Building Financial Independence with Susan Washburn

Announcer 0:44
Gloria Steinem once said, we will never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth. Barbara Provost and Maggie Nielsen are the team at purse strings that will help you navigate the ins and outs of financial independence so that you can be financially fearless. This isWomen and Money, The Shit We Don’t Talk About.

Maggie Nielsen 1:08
Welcome Susan, thank you for being a guest on our podcast today. Yeah, we’re so excited to have you before we dive into all your good stories. Do you want to give us a little background of who you are and what you do?

Susan Washburn 1:22
Sure. Well, let me go back a little ways. I’ve lived a really charmed life. By the age of 30, I had accomplished, I thought everything. I had a fabulous career going. I had a beautiful home in New Orleans, and I was married and starting a family, so I was just checking the boxes off right? Well, two events happened that derailed my life. The first one was a hurricane called Hurricane Katrina, about 20 years ago, and that forced us to leave our home and evacuate, eventually, to the dryer shores of Florida in a little town called Vero Beach. And while I was here, rebuilding our lives, getting kids in school, I delegated my financial affairs. And guess what happened next? A divorce. So here I was, I thought relatively intelligent. I graduated from law school, so I was educated, but I realized I had no financial knowledge, and suddenly I was alone. I was scared, and I had to figure out how to get smarter about my relationship with money. And it’s been quite a journey from round zero, so to speak to where I am today.

Barbara Provost 2:46
That’s an that’s amazing. So let’s dive into all of this. Okay, so you, you evacuated because Hurricane Katrina was coming your way, right? Yeah. And we had talked before, and you said that was the beginning kind of of the end, in a way, because you started realizing some covert activities were going on with the financials in your household. Can you share a little bit about what was going on there?

Susan Washburn 3:12
Well, once we were in Florida, all of the mail suddenly started coming. My ex, my then husband, now x, he had everything going to the office, so I didn’t see the bills, and we never had conversations about money, and I let him once my two sons were born, I just put all of my time and effort into managing those little lives and play dates in school and being, you know, embracing being a full time mom. So it was pretty shocking. I was at a baseball game for one of my guys, and I opened some mail, and I saw that there was a lot of money taken out on margin, and I had no idea what was going on. And other, you know, once you start finding that one deception, they all start falling into place. So I was stunned. I I still am stunned. There’s never a conversation like you know, we have some problems. Maybe we need to work this out. The week before Hurricane Katrina, I went back to work. It was my shortest job ever for a week because I got fired because I couldn’t come back, because I didn’t have a house, but I knew that we needed to have more income coming into the family and with my sons going, you know, school full time, I wanted to go back into the workplace, because I do find some sense of purpose, whether working be in the house or outside of the house, or for so many of us, a combination thereof. So that was really the start of it, and then it just kind of got worse.

Maggie Nielsen 4:58
And so I know. With Katrina, it sounds like you lost everything. So not only were you realizing this financial information, but I assume you’re dealing with what insurance on the house, buying new everything, moving the whole family. I mean, were you able to take anything with you, or is everything just washed away?

Susan Washburn 5:18
We really just one of the best thing we had flights to leave on New Orleans. Our home was about a mile away from one of the Levee Breaks, and it was one story. So I was just exhausted from that first week of going back to work being told I had to wear pantyhose again, you know, just, just silliness. So really, we put the boys in the in the in my SUV. We took some important papers, maybe took two days worth of clothes, and we just wanted to get out ahead of the crowd. And we did do that. And ended up in North Carolina at my folks house for a little bit, until my father saw me play Monopoly for like the 100th time and said, I think they need to go. You need to put these children into school. And when I drove up to this lovely little town called banner out, there’s an elementary school, and it just popped into my head. It said Blue Ribbon School, but it said Happy Labor Day, and Labor Day was spelt wrong. And I said, I think maybe I need to go find a school that, on their side has Labor Day spelled correctly. But it was, it was a time, but you’re right. I see a lot of now people who, in the last few weeks in Florida, we’ve had two hurricanes that have hit people, and we’ve had water surges. We’ve had tornados across the state. We’ve had wind and rain and and people don’t often understand the difference between homeowners insurance and flood insurance. Yeah, I was fortunate that we had flood insurance. And then my father, one Christmas, told my ex husband, he said, Well, you can have more than just you can have excess flood insurance, and he listened to my father, so that was great. So we had insurance than most people, because good people don’t understand that. With homeowners insurance, if you have a flood, it’s not covered, so it’s it’s one of those really hard lessons to learn, and for us, it was something that I think saved us financially. The other thing that people forget is, even if you do get a flood insurance check, if you have a mortgage, that check goes to the mortgage company first. So yes, so you might think, Oh, I’m getting all this money, and you might, but it’s still a lot of different hurdles to come. I know that we had a first time adjuster get to our home in New Orleans, and so he had never seen a disaster, but he had never seen anything. It was his first house, so oh my gosh, we were really put through the ringer on. I had to count the number of shoes, the clothes, the I had to itemize everything. And I didn’t, you know, 20 years ago, I didn’t have an iPhone to take pictures of everything before I left. So it was a real eye opening experience, and just fighting different bureaucracies because the excess flood insurance was in the private market and but I couldn’t get to that. They were all ready to go until, you know, our primary flood insurance had been all settled. Then we could, you know, jump from place to place. But it were trying times. I was always really happy the school, this little school in Vero Beach called Saint Edwards school, and they took our sons in, and it was really great, because they could go someplace where they didn’t see their mom stressed out about fighting insurance companies during the day, trying to figure out what’s next. So

Maggie Nielsen 8:55
Yeah, it sounds like it’s a full time job.

Susan Washburn 8:58
It was a full time job. Grieving was a full time job and moving forward.

Barbara Provost 9:03
Yeah, you know, we have a forensic accountant who focuses on women and kind of, what are the the Inklings or red flags that they are suddenly seeing that shows them, wait a minute, something’s going on here. And yours was getting that kind of on margin, like you said to me, I don’t even know what margin was, but we were in margin.

Susan Washburn 9:26
I saw a big negative, and I’m like, What the heck!

Barbara Provost 9:30
Yeah, so where was the money going?

Susan Washburn 9:34
Well, it was just, I think, I don’t know where it went. I have theories, but I didn’t delve too much into it, because we kind of got settled. We had bought a home, and then I see this happening, and I’m like, Really, here we go. So it it’s really important for women to be involved in their financial affairs. Especially, I read something about how younger. Women today are very involved in getting education, and we’re we’re speaking up for getting pay raises. We’re speaking up for me too. We we are expecting to be treated well in the workplace. But the same speaker said that what happens is lots of times when women get married or have a partner, a male partner, that they’re delegating back those financial responsibilities. Do you hear about that as well?

Maggie Nielsen 10:28
Yeah, we definitely do. And you know, there’s always this part where I understand, like, God, if you’re raising two small children, you’re moving the whole house, I can’t blame you for needing to put something off and to somebody else. You know that makes a lot of sense, but it’s really important to understand. These are the things I can delegate, and these are the things I have to stay in tune with, no matter what tornado is going on around me in my life. Because I do get it can be overwhelming, and you have to pick, you know what you’re gonna you know what you’re gonna put your attention on. And so it is hard, you know, when you’re raising those kids, you got a lot of going a lot of things going on, you know. And I have to manage this as well. It would be easier to give it to somebody else, but we keep saying how you can’t do that.

Susan Washburn 11:13
You can’t.

Barbara Provost 11:13
You need to have money conversations, if nothing else, if someone’s managing it, at least, you need to have conversations of how the management is going.

Susan Washburn 11:22
Absolutely, and I’ve seen clients, as I’m sure all of us have heard of. You know, especially maybe women, older women whose husbands passed and traditionally handled all of that. If their spouse passes, or their spouse has a significant medical situation, they’re very lost, and to try to figure their way through what’s often a maze, whether it’s clearly set up and defined or whether it’s scattered to them. It’s a maze because it’s just always been done, and I just trusted someone that I cared for and loved and the father of my children, and I should have stayed involved, and that would be my one caution to people, is don’t step away from it. Have the conversation. Have date night and date night. Be looking at the numbers.

Barbara Provost 12:12
Yeah. So, so how did you make that move? Like you made a decision you need to make this move. You were a housewife. You had two small children. You know that’s a very vulnerable place to be, a very uncertain place to be. So how did you move forward in that time frame?

Susan Washburn 12:29
Slowly, slowly,

Maggie Nielsen 12:32
One step at a time?

Susan Washburn 12:34
One day at a time. It really was. It was very hard to be divorced in my 40s with two younger kids. It was challenging on many fronts, I, at that time, went to work for my family’s wealth management company. I was an English major. I went to law school, and I went numbers, yeah, and I started doing some compliance work, and then I be, I studied to become a certified financial planner, and even after taking two bar exams, it was really hard in my 40s to go back and learn and learn subject matter that was unfamiliar, and it took, took a little while. It took over a year to do, and that was one of the things that, you know, my family business impressed upon me, that that would be a great even though I have the law degree to have this other skill set. But it took a lot, it took a lot of sacrifice on my part. I focused on my career and my children, and that’s that was my life for a lot of years, and it was hard. There’s no other way to put it. It’s just hard.

Barbara Provost 13:47
But it paid off. It paid off, right?

Susan Washburn 13:49
It did. When my youngest went to college, I guess it’s about seven years ago, I decided that I wanted to learn more about my industry. I decided that I wanted to really put these skills that I had studied for to work. And I came to work for Pro Vice management group, and there was a woman here, a partner, Nancy, and my mentor, and I said, I’m going to go. I’m going to try this. And I spent the next two or three years just learning, learning from all the partners here, really embracing what they could teach, because everyone had a slightly different way of working with clients, of explaining things. So it was, we’re involved in the community. So it was really a good home for me, and it just took time to kind of put all of that together, and somewhere along the line, I guess maybe right before the pandemic, another life event for so many of us, I decided to really focus on working with women, and I worked with a coach, Adri Miller Heckman, who introduced me to you all, and really to get my message. Cross to become clear about how to work with women, how to message, because we all seem to have the same questions, right? Are we going to be okay? Have I done enough? Do I need to do more? Am I going to have to change my lifestyle and to speak in a way that is impactful for women, rather than very techie, because as someone who is not someone look, I’m not a Certified Financial Analyst, I’m not an econ major, those aren’t my strengths, but what I can do is kind of take that and bring it down to a language that a lot of women can understand and not feel like a dance, because we’re often very smart, but we all have different ways of intelligence. So it could be emotional intelligence, it could be book smarts, it could be a combo thereof. So that’s the path I led on. And I love I love that even a few years ago, I also decide to become a certified financial transitionist to help people with the different life events, because you get to learn on the human side of money, and that’s really neat, because our relationships, our emotions, our dreams, they often guide how we make decisions, rather than just the numbers.

Announcer 16:21
purse strings offers an available for hire network of vetted professionals who specialize in serving women. When you have a life event that has suddenly made money a priority, you can now move forward with a whole new confidence that you’re getting advice and services from Savvy professionals who are uniquely equipped to serve your needs, go to purse strings.co and use our directory of hand picked financial professionals when you’re ready to plan for retirement, navigate divorce, buy your next home, fire up your new business and more, go to purse strings.co or check the link in the show notes. Now you can be financially fearless.

Barbara Provost 17:03
Absolutely and you know, it’s interesting, because so often, no one asks women like, what do you want your future to look like? What are you saving your money for? What are your goals? What are your desires? What are your aspirations? Women just are say to us, well, they told me to save. So I saved, you know, but they don’t really know why. So having opening that dialog of, what if, what if I could do this, you know? What if I could change careers? What if I could move by my grandchildren? What if I could travel the world, whatever it might be, but really setting a goal out there and making it intentional.

Maggie Nielsen 17:41
Or knowing that, you know, if you did a little bit more here or there, this is what you could reach, you know, because sometimes, like you said, Susan, it’s in these numbers, or, you know, returns that they’re giving you, where I’m like, okay, is a 7% return? Good? Bad? Is that going to fund my retirement? Should I be worried? Should I be happy? Like, I don’t know what that number means to me in the spectrum of my life. And so it’s kind of like, well, if you told me, Hey, if you do $50 every month more, then you can have this. Okay, that makes sense to me. You know, that makes my dream more of a reality than just telling me like, you know, hitting returns in aprs. I’m like, I What does that mean to me in my life?

Susan Washburn 18:20
Right? To make it more individualized. And there’s so many life events women face just by living longer as we know we we need more money, right? And those last years of our life, if we have health issues, can be more expensive. I’m always shocked when I hear the average age of widowhood. I i always thought it’d be what our 80s, but it isn’t in our late 50s. And are you equipped to deal with that? If that tragedy happens, or silver divorce has become a I think that’s the highest group of people getting divorced now, right? And that has significant financial implications too, because that pot of your your pot is going to get divided in half. So can you live off of half of that? Have you thought about that? And what does that mean? So there’s so many. It’s such the emotional as well as the numbers tied together. One of the worksheets that I like to give out, that I learned about from my certified financial transition is, is a communication worksheet. One of the first worksheets is, how do you communicate? And you just ask, look at two or three things and tell me which of these I need time to digest. Don’t if I don’t ask questions, that doesn’t mean I I’m not listening. Because we don’t talk about money, do we? It’s the shit we don’t talk about. Is the podcast and women, I am the daughter of an investment advisor, all I was ever told to do was save. Well, that’s not enough, either, is it? Because we need to invest, because if we just save and put it in a bank account, we don’t earn anything. So there seems to be this whole conception that we can’t be great investors. I think part of it is we were never you. Given the opportunity you’re taught to invest. We were taught save, save, save. And I think we have society as a perception that all we do is spend.

Maggie Nielsen 20:11
Exactly. Yeah, on our bags, on our shoes, only on luxury goods, not on anybody else, not caring for anyone else, not preparing for anyone else, but only on luxury goods for ourselves.

Susan Washburn 20:21
And that’s what they say with retirement, that men prioritize saving for retirement, and women look at the budget making sure there’s enough money for the household, and then when they get through two or three other things, we get to, oh, yeah, maybe I should save for retirement. So there needs to be a flip on how we prioritize saving and investing. And how do we talk to women and get them excited about that? We talk about our trips, our children. What else do we talk about? Lots of things, but if we bring up the subject of money, I was taught that money was tacky to talk about. Were any of you taught that? Not you. Maggie.

Barbara Provost 21:01
Well, no, we’re changing the narrative here at purse strings, because we say for women, first of all, if we’re not talking about money, we’re not learning about money. And second of all, women need to put themselves first, because, like you said, Susan, we’re going to outlive our male spouses, and we’re going to need money at that time to care for ourselves, because it’s going to be very expensive for our health care and our oversight and all of that. So you know, investing all of your money and your child’s college tuition is not a good return on investment. So, like, decisions like that, really need to be calculated and thought out before we make emotional decisions like that. So we’re really talking about, what are the pros and cons around some of these financial decisions women are making, and how can they best suit themselves first?

Susan Washburn 21:53
No, I think women need to kind of raise your hand so to speak and say, I’m going to prioritize me. I know one of the things I decided about two years ago was, just for my overall health, was to start hiring a trainer twice a week just for physical strength. As I age, I need that. And I thought, I’ll wait till I’m going to retire, and then I’m like, then it’s too late. Let’s go. So it’s taking those little steps, right? That’s not a big step.

Barbara Provost 22:22
No, you’re absolutely right. It’s like Maggie said, the compounding factor of the little things that we do every day, saving lifting a weight, going for a walk, you know, looking at our financials, understanding the balances in our account, you know, calculating financial decisions, meeting with our financial professionals. They don’t have to be overwhelming. They just have to be kind of your everydayness around life skills and life management.

Susan Washburn 22:48
That’s why, when one of my clients, I bring her in every year, she goes, it’s like going to the annual doctor. I said, Yeah, you we need an annual check in. We need an annual checkup on your financials, because I need to know what’s happening in your world. Is there an health issue has something significantly changed that we need to address your life? Because I if you don’t share it, I don’t know it, and it’s like you said, getting the conversation going and continuing it, and it takes a little practice.

Maggie Nielsen 23:16
Yeah I was going to add in there that, you know, these money conversations as much as we say they’re important. And you know, it’s not taboo any longer. If you’ve never had them, it can still be uncomfortable to get started, like a lot of things are, but over time, it does get better and easier, but it’s not going to be like, Oh, you’re right. It’s not taboo, and that’s a really easy thing to do. It does take a minute to warm up, to learn how to talk about it, to learn who you can talk about it with, because some people still are uncomfortable with the topic, so it’s just kind of learning those things and navigating that. But you know, Susan, I think your story is such a great example of like, you can bounce back and it’s never like, this, is it? This is the end. It takes time, small steps forward.

Susan Washburn 23:56
Yeah, keep going. I mean, you don’t know what the next step where it’ll take you, but if you you, I think you have to keep moving. It’s taken me a while, but I’m now an owner. I’m a partner where I am. And if you would ask me seven years ago, was that going to be in the cards? I don’t know if I would have thought that, but it’s just taking those steps because life has some unexpected surprises. Some of them are joyous, some of them huge challenges. So it is having a core group of cheerleaders. I’ve had some great cheerleaders, Barb and Maggie. I’m sure you’ve been cheerleaders for each other, given that your mom and daughter. So I think if you can find those people that lift you up, that inspire you. Some of my mentors here are not women. Some of my you know, some of my greatest cheerleaders have been men, so I like to give them a shout out too. But sure, it’s learning that we also have to be vocal. We have to speak up. I. Wow. They say, just when women apply for jobs, if we don’t have everything on the job description that we don’t apply, and guys are like, right in there, right? I can do one of those 20 things, so we need to take some chances. And when I came over here, I my financial planning skills. That wasn’t what my family’s firm did a whole lot of, and I really took the opportunity to learn and to grow and to kind of put all of those pieces together so we can help people, you know, design a holistic plan that works for them, and especially for women, all the little, little extras that we need to to plan for. It’s like having a caddy on the team, right? If you’re a golf person, you know, having a caddy to help you out.

Maggie Nielsen 25:49
So you talked about, you know, some of the we talked about, some of the harder things that came up on the journey, but let’s share some of, like, the highlights that came up on your journey as well over these 20 years. Any great surprises along the way?

Susan Washburn 26:00
Great surprises. That I’m still standing is always a great surprise, right? Yay, yeah, my sons, I think, obviously I’m a mom, and they’ve both graduated from school. They are in the world working. One got married. So there’s some of my greatest treasures and just learning to try new things, like golf. I try. I started playing golf about two years ago. So some of some of the personal stuff is really important to figure out how you can balance. I come from a very strong New England work ethic, and sometimes I don’t know how to not work. So it another thing. I think, as a mom, I that’s a 24/7 gig, whether you’re at home, whether you’re in the workplace, and being a single mom that taught me a lot, a lot about me and what I could do.

Barbara Provost 26:53
Yeah, and then you look at other moms and have empathy for them, right when you see

Susan Washburn 26:56
Oh my gosh, yes. And I’m so glad to see the workplaces become much kinder to women working moms. Yeah,

Barbara Provost 27:04
We still need more work on it. We do a lot of acknowledging it. Yeah. I mean, I just when I see moms struggling to open a door with a stroller and a toddler, I’m like, let me get that for you. You know, because I know how hard it is to manage all of that when you’ve been in those places, you just want to always lend a helping hand.

Susan Washburn 27:21
Right? No, I absolutely agree. And when I just remember years ago, there part of the reason I became a stay at home mom is because there was so few options for where to put my kids, and it was actually more cost efficient for me to stay home than to pay for daycare. And I think daycare costs are still a huge expense. When I hear clients talk about it, they can’t wait till their kid gets to kindergarten, but it’s it’s a challenge we face and as caregivers, and we tend to be the caregivers that get sandwiched between generations our aging parents and friends and our children and some women are seeing grandchildren too, so

Maggie Nielsen 28:03
It’s a lot, but yeah, I think this has been a really great conversation, just to show that you can bounce back. You know all, there’s so many women who have, you know, similar stories or not alone in that boat, but we’re here to be your cheerleaders. We’re here to help you with those finances. We’re here to teach you what margin is if you need to know, you know whatever it is to help you support and really move forward and start owning your finances. So before we sign off, Susan, are there any last thoughts or notes you want to send to our listeners today?

Susan Washburn 28:33
Sure, get going. You know, figure out where you need to start as a woman to move forward and take a step. I know on purse strings, there are a lot of women and some great guys too. Don’t want to leave them out, but find someone that you can can hear you. I think that find someone that can listen deeply to what you say and prioritizes your relationships. I think that’s a lot of what women want, that we want someone who hears us, can work with us, and sometimes can give a different perspective, or just kind of guide us along there. And yeah, don’t, don’t delay. Get started today. Right?

Barbara Provost 29:17
One In front of the other? Yeah, it’s exactly.

Maggie Nielsen 29:21
Well thank you for coming on today.

Susan Washburn 29:24
Thank you. Thank you, ladies.

Maggie Nielsen 29:25
Thank you for all our listeners tuning in. So like Susan said, Just take one small step forward today and tune in next week for women and money, the shit we don’t talk about, talk to you all soon.

Speaker 3 29:38
Information is for illustrative purposes only and does not constitute tax investment or legal advice. Always consult with a qualified investment legal or tax professional before taking any action. The.

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