyone. Love Lauryn's story, because it's such a different world. I mean, can you imagine being a star athlete and being offered hundreds of thousand dollar contracts when you're 20 years old, out of the blue, and all the responsibility that comes with it? I love the fact that she came out so strong and then it became such a great foundation for building her Worth Wining financial advisory business, and her Worth Listening podcast, which everyone should check out. Lauryn is a wonderful role model.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial Grownup tip number one. Lauryn talked about asking a lot of questions and having your list. Okay, I want everyone listening to always have one question at the top of that list, no matter what you are buying, financial services or otherwise, how do you get paid? It's very important to know, is someone being paid a flat fee or are they being paid on commission. Now, there's no right or wrong answer, as long as you're comfortable with the answer. Generally, it's nice for financial services to go to somebody who's not being paid on commission because you know that they're seeling you, in theory they should be selling you, what is best for your needs. If it's commission-based, they may be selling you what gives them the best commission and you never really know.

Bobbi Rebell:
So it's important to know how they're being paid. But remember, this is the financial services industry. In many other industries the general rule is that commissions are often the preferable way to be paid. For example, think about travel. Very often someone that helps you set up a trip is getting a commission and most people are okay with it being paid that way, as opposed to paying them a separate fee, although it can be done that way as well.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial Grownup tip number two. You may have noticed that I was fawning all over the fact that Lauryn is a Certified Financial Planner. It is a big deal. When you give your money to someone, you need to know that they are qualified, that you can trust them. And I can tell you, that as a Certified Financial Planner myself, we are what is called fiduciaries. And that means that we have to work with you to find whatever solution is in your best interest, not just what is suitable. Fiduciary, big word, very important word, but pay attention to it.

Bobbi Rebell:
Thank you all for your support. If you have a financial question, a money question, or just a question about what goes on behind the scenes here at Fin aical Grownup that you want answered on one of our bonus episodes, we are taking listener questions. So just DM it to us on any of the social channels. On Instagram @bobbirebell1, on Twitter @bobbirebell, or you can also just email it to us at hello@financialgrownup.com. That's hellow@financialgrownup.com. And thank you to Lauryn Williams 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 Stewart and is a BRK Media production.

Entrepreneur and Investor Barbara Corcoran explains why she believes spending money in a deliberate way even before you earn it is a smart business strategy, and shares the story of her first really big investment. And yes, she committed to it before she had the money.

In Barbara’s money story you will learn:

-How she bought her first house at age 29 (which had 8 bedrooms!)

-The importance of discussing big purchases with a significant other

-How Barbara saved $7,500 in three months

In Barbara’s money lesson you will learn:

-How she motivates herself to save money

-Why she chooses to ignore rational and take risks

-Her advice on committing to a goal

In Barbara’s everyday money tip you will learn:

-Why she spends money before she has it

-How she puts herself under pressure in order to produce financial results

In My Take you will learn:

-Why it's always good to listen to different opinions and take advice from successful people

-Two negotiation tips that will save you money and help your career

Bobbi and Barbara also talk about:

-Chef Boyardee and Ramen noodles, the quick dinner that helped save Barbara money and reminded Bobbi of her childhood

EPISODE LINKS:

Listen to Barbara Corcoran's podcast Business Unusual here, and on iTunes

Watch Barbara give more business advice on the multi-Emmy award winning show Shark Tank on ABC

Follow Barbara!

Twitter: @BarbaraCorcoran

Instagram: @BarbaraCorcoran

Facebook: @TheBarbaraCorcoran

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

Barbara Corcoran:
I always spend money I don't have. If I see money coming in new receivable, three months out, I committed that day, what I'm going to spend it on, and I start spending it even before it arrives.

Bobbi Rebell:
You are 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.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hello, my Financial Grownup friends, brace yourself Barbara Corcoran is here and she is going to give it to us straight up, no beating around the bush and she said some things that frankly I was pretty surprised with. They go against almost everything that I've been taught about building a solid financial foundation for your life, for your business, but she made it work. I'm still not sure I could make it work for me, but I'm thinking about it because she makes a good case and I'm interested to hear what you guys think after you hear her interview.

Bobbi Rebell:
So glad you are here. As I said, this episode is a really big one, so if you're new, you're joining it a really good time. We do something by the way called flex time for podcast, the episodes are kept pretty short, around 15 minutes. The idea is no excuses you can always fit it in, make it easy for you while you're running a quick errand, what have you, but if you have a longer commute, you can also stack them. We have a library now of more than a hundred episodes so you can listen to a few on your commute if that's what worked for you. Make sure that when you subscribe and hopefully you are subscribing, we really need the support that you set the downloads, go into the manual settings and set it so that you automatically get the downloads so that you don't miss any and you're good to go.

Bobbi Rebell:
And we love automation because that way things just happen and it's one less thing to remember. Alright, let's get to Barbara Corcoran and you know her from Shark Tank and now she has a new podcast called Business Unusual, also really short, so that's a good thing. She gives a lot of advice that seems shocking until you listen to it and listen to her reasons and then think that is part of how Barbara Corcoran is successful. It's the unusual. She approaches things in a different way from the way that we're always used to approaching it and it works for her. It may not work for you. The big takeaway from this episode, which you'll see I'm going to talk about after her interview. I don't know if I could do it, but I can see how it worked for her. So with that, here is Shark Tank's Barbara Corcoran.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey, Barbara Corcoran you're at Financial Grownup welcome to the podcast.

Barbara Corcoran:
Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Bobbi Rebell:
I am such a fan of your new podcast. For many reasons, of course also because it's a short podcast, but you have the best wisdom and you share so many lessons from your life, so thank you for that.

Barbara Corcora:
My pleasure. I enjoy doing it, but it's a scary proposition as I'm sure you will know, you have to earn people's ears while you're talking to them.

Bobbi Rebell:
You do, well you've been earning it for many years and you're going to share a money story from early in your life, your very first real estate purchase or I should say your first house and it sounds like it's going to be a story, but there's something that happened that I think people want to hear. Go for it.

Barbara Corcoran:
Yeah, and it has a valuable lesson. When I committed to purchasing my first home with my first husband. I was about 29 years old. I didn't have a pot to pee in as they say, but we sat across the dinner table for a man who said he was selling a certain house that was like a magical house from what I heard, and my mouth said, I'll take it. And why it was magical. It was a house that anybody would think you could only dream about, which was a house with eight bedrooms two guest cottages, a wet and a dry boat house facing a brand new lake.

Bobbi Rebell:
Did you have kids at this point, Barbara?

Barbara Corcoran:
No, of course not.

Bobbi Rebell:
Who was moving into this mansion?

Barbara Corcoran:
Listen, I figured I'd have fun with friends, but I had no rights saying we'll take it to which my husband was more startled than I was over my own mouth. Because we didn't have a dime to our name, we were struggling to just meet our bills. We're still kind of kids coming up the ranks, but-

Bobbi Rebell:
Wait, so tell me what happened. How did you buy the house?

Barbara Corcoran:
Once I said we'd buy the house, we had the problem of coming up with the down payment, 7,500. And so my husband and I started eating tomato noodles every night that I think they're chef Boyardee or something in a can and bring them lunch every day and we saved every penny of what we were earning in our lives, short of the rent we had to pay for our studio apartment. Well, three months hence we had most of the down payment but not quite and we're out for dinner with the same big boss of his and he mentioned that his father, he wanted to close, which was putting ... Was scaring me to death because I still didn't have enough money.

Barbara Corcoran:
But he said his father was reluctant to leave the house and I volunteered. Well, why don't you let your father stay there, but in trade for that, I got four months extra time. So we were able to save the down payment of $7,500. No problem. But when we got to the closing, the closing costs too, which I didn't have, but he was so in dear to us for keeping his elderly dad in the house that he paid for the closing costs for us. And we moved into that beautiful house and we had it for seven years until I decided to leave my husband and he got the house.

Bobbi Rebell:
Why did that happen? How did you let that happen?

Barbara Corcoran:
You know why? Because I got the apartment in the city by then we had bought a one bedroom apartment in the city and I sold that one bedroom that I paid $80,000 for two years later for 250. And he sold that house that we had paid $75,000 for two years after our divorce for $75,000.

Bobbi Rebell:
So what is the takeaway for our listeners?

Barbara Corcoran:
I'm a believer in always committing throwing it out there and say I'm going to do it. Because when you have that kind of pressure and you've publicly committed, you find a way to get there. If you can commit to something, you'll find a way of getting there. If I had said, give me a couple of months, let me see if I could save for the house, believe me, my rational side would have kicked in and said, what are you doing? But because I said I would, I found a way that could do it and that's the truth, and most people are better than they think. If they're willing to be courageous enough to state it as low as fact and then make it happen versus the other way around.

Bobbi Rebell:
And eat a lot of canned noodles.

Barbara Corcoran:
Oh yeah,[inaudible 00:06:40] Yeah, you can do anything if you know it's temporary.

Bobbi Rebell:
Tell us your everyday money tip because this is also a real Barber tip because this is something that works for you may not work for other people, but it is a strategy that people might want to consider. Again, for you it works it may not be for everyone. Go for it.

Barbara Corcoran:
It's a particularly good strategy if you're out to those your own business, and I'll tell you why. My strategy is this. I always spend money I don't have. If I see money coming in new receivable, three months out, I committed that day, what I'm going to spend it on, and I started spending it even before it arrives. The reason for that is I have no choice but to actually make it happen whatever I'm doing. Because I know I've already committed the money. It's like putting a gun to your own head where you have to produce. If instead you wait for the money to come in and then say, okay, I've got this little extra cash. We've had a profit this month. Let's see the best use of it. That sounds rational, but I'm telling you the fever with which you attacked the best use of it is nothing compared to knowing that the bank is going to come in and chop your head off if you don't produce.

Barbara Corcoran:
So. I've always consistently put myself under pressure by spending money long before I have it and I've never let myself down. There's something magical that happens in the universe when you really under fire when you have no choice that you find a way to get there, and so I'm a big spender and on top of that I can also say, although I was born a poor kid and have my thousand dollar loan from my boyfriend, thank God, or we have been able to quit my waitress job and starting a business nowhere. Okay.

Barbara Corcoran:
But once I had that thousand dollars, I just thought, you know what? This is found money. It's a gift from God and I'm just gonna run this thing up the flag pole until somebody stops me and my most assured policy of making sure no one stopped me was to spend money in advance of having it because I had no choice but to make good on it. I had no choice and ran like a devil with a limited timeframe and I was able to accomplish 10 times more than all my competitors simply because of the pressure I had put on my own back. All right, so it's not what you read in accounting book, but I can tell you when you're building a business, it's a smarter way to go than to be calculated and do it a step at a time.

Bobbi Rebell:
It's the real world. One other quick question though, did you ever have trouble and how did you handle it collecting those receivables?

Barbara Corcoran:
No, I wrote off about 10% of my receivables because you have to appreciate. My business was selling co-ops in New York City and we had about 10% of our deals that didn't approve the Co-op association. They were turned down by the board, so I knew what that average was the first year, by the typical may be the second year in business, I realized I lost 10% of my deals, so I just wrote off that 10%. So that was realistic in suddenly a good accountant would do, but that's where my relationship or any resemblance to an accountant definitely ended in my attitude to it and everything else.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right. I want to talk quickly about your, still relatively new podcast even though who would know it because it's always at the top of the charts where to I'm trying to climb, but you're there and that's a lot because your podcast is so good. It is a short one, so dear to my heart, but you also really deliver personal and as you have here very honest and straightforward advice about your life and the lessons that you have learned and your bold with it. Your most recent episode talked about quitting jobs. You quit 22 jobs Barbara, you also talk about negotiation skills. Tell me more about this podcast and why it is so different and people are really responding to it?

Barbara Corcoran:
I think people are responding well simply because I tell it like it is. And it doesn't mean if it's the person listening, but I think they leave trusting that they heard the truth and I also think I'm impatient by nature. So if you're gonna ask me what about negotiation? Most people can write a book on that. I can't. I can tell you in eight minutes flat, what the key to negotiation, what are the key moves and what doesn't work. And really I don't have more to say after the eight minutes. So I think because I have such a short attention span and because I'm so impatient by nature myself and listening, I want to know what you want out of me and what do I gotta do. And that's pretty much how I am with everybody. Get to the point and then tell me how you get there.

Barbara Corcoran:
So I do get to the point and then tell you how I get there and then the eight minutes are up and I'm signing off. I wish I was more verbose and had more great delicious detail, but I just say the main things that worked for me and I leave it at that and my sign off until the following week. So I hope it works. We'll see. It's very scary as I'm sure you know, to merit someone's eight minutes. I feel it's such an abuse or a trust that I feel like every word has to really, really count or I have no business doing its own. I'm Mostly scared, I'm scared to six days. Then I do the podcast, then I get scared all over again.

Bobbi Rebell:
Well you're doing a great job. I don't find you scary at all. I love it. I think you're worth investing every one of those eight minutes, so thank you for all that you do. Everyone knows where to find you, but just in case because I ask everyone, tell us where you can be found, where people can follow you on social and what else is important that's going on in your life that we should know about.

Barbara Corcoran:
Well, of course it's a Business Unusual, which is the podcast, my newest baby, but as usual, any social platform @BarbaraCorcoran is very easy.

Bobbi Rebell:
Love it. Thank you Barbara.

Barbara Corcoran:
I love you back. Bobbi. Thank you so much. And Go back to your real name, Barbara, it's such a pretty name.

Bobbi Rebell:
So if you're like me, you want to hit rewind and listen again. She's that good. And before I get to the financial bonus tips, just want to make a little comment about the food because we spend so much time agonizing over all of this organic fancy food and when we're saving money, everyone talks about the ramen noodles. I want to talk to you about the chef Boyardee that she and her husband were eating to save up money because you know what, that's fun childhood memories for me. My mom was a working mom and you know what? Sometimes we have something called spaghettios. Do you guys even know what that is? It's basically this like circle pasta in a can and tomato sauce and it's delicious. It may not have any nutrition, but if you see spaghettios in the store, I have no affiliation with them. Pick them up and try them instead of ramen noodles if you're trying to save money.

Bobbi Rebell:
Just for variety, be a little bit bad. Like I said, they're probably not nutritious at all. All right, let's talk about my tips. Finance grownup tip number one. Sometimes financial advice like Barbra's goes against common stereotypical things that we hear. Here's the thing though, always listen to different opinions especially when they're from someone like Barbara Corcoran who has been so successful in so many different fields, to not only real estate where she started out, but also now with Shark Tank. She's an entrepreneur investing in so many different companies, so listen to her and give it some thought. Now I'm not telling you to go out and spend money that you don't have or even to spend on receivables, which is really what she was doing. It was money that she had contracts for but had not yet received so she believed that money was coming, but I see her point and I also see how that can create a really strong motivation so before totally rejecting it or even accepting it, play out how that would work for you.

Bobbi Rebell:
How are you going to cover things for example, if someone does not pay or if they pay, but they are on a delayed schedule so they're not paying in 30 days like your bill says they're paying 60, 90, 100, 20 days out. How are you going to finance that? You have a line of credit with your business. Are you throwing that on a credit card where you might be paying interest, late fees? What have you, factor that in. Are you going to charge a late fee to them? Barbara factored in that 10% of her expected commissions receivables were not going to happen so even she was doing that.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial Grownup tip number two, be creative and flexible. When you're negotiating. Barbara, let the sellers elderly dad stay in the house longer than originally planned. Again, you have to give Barbara props for being open minded and in return by the way, she got precious time and the goodwill was so strong and her gesture was still appreciated that the closing costs were paid by the seller.

Bobbi Rebell:
That is huge. Thank you all for being part of the Financial Grownup community. We bring this to you for free. The only payment we ask is that you share it with someone that you care about and that you believe would enjoy and benefit from the podcast. Your reviews and your feedback. I'm just going to tell you guys straight up there is really important. I read everyone, we don't get as many as I would like. There aren't that many there and I know a lot of you are out there. A lot of you are DMing me, which is actually really great. Still DM me, gave me the feedback, but if you can also leave reviews on Apple podcasts, that is also really helpful to get the show notice because that's how people discover the show.

Bobbi Rebell:
If you do want to also be in touch on social media, it's not either or guys. Follow me and DM me on Instagram @BobbiRebell1 that's the number one on twitter I'm @BobbyRebel and on Facebook, Bobbi Rebell as well. And big things of course to the amazing Barbara Corcoran, the ultimate Financial Grownup. Everyone check out her podcast Business Unusual and watch her on Shark Tank and thank you Barbara Corcoran for getting 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.

Serial entrepreneur Lindsey Holden, who is the CEO and Co-Founder of the personal finance app The Long Game, literally played the long game when she spent 5 years living in her family’s veterinary office, to pay off her student loans and build a solid financial foundation. 

In Lindsay’s money story you will learn:

-Why she lived at her family’s veterinary office for 5 years

-Some of the unique experiences she had and what, if anything she would do differently

-How to come up with creative solutions to financial problems

-Tips on how to pay off student debt

In Lindsay’s money lesson you will learn:

-How to stick to your convictions and deflect judgement when making personal money decisions

-Why Lindsay considers herself a minimalist spender

In Lindsay’s everyday money tip you will learn:

-How to leverage coupon codes using Google ads to get discounts on services like Uber and more.

In My Take you will learn:

-How using gamification can motivate you to save and encourage better money habits

-How to get the most out of a rewards programs

Bobbi and Lindsay also talk about:

-How Lindsay’s app The Long Game works

-Lindsay’s experiences as a serial entrepreneur

EPISODE LINKS

Uber

Google Adwords

Cryptocurrency

https://www.longgame.co/ 

Follow Lindsay!

Twitter @linzor1

Linked In @LindsayHolden

Follow Long Game 

Twitter: @LongGame

Instagram: @LongGameSavings

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

Lindsey Holden:
It's kind of like a sitcom story, right? You're like, "Yeah, I'm actually living at a veterinarian office," which is really weird and also kind of hilarious for your dating life.

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, Financial Grownup friends, hope that little teaser at the top got you curious. This story is one-of-a-kind. And it makes you think, what would you do to get yourself on solid financial footing if you had debt coming out of school? How far would you go? And for how long? And would you care what people thought?

Bobbi Rebell:
Welcome to everyone, and thank you for spending time with us. We keep it short here, around 15 minutes, flex time for podcasts. If you find value, the only payment that we ask is that you share it with friends, the ones you care about, the ones you want to live a richer life.

Bobbi Rebell:
Now to our guest, Lindsey Holden. She is the CEO and founder of Long Game, which is a personal app that uses games and rewards to incentivize financial habits. All of us could use a little extra motivation. And Lindsey was certainly motivated to get her financial life in order. Great story, my friends. Here is Lindsey Holden.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey Lindsey Holden, you're a Financial Grownup, welcome to the podcast.

Lindsey Holden:
Thank you so much.

Bobbi Rebell:
Congratulations on the Long Game. You're certainly in it for the long haul. This is not even your first company.

Lindsey Holden:
Yeah, we built a financial app, so we're an FDIC insured savings account. That have games on top, and you can win up to a million dollars on our app for saving your own money.

Bobbi Rebell:
That's awesome. Let's talk about your money story, because that has to do with building a base to now have the kind of success that you're seeing. You kind of took a step back at one point, to make sure you have that firm foundation, and it had to do with sharing a bathroom with 40 people for about five years? Am I getting that right?

Lindsey Holden:
Yes you are. Let me tell you a little more about that. After leaving college, I had a graduate degree. I had also, major student loans, like a lot of people today. And, I had a job offer in San Francisco, which is a very expensive place to live, and my finances are tight. My father owns a veterinary hospital in San Francisco. So I decided to move into a veterinary hospital, in a room in the back, where I did share a bathroom with 40 people.

Bobbi Rebell:
Explain more. How exactly did that work? Were there 40 people living there?

Lindsey Holden:
No.

Bobbi Rebell:
I didn't think so.

Lindsey Holden:
It was a place of work. Essentially, my bathroom was also shared by the people that work there. And there're specific hours, obviously, where it was much more comfortable to take a shower or whatever it was. But it was kind of a silly thing, but it was a really long period of my life. I had lived there from, I'm embarrassed to say, five years, to pay off my student loans, and get a good start on my career. But there're a lot of silly little things, when you're there. Because you end up being part of a community in the place that you live.

Bobbi Rebell:
So, like what?

Lindsey Holden:
I lived in a room in the back of the hospital, and we had a mouse infestation. Mice, they moved into my room. I was like, "Well, we have so many cats here." So I went downstairs and basically said, "Hey, can I borrow a cat for a minute?" And they're obviously like, "No, you cannot. You cannot take a cat."

Bobbi Rebell:
I thought they were going to say yes.

Lindsey Holden:
I know, me too. There's like a boarding cat, that wants to do some work here.

Bobbi Rebell:
But you actually accomplished quite a bit, because you did pay off your student loans.

Lindsey Holden:
Exactly, yeah. There's a lot of expectations around starting your career, and having this life that you've always imagined. I think it's really important to be practical, and not to be afraid to have creative solutions, and just develop the foundation that you need to build a life that you want.

Bobbi Rebell:
What are the specific things you did, besides not paying rent, to pay off those loans, and form that foundation? So you could go and be an entrepreneur?

Lindsey Holden:
Paying off loans is absolutely huge. Most people today, that are graduating, have student loans, about $38,000 on average. So, to build a lifestyle that you're living well within your means, when you get that first job, is just really important.

Bobbi Rebell:
What are the specific things that you did? So you lived rent-free. Were you changing the kinds of foods that you ate? Did you go out less with your friends? What other things helped you achieve that goal?

Lindsey Holden:
I'm kind of a minimalist when it comes to things, so I wasn't spending too much on extra things, and trying to really optimize my life in that way. I think that's basically a mindset and an attitude that you can get in, that's really helpful.

Bobbi Rebell:
So what is the takeaway lesson for our listeners?

Lindsey Holden:
The takeaway is that maybe it's not cool to move in with your parents or whatever, but don't let shame be the driver in this. I think it's ridiculous. The way to really live a cool life is to be an individual, and be responsible for the financial life that you want to live.

Bobbi Rebell:
Did you ever get criticized? Or did you feel like people judged you?

Lindsey Holden:
Not criticized, but it's like a sitcom story, right? You're like, "Yeah, I'm actually living at a veterinarian office," which is really weird and also kind of hilarious for your dating life, as you can imagine. But I just owned it because it was something that, I really care about building the foundation that you need to have the career that you want. And the people that love you, really start to think that's cool too.

Lindsey Holden:
I've had flowers delivered to the front desk there, before. So all the people that work there, just knew my social life.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right, let's talk about your every day money tip. You have one of the most creative ways I have ever heard of, to really leverage reward codes.

Lindsey Holden:
This one's fun. You know, there're a lot of referral programs out there. When you're playing on the internet a lot, you find creative ways to use these. And one of the things that I did when I was living at veterinary hospital was to run Google AdWords against my Uber code. This can be done with any other referral program, but essentially, the link that you're using is your referral link. And then, you're able to get the money from the referral, which ended up being credits for Uber. It was just a fantastic way to get some free rides around the city.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right, let's talk about the Long Game. So, as I mentioned earlier, this is not your very first venture. You're an experienced entrepreneur. Tell us more about the Long Game.

Lindsey Holden:
Like I said, Long Game is a gamified financial app. We're trying to make banking into a wonderful, joyous experience. And we do that through use of games. A lot of those games are games of chance, where you can win up to a million dollars. But you can also win cryptocurrency in our app. We're always talking to our users and finding out what rewards they want to see in our app. And then using those to help people build a financial foundation that they need.

Bobbi Rebell:
So specifically, how does it work?

Lindsey Holden:
So you download an app, where Long Game, obviously on Google Play and the App Store. You get a FDIC insured savings account. Then, as you save in that savings account, we reward you with games. And you can choose which game you'd like to play. Some of our games are instant win, some of them are a weekly drawing. But they're all giving you a chance where you can win cash. And, the more you save, the more games you can play.

Bobbi Rebell:
How did you come up with this?

Lindsey Holden:
It came from an idea that's called Prize-Linked Savings. It's usually run by financial institutions, or governments, actually, for bonds. But, it's offline, you basically deposit in an account, and there's a monthly raffle, generally. So we've taken that idea, and brought it into an app form, and made it much more engaging and accessible.

Bobbi Rebell:
And tell us more about the future. I know you're always coming up with new games. What can we expect to see next?

Lindsey Holden:
Not only are we coming up with new games, new rewards, all the time, new characters in our app. We're also adding financial products. So, Long Game hopes to be the financial hub that can help you with all your financial needs, in a rewarded way. So you can imagine us later, online banking, letting you pay down your loans, and that sort of thing. And then giving you rewards for completing those actions.

Bobbi Rebell:
What's the biggest prize that anyone has won?

Lindsey Holden:
It's a thousand dollars.

Bobbi Rebell:
A thousand dollars is the most you've given away?

Lindsey Holden:
A lot of people have won a thousand dollars, actually. We've given away over a hundred thousand dollars to-date.

Bobbi Rebell:
Awesome, great. Tell us where people can find out more about you and about the Long Game.

Lindsey Holden:
You can find out more about us on LongGame.co. You can download Long Game in the Google Play store, and the App Store.

Bobbi Rebell:
And, to follow you on all your socials?

Lindsey Holden:
On Twitter, I'm @linzor1. And you can find me, Lindsey Holden on the rest of them.

Bobbi Rebell:
Awesome. Thank you so much Lindsey. This was amazing.

Lindsey Holden:
Thank you so much.

Bobbi Rebell:
Wow, that was a genius money tip there. Super original for sure. DM me if you try it, and let me know how it goes.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial Grownup tip number one. Apps that use gamification to motivate you to adopt better financial habits, are always a good thing. In addition to, of course, checking out the Long Game, some other popular ones are Beeminder. It forces users to make a commitment to a financial goal, and to hit milestones. Now, if you don't hit them, you have to make a payment to Beeminder. Obviously, you can fake out the system, but, if you go with it, it might be just painful enough to make a difference.

Bobbi Rebell:
Another one that's a little different, is Fortune City. Along with bookkeeping and so on, to check expenses, the app has a simulation game to build and grow your own city, so it keeps it interesting. Other more traditional apps that make paying more attention to your money, more fun, and help you achieve savings goals for example, include Acorns, Stash, You Need a Budget, Thrive, and Qapital, that is, Qapital with a Q. I'm going to leave more info in the show notes, which can be found at bobbirebell.com/podcasts/lindseyholden.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial Grownup tip number two. Lindsey talked about sharing her Uber code through Google AdWords. We all get codes all the time. Make sure if you love a product that you use, and you recommend it to a friend, you tell them, give them your code, ask them to use your code, if they try the product. And it's fine to say, "I'll get a bonus," because almost every case, they get something too. And even if they don't, friends want to see you rewarded. So don't be shy about it.

Bobbi Rebell:
And every time you sign up something new, don't forget to use a friend's code, that they can share with you. So if you know a friend uses a service, or goes to a certain exercise place, or buys a certain product, ask them, "Do you have a reward code that you can give me, because I might sign up for that as well." Just think for a moment, who you know that uses that product or service, pay forward.

Bobbi Rebell:
And with that, I want to thank all of you for sharing your time. DM me, let me know your favorite gamification apps. On Twitter, I am @bobbirebell. On Instagram, at bobbirebell1. More about the podcast, at bobbirebell.com/financialgrownuppodcast. And did I mention, my book, How to Be a Financial Grownup is now out in paperback. I'd love it if you pick up a copy, and maybe one for a friend.

Bobbi Rebell:
Thanks, to the Long Game's Lindsey Holden, 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 Stewart, and is a BRK Media production.