Your Points May be Worth More Than You Think with Tiffany Funk
Do you have points sitting in an account right now that you have no idea what to do with? You signed up for the card, you spent the money, and somehow it still feels like not much of a value for you? Tiffany Funk is here to fix that.
Tiffany Funk is the co-founder of Point Me, a platform built to make travel loyalty programs actually accessible to real people. She is a recognized expert in points, miles, and the financial systems that connect airlines, credit cards, and consumers and she has spent her career cutting through the noise so women can make smarter choices with the money they are already spending.
Tiffany left us with something worth sitting with: financial freedom is about having good choices available. This episode is your starting point. And if this topic is important to you, join us for next week’s Money Talks; “The Solo Traveler’s Money Guide: How to Budget for Adventure as a Woman”. Click here to registerfor FREE and bring your questions!
This episode is supported by Meredith Schnepp, VTA, CCC, founder of Sunkissed Bliss Travel. Meredith designs deeply personal, seamless travel experiences for busy women, couples, and families who want beautifully executed trips without the time, stress, or guesswork of planning it themselves. Through carefully vetted global partners and high-touch, full-service planning, she makes sure every detail is handled so you can show up and actually enjoy your trip. If you’re ready to invest in travel that feels as meaningful as it is memorable, book your complimentary consultation at www.sunkissedblisstravel.com and follow her on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook.
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Barbara Provost, EdD and Maggie Nielsen, MBA are the co-founders of Purse Strings, a national platform helping women make confident financial decisions by connecting them with vetted financial professionals who truly understand women’s lives and money needs. Purse Strings connects women across the U.S. with vetted financial professionals who specialize in supporting women through divorce, money transitions, and financial independence.
Full Episode Transcript
(This transcript was generated using AI, so please excuse any misspellings or errors)
PS: Tiffany Funk MP3
Dr. Barb:[00:00:00] You don’t remember this, but there used to be this song, come Fly with me. Come fly, come fly away. And flying, you know, going to the airport. Used to be people used to get dressed up, you know, put on their best digs. Women would wear dresses with nylons. I mean, it was a big, big deal. And. I loved airports in the day when I was a little girl, and we’d go either pick up or drop off one of my sibs, you know, wherever they were going, and you could go to the [00:00:30] gate.
And I always thought, you know, airports are very emotional for me because someone is either leaving or someone you’re welcoming somebody home and, and a,
Maggie: It’s like the beginning of love actually.
Dr. Barb: exactly, exactly. So, airports travel. All of that has really changed for many, many, many unfortunate reasons. But nonetheless, people still love to travel and they love to travel for free.
Maggie: Who wouldn’t wanna travel for free. And I think that’s why [00:01:00] we wanted to have this conversation of digging into points. And like transparently, I’m not using my points enough, I just paid off all my credit card debt. So I’ve been like, let’s not use a credit card, you know? But now I’m like, I’m missing out on points and I wanna get back in the game.
Dr. Barb: There you go. But are they the right points? That’s something we really, really learned because I told our speaker, Tiffany our expert, I should call her, how overwhelming it can be. Like, it’s almost like overwhelming. I almost do nothing because I can’t[00:01:30]
Maggie: It’s like decision fatigue
Dr. Barb: Yeah, exactly.
Maggie: well, we’re changing that. We’ll sit down and figure this out ’cause we’re gonna get some business points. We’re gonna get some personal points and we are gonna go to Tahiti.
Dr. Barb: Yep. That’s where Tiffany was calling in from. So let’s learn her secrets, her insights, and her tips on how to leverage points on credit cards so that you can travel the world.
Maggie: Let’s get started.
[00:02:00] 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 is women in money, the shit we don’t talk about.
Maggie: Tiffany, [00:02:30] we are so excited to have you on the show today. So before we get started, can you give us a quick intro, who you are, what you do, and how did you end up in the world of travel points and loyalty?
Tiffany: I’m Tiffany Funk, and yes, I am an expert in travel and especially more than travel, the points, the loyalty, the financial systems that make it all work together and. It’s so interesting to me. I come to travel from a love of aviation and I think that’s [00:03:00] maybe less common, but I love planes.
I love airports. Grew up doing a lot of flying. My dad was a private pilot and, you know, it’s just, it’s a very different experience and gives you a very different perspective, I think on the whole space. We all love to travel. Vacation is fabulous, but the complexity. With loyalty programs and the ways that they interplay between the airlines they support and the financial institutions and the customers has always been really fascinating to me.
Those levers of finance and [00:03:30] industry and, you know, just the different impacts they have, we don’t really think about it, right? You just go to the airport and it works. You don’t think about how the money moves. And I love thinking about how the money.
So that’s sort of the anger for me.
That’s why I co-founded Point Me, which is a company that helps people use their points and think about their points in terms of, you know, travel wealth rather than just coupons. And it, that’s just my overall philosophy is there’s. These really interesting systems, people are generally not [00:04:00] really informed or financially literate when it comes to this other side of it.
And I like being able to sort of evangelize around, oh my gosh, you’re missing out. Or just, Hey, once you understand this, you’ll be able to make so many better choices and feel so much more informed to the consumer.
Dr. Barb: Wow. I’m so glad we’re having this conversation because it is so confusing and there’s so many competing messages out there from different companies about get this many travel points, but you can only [00:04:30] do this airline or do this travel points, but you have to pay this amount of money. But if you use this much travel, then it kind of is a wash So thank you.
I hope we can walk away with really good strategies on how to leverage all of these benefits.
Tiffany: Yeah, it is really confusing and I think everything is more complicated with social media and I think this space in particular, since I think 2020, I’ve seen just a flood of misinformation and people who, [00:05:00] they understand the tip of the iceberg, but they. Are great influencers and so they present it as though they know the whole thing.
And it’s really, to your point, it’s creating a lot more confusion. And I think it’s taking something that should be really approachable, really accessible. We are all smart ladies, and turned it into like, Nope, can’t do it. Don’t have the brain. So cutting away through that I think is like the best thing we can do for people.
Maggie: So before we get into like all the tips and tricks, which I definitely wanted to get into, when did you realize like [00:05:30] this could be a money strategy and not just a perk? Was there like a moment or a trip where this kind of really clicked for you?
Tiffany: Ooh. So there’s layers to that. So, I mean, the first thing I knew about airline programs because my parents got divorced when I was a kid and my dad moved to Hawaii, and so I was flying back and
Maggie: A lot of points right there.
Dr. Barb: yeah,
Tiffany: yeah, and it was different. It was a different time. United flew seven 40 sevens at the day, which if you’re not a big aviation person, those are the ones with like lots of [00:06:00] engines in an upstairs.
And so there would be times where because I was such a frequent flyer of United, I would get upgraded to get to go and sit upstairs as an unaccompanied minor. So it’s like, you know, there’s a system there and like that’s very impressionable. But where I really got into point, was during the last recession, well over the last, how are we tracking these days?
The 2008 one
Maggie: Yep.
Tiffany: where I was leading a corporate team but had to do a lot of travel and we were in such a tight moment [00:06:30] where you were literally tracking pennies and you know, I was having to do this business travel and I was looking at like the perks that a hotel loyalty program would give you, knowing that loyalty programs were a thing.
And one of them was breakfast. And I looked at that and I said, you know what? If they will pay for breakfast, which is like $25, that’s actually three hours of labor that I can put back into my P&L. And like right now that matters, right? Like that helps me keep someone employed. So Hilton Marriott, if you’d like to buy me breakfast, [00:07:00] fabulous.
That was like a direct impact. And that’s like still in a big corporate job within an expense account. But in a moment where we were really trying to look at every dollar of spend. And I think a lot of us fall into this trap where we’re really good at being stewards of our company’s money. Are really good fiduciaries of our P&L, but tend to sometimes neglect our own personal side of it.
And so I think like that’s just sort of the approach that I take. Yeah. With the personal side of it too. [00:07:30] You know, you don’t necessarily need to be maximizing every single penny. You don’t need to be like the people on Reddit love them, but like, if it’s your hobby, it’s a passion. It’s different. There’s also just like good financial choices you can make that make it easier.
Maggie: there’s like the super couponers, but in like different buckets, you know, it’s like the super pointers and they’re like getting all the deals and the super hotelers, you know, and getting all the deals. It’s funny, there’s like subcategories of all of ‘ em.
Tiffany: Right. You can do that, but like you don’t have to get free toothpaste every time you go to Walgreens to still take [00:08:00] advantage of like smart purchasing decision.
Maggie: yeah, that gets exhausting, especially if you’re like juggling kids and have many other things going on as well.
Tiffany: I’m actually so glad you mentioned that, Maggie ’cause this is one of the biggest things, like when I came up through miles and points and in that like frequent flyer community, the flyer talk of the day, there were so few women, in that space. And it wasn’t because it was necessarily an exclusionary space.
It reflected the demographics of the majority of business travel then and now is conducted [00:08:30] by men. The jobs that require that kind of travel and then like give you those kinds of perks are not as accessible to care providers and people who are doing that juggling. You know, you can’t have the consultant schedule of out Monday morning, back Thursday night.
And deal with soccer and doctor’s appointments and, you know, the dog doesn’t have food. And so I think like that’s part of it too, and where a lot of the framing with a lot of these miles and points thing, I think it’s actually really important, especially in this space, to [00:09:00] acknowledge that content is very male dominated.
And so a lot of the influencers, like I ran business for one mile at a time for years. And again, that’s. It’s very male. It’s young single men or people who other people are running their home economics. And that really shifts the tone of the conversation. And I think as part of, like, to your point, Barb, what makes it a little like this doesn’t apply to me because you are actually not the target audience for a lot of this content.
Dr. Barb: Oh, that’s so interesting.
Maggie:[00:09:30] And when I was looking for people to talk about this, there were a lot of men that came up and you were one of the only women. And so I was like, oh, damn, let’s get her on,
Tiffany: Yeah, I mean, to be fair, that is getting better and there are
a ton of women in this space now, especially Instagram has been really good for promoting those voices and like sort of building that community of like women who do points and travel, but the crux of it, the majority of frequent flyers but I do my demographic samples in the lounges and in the first class cabin domestically, and [00:10:00] it is only ever on Alaska where I am sitting next to another woman.
And I think that reflects the business demographics of the Pacific Northwest. You know, where you have just more female executives and people in those roles over in this part of the country. But I’ve never sat next to a woman in the first class cabin on an American flight or a Delta flight or a United Flight and their frequent flyer programs.
And thus the content around it, it is more male and like that’s okay. I think it’s just helpful to know, you know, as you’re digging into these things.
Dr. Barb:[00:10:30] I think the airlines and the hotels have a great opportunity here though, because so many women are in charge of, you know, making financial decisions in the household. And if they’re booking vacations and things like that, and they can leverage these, they can focus on, you know, what women want and need.
And we look at organizations like those who typically, you know, focused on men and they have this huge potential to say, what is it that women wanna need when they’re traveling, which is quite [00:11:00] different than what men wanna need.
Tiffany: exactly, and especially because women do make the majority of travel purchasing decisions, whether that’s because they’re making them for their household or they are the ones who are the office coordinators booking
travel, these roles shouldn’t be gendered, but like they are, or they’re even the people who are negotiating corporate contracts.
And to their credit, Hyatt actually took your advice a few years ago maybe about 10 years ago, and they hired a team to come in and say, look, we actually want to draw more business [00:11:30] travelers who are women. We see that this is a demographic that’s coming up. Like what do women want in hotels? And so you will see in Hyatt properties that are in, that have been more abated more recently, there’s outlets everywhere.
The ergonomics are better. There is lighting, you know, there are makeup mirrors where you would want them to be. There are steamers in the room already, right? Little things like that, that just saves you having to call and try and track down a steamer,
Maggie: Are they the ones who also offer, like now like yoga mats when you [00:12:00] go and you know, different things like that where it’s like, I would love to do my yoga, but my mat is not the top priority to bring with me when I
Tiffany: Yeah and Weston did that too, where they actually for a while were like, you can just have like workout gear or we’ll set those things up for you. And so you are seeing brands try and think about that more and sort of acknowledge that if, you know, for half of the traveling population, our stuff does not actually fit in that 3 1 1 bag and we’re going to need more support when we get to the property, which is great.
Dr. Barb: So [00:12:30] here’s my concern. I see all these, you know, get United, get 150,000 points and with American get 90,000 points for their credit card, you know, and then always go to this hotel and that hotel. It’s so overwhelming and we travel. And I do nothing because I don’t know which one’s the best. Am I gonna get locked into a credit card that, oh, I should have done this one over here.
I didn’t know, you know? So what are women getting wrong [00:13:00] with some of this travel stuff?
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Tiffany: This is very interesting. When we talk about like, making financial investments, they often talk about like woman’s portfolio will outperform. A [00:14:30] mans over time, right? Because we tend to be a little bit more conservative. We tend to spread our risk. And so if we’ve already thought about that, we can take that same ethos and apply it to our miles and points in travel.
So you can be opportunistic. If United wants to give you 150,000 points for getting their credit cards, like great take it. But for your everyday card, in your day-to-day spend, you’re not buying single stocks in your normal portfolio, right? None of us have time to be doing penetrating or like day trading or like trying to care, which
you know, time the market, we’re very [00:15:00] busy. So looking at what we call flexible points, currencies. So those are like your American Express membership rewards, your chase ultimate rewards your city. Thank you. Wells Fargo has this now with their autograph cards. Capital One has them with their venture cards.
That’s like buying a mutual fund rather than buying a single stock. So you might not see as high of points offers with those cards, but you’re going to get a much better return on your everyday spending. You know, I have an Amex Gold card and it gives me four times points on [00:15:30] groceries. Well, they would want me to say like, at US supermarkets
because banks, but like, that’s huge in our house.
I love to cook. That’s our, one of our biggest expenses. And so if I were using, you know, an Alaska card or United Card or a Delta card, I’d only be getting one point there. So I’m earning points four times as quickly. And then when it’s time for me to use those points, there’s a dozen airlines I can transfer them to.
Or I can use them as just cash back in the Amex portal, which is not the best value, but to your point, at least I’m doing [00:16:00] something if it got overwhelming. And I think like, so that’s the first thing is just like with your finances, you don’t have to know what is the best airline program out there.
Although, point me does a study every year where we look at it quantitatively and we can say like, Hey, you know, the best airline rewards program is this. It’s been Flying Blue the past two years, which is a program that probably most Americans haven’t even heard of.
Maggie: Yeah. Flying blue. What’s that airline?
Tiffany: Yeah, it’s the loyalty program for Air France and KLM and Transavia, but they partner with a lot of us credit cards and like, who doesn’t wanna go to [00:16:30] Europe?
And they have, they’re partners with Delta. So you can, you know, earn points with these different credit cards, you can transfer them to flying Blue. You know, and they offer a lot of options that we’ve found when we look at this from a quantitative perspective. Are really compelling. You know, they let you put the flights on hold before you move your points.
They have some discounted points, rates for families, you know, and just like little things that make it a little bit more accessible to people. But again, you don’t have to decide ahead of time. You know, you can wait until you’re ready to book the trip and then [00:17:00] see when this is what point B shows you, you know, all of the different options available across all of these different programs for the flights you want to take.
Maggie: So, yeah, let’s explain a little bit more about what point me can help with that. ’cause I was poking around on your website and it’s very interesting and it’s kind of going and utilizing those points through Point me and you’ve just kind of aggregated and found the best ways to use those points without people having to pull up the 18,000 tabs it seems
Tiffany: You described that so well because that was literally our frustration when we decided to Bill point me, [00:17:30] you know, we’ve been helping people one-on-one conversations, emails. We actually had a thriving consultancy business, two of them, where we were helping people, you know, more individually booking their trips.
And it was like, no, how does anyone ever get anywhere?
Maggie: We don’t.
Tiffany: Right? And looking at like, you know, American Express has allowed people to transfer points to these various frequent flyer programs for longer than I’ve been alive. But didn’t have a mechanism to tell you like what flights [00:18:00] when, how many points it would be.
And so we’d really built these legacy businesses on referrals and people who would be playing tennis with their neighbors and be like, oh my gosh, I called the number on the back of my American Express card and they said it was gonna be a million points to go to Rome. And they’d say, oh, well you need to call these people and like they will help you do it properly.
And we would, and it’d be a hundred thousand points. It’s more new because inflation is a thing for everyone. But yeah, so it was really that, and it was so cool because it allowed us to solve a problem for the industry that they hadn’t been able to solve [00:18:30] for themselves. And to be able to say like, Hey, if you have these Amex points, here’s all the things you can do.
And what’s so interesting is that to your point, women make so many of these decisions, they’re the ones doing a lot of spending and the shift in cardholder behavior as consumers are feeling more empowered and are like, oh, now I get it. I’m using my points. I’ve never used them before, but now that I’m using them, I feel differently about how I spend on this card.
I’m Transaviacting differently. [00:19:00] And so it’s just raising everyone up. Consumers are getting what they want. Banks are getting more money. The loyalty programs are getting, you know, more points transferred in and so they’re happy seats are going out full and it’s just really interesting the impacts across that whole cycle.
Dr. Barb: So I have a question. Somewhat personal.
You know, I feel like, you know, I’ve been just kind of your everyday traveler, but sometimes I get in the airport and I’m like, you know what? What would it take to get bumped up to first class? Or when can I go in and use [00:19:30] this, you know, those comfort lounges or whatever, you know what I mean?
Like, I don’t even think of that because I just go in like your everyday traveler and you know, grab a coffee and sit down and wait. But, you know, how can we upscale our, you know, travel luxury by using points?
Tiffany: I love that and I love that you’re specifically going like by using point, because I think a lot of people want to upgrade from you economy to first, and they think if I wear nicer shoes, that will happen for me. It won’t. If [00:20:00] I fly the airline more, it’ll happen for me. It probably won’t anymore. You know how it used to work is that as a consequence of deregulation first class cabins, like domestic first, those cabins have been going out mostly empty
for a couple generations. Historically before 2021 86% of those seats were not getting sold. But it was important to have them because sometimes you need them. It was important for the corporate contracts, the aspirational of it. You’re configuring the [00:20:30] planes and it let airlines say like, Hey, for our most frequent flyers, we can entice you
to have your boss pay for you to fly on our airline with the promise of like, we’ll upgrade you. Now, business travel has really shifted. We all know how to use Zoom now in a way that we didn’t in 2019, and we are seeing more leisure travel and leisure travelers. They don’t travel one person with no bag.
We come in a posse, right? It’s a whole thing. And so now it’s [00:21:00] completely inverted where not even 14% of domestic first class seats are going unsold, like they’re getting purchased outright. So I think that’s the first, like edit your expectations. You’re not getting upgraded. It doesn’t really matter who you are.
You’re not getting upgraded,
Dr. Barb: I’ve never gotten upgraded ever.
Tiffany: even if you are like a top tier elite. And I say this affectionately, like, you’re not getting upgraded because the seats are full. They’ve been sold. You know, and airlines have become much more effective at monetizing those seats and saying like, they’ll sometimes email [00:21:30] even their elites a couple hour hours or days before departure.
Like, you know, upgrade list is not looking good, but like $45 and we’ll put you in the front. And somebody who’s on a business expense account, like that’s a great deal, right? They can laptop without being a tyrannosaurus. And so that makes sense for them. So the first thing really is like, buy the cabin
you want to sit in. Whether you’re using points or money, and I think people are often surprised when you look at the points prices. They’re not that much higher for business than economy.
I [00:22:00] was looking at booking a flight just for my mom for this Saturday actually, and she’s, you know, it’s just Phoenix to Salt Lake.
But economy is 4,500 points and business is 7,000. You know, it’s just, it’s a short flight. It’s not a big deal. It’s not a good use of points to sit in first class for a flight that short anyway, but that sort of gives you a sense of the delta. Internationally, the deltas are often even smaller, which is, I think the really the best time to look at using your ticket.
Your points for tickets is for those business class where it’s also actually like, actually nice as opposed to [00:22:30] domestic first class, which is not really significantly better in most cases, unless you’re on, you know, the fancy planes between New York and LA and San Francisco. So that’s, I think that’s the biggest thing is like, check the prices.
You can really be surprised plan on getting the cabin you want to sit in because the upgrade mechanisms are just not there anymore. Which is just function of supply and demand.
Maggie: And then how do we get into those like elite rooms at the airport?
Tiffany: I think the first question you might wanna ask is like, do you want to.
Because I, [00:23:00] it was flying last week and was in San Francisco and walking past, like lounge after lounge where they’ve got lines and like, I don’t go to the airport to queue.
I’m not there to queue. I have pre-check and I have global entry and I time it so that I don’t have to queue.
So like that to me is negative value. I would rather go and sit. Buy an empty gate and be able to charge my phone, then queue to get cube cheese.
Dr. Barb: I
Tiffany: it’s just where I’m at in my life right [00:23:30] now. But I think when you’re traveling as a family, you can easily spend $150 in the airport on,
Maggie: no problem
on anything.
Tiffany: Right, right. You’re just like, oh my gosh, like we got two sandwiches and a soda, and how is it a hundred dollars? So, you know, I think in that case, that’s where it’s really valuable. And that’s also because now we have the shift of leisure travelers who are the ones who are using the airport and using these facilities.
Like that’s why it’s crowded. Our airports are designed more around business capacity rather than leisure [00:24:00] capacity. So a lot of credit cards these days, I almost think it’s table stakes for a lot of these credit cards will give you some kind of lounge access or they’ll give you some kinds of credit.
And that’s a little bit of a matter of like, where do you fly? What do you need when you travel and sort of using that as your filter. The first filter I think should be getting points that are flexible, buying that mutual fund and then looking at the subcategories of, okay, well if I have this card is going to give me access to, like, capital One has really nice lounges but I don’t travel through any of the [00:24:30] airports that Capital One has lounges at.
You might. And like their concept is great. They even have like a grab and go, which is really helpful if you’re, you know, sort of constrained. You can just grab those packaged snacks and like then feed your family someplace where they’re seating, you know, that can be a really good option. But that’s just a little bit like you have to know your travel patterns and what you’re going to do.
And if it also goes into, if you’re only flying a couple, three times a year in economy. Does it make sense to pay that higher annual fee to [00:25:00] get that handful of mile access. I say this with no judgment because it’s truly just a math question, and it’s math that we can all do, and you will find it very empowering to do, is to look at like, how much did I spend the last three times I was at the airport?
Okay, this card pays for itself. If I can use these lounges, even if the snacks aren’t good, it’s still better than like whatever I spent. Or you might look at it and say, you know, I always check a bag. I think especially people who have like kids under five, you’re checking bags. Like, let’s just admit it, you’re checking [00:25:30] bags and you wanna check a lot of bags and you’re gonna be more comfortable if you don’t try and carry that all on the plane.
And so in that case, like getting that airline co-branded credit card that gives free checked bags for everyone on your itinerary is a no brainer. You’re spending like the $95 annual fee and you would pay that in one way of one trip. You know? So definitely get that. Maybe don’t use that card for your everyday spending.
But you’re basically preparing your bags for the year with that annual fee. So it’s sort of that, if that makes sense when you’re talking like, how do you think about it and how [00:26:00] do you make this a math problem rather than this big, overwhelming, there’s so many perks and all the influencers, and I saw this TikTok and she had pajamas, and I want pajamas on the airplane.
Just strip all that out and just bring it down to the dollars and cents. It makes it honestly, so much easier.
Maggie: it is interesting when you look at those cards that we’re like, I can’t believe it’d be 500 a year, but you know, like my friend was just saying that she gets $15 a month in uber credits and she lives in a city, so she’s like never [00:26:30] not gonna use that. So that’s already some cash. So like, you know, it’s interesting how it does come to a wash, but you just gotta kind of see how those payments equal out.
Every time we’re on the airplane, they offer a credit card. I know you can get, like, then you have your Capital One and you have your Chase or whatever. How many credit cards do you have?
Dr. Barb: Or does one need?
Tiffany: those are two very different questions ladies.
Maggie: It seems like they’re adding up. ’cause there’s a point where you’re like, I don’t feel like I should have 10, 12 cards,
Tiffany: Yeah, I mean, okay. Like, we’ll just do this. I’ll say this is the stack of [00:27:00] cards that just lives on my desk for making internet purchases. And then like, we won’t even talk about like, what’s in my wallet versus what’s in my Apple pay versus I have a binder behind me with cards but like don’t be like me.
Don’t be like me. Everybody just has to find the things that work for you. And like I’m very good at spreadsheets, I own and run businesses. But I’m very visual when it comes to keeping my life organized. So I have the binder and it’s got baseball card holders in it, so I have every card I’ve ever had in there.
And then I just put a post-it note on it, like wasn’t great or like canceled for [00:27:30] this reason so that I can just offload that from my working memory and not have to remember it. And that’s, I think part of the other thing you don’t have to remember all these things. Right. You can write it down, you can use tools that show you all the options.
You can save your brain for other things like knowing your child’s third grade teacher’s, shoe size, you know, these other like
Dr. Barb: Because that’s important.
Tiffany: know,
End up overwhelming us. Thinking about the mental load of it, I think most people, well, most US households are using two or three credit [00:28:00] cards.
Is sort of the average. It doesn’t mean you have to, but that might look like, you know, a lot of people like to have like their Costco card or their Amazon card. I don’t think either of those are particularly great cards. For somebody who wants to travel, but based off of household spending, like they can still make sense.
You’re essentially getting cash back and cash back to your budget is never a bad thing. Especially right now. So, you know, but then you might also need to have that airline card. Maybe you’re not gonna spend on it all the time, but if you’re getting those free [00:28:30] bags, you know, why not? Where I think you have to be careful is having multiple high fee cards.
And I see a lot of people who I think have sort of been enchanted by the whole thing. People who have both like a Sapphire Reserve and an MX Platinum. And right now, if you have both of those cards with all the changes, you’re paying 1700 $800 in annual fees.
And Right. And I feel like those people need to take a beat and actually do the math because yes, you’re getting your $15 credit here and you’re getting your Lululemon credit and you’re getting [00:29:00] this, and you’re getting that.
But is that money you are going to spend anyway? Like, is it actually a savings maybe for some people? It really is, and I talk to people who like are in New York and they’re like I get so much value outta these cards. It’s fantastic. But like I live in Spokane. So, yeah, it just is not the same. And I think a lot of the times if you don’t live in one of these primary markets, these cards aren’t as tailored for you, and that’s okay.
Just like look at it critically.
Dr. Barb: So I have a question around business credit cards and business travel, [00:29:30] because we’ve been talking about credit cards kind of in general, but if we were to focus on women who have small, medium, large businesses what’s the advantage to some of the credit cards for them? What should they be looking at?
Tiffany: That’s fantastic. And I think the same rules apply, right? So you wanna be looking at like these broader, what are the points that you’re earning if you’re wanting to travel or you know, what kind of spend do you do for your business? I know somebody and they do a lot of print mailing [00:30:00] for their business, right?
The things that show up in your post office and to the tune of like, millions of dollars a year. Because printing is expensive ultimately and there’s gonna be people listening who are like, it really is, you’d be shocked. And so for them having a card I think they mostly use an Amex business Platinum because.
That card gives you like one and a half points on any Transaviactions over $5,000 and doesn’t have a preset spending limit. And so for them they’re like, I spend nothing. I spend nothing. I spend nothing. I spend nothing. I spend [00:30:30] $800,000 on printing and mailing and then I spend nothing. So like that’s a really good example of that works so well for that business.
And I think there’s lots of businesses that are like that, an esthetician where like you’re not really spending a lot, but now you need to make a huge purchase because you’re getting like a new laser machine or something. You know, there’s cards that sort of cater to the fluctuations that a business has, so I think that’s really helpful.
Other than Capital One, business cards also don’t report to your personal credit, and so that can be a really good way of sort of [00:31:00] separating things out. It can also just straight up make your accounting easier, even if you have an Etsy shop and you have a, you know, a very small business. Having all the business expenses on one card does make it a lot easier come tax time to just export the CSV and be like, these were my business expenses.
So I think like there’s so many benefits. And it’s funny, I was talking about this with my husband last night because my coworker podcast about money. I also think it’s important to remember that like until the late seventies, early eighties, [00:31:30] like women couldn’t open a business credit card. And so there is some part of me that’s like, you should actually just open them because you can
Maggie: We’re taking advantage of whatever we can
Tiffany: Yeah, like, just take advantage because it’s how you give more working capital to your business. You know? It’s not like you, I wouldn’t use it in terms of, as opposed to a loan, but, you know, for cash flow, for organization, for earning the points, for getting some of the perks, you know, and they just, they think about it differently than the personal cards.
So the way you spend gets you things in a little bit different of a [00:32:00] way.
Maggie: This has been so fun because it’s the flip of a conversation of it’s always, you know, no credit cards, no debt, blah, blah, blah, which I get, I hear it. You know it. If you’re using credit cards and racking up the debt, it’s going to, the points are not beneficial,
Tiffany: No, and I think especially with these cards, like, I’m so glad you mentioned that. Like if you are in a situation where you need to carry a balance, it happens. That’s not a points earning card because these cards have much, much higher interest rate. Than cards that are more [00:32:30] designed for like those other phases in life.
So these are not the cards to carry a balance on. These are the cards to pay off in full every month. They’re the ones to use for, 21 day cash flow situations, which can be really huge for families and small businesses. But just to think about that. And if you’re starting to get into a period of time where the builder catching up, I would immediately.
Get a low interest card possibly even from your credit union, transfer those balances over because you know, if you’re paying 35% interest or whatever, it’s just going to totally eat [00:33:00] away at whatever theoretical perks you might have.
Maggie: Yeah we’ve heard people say, well, it gets me the points. I’m like, yeah, but you’re in debt so it’s not working. But it’s nice to have this conversation of the cards can work for you if you work the system the right way. And it can be your benefits for the things you purchase. It’s just having that nice you know, that nice line of knowing that you could pay it off versus this is actually just some debt that I need to work on paying down.
So if someone listening today wants to start points and things like that, what’s one simple shift they can make that would immediately get them more [00:33:30] value from their spending?
Tiffany: Ooh, I love that. I think the first thing is to look at your spending. Probably everybody who comes on your podcast is like, look at your spending.
Maggie: But yours is gonna get us to travel, so it’s a better,
Tiffany: Yeah. But I do think that’s the first step. Like where do you spend as a householder, as a business? And start with that as your framework and be like, okay, wow.
I actually spend a lot on, at the pharmacy. Right. Some people you got some expensive medications. So then look like, look at that and find a card that sort of matches [00:34:00] your spending. I think a lot of people are like, oh, I want to travel. I’ll get a card That gives me points on travel, but most of us don’t actually spend that much on travel compared to like our other spending categories.
So that’s always my first step because the wow get three times points on travel or two times points on travel Is. It’s like sexy. It’s a compelling offer. You know, when you’re on the plane and the flight attendants are saying like, you can get three times points on every purchase on this airline, but how many airline tickets do you really buy every year versus like soccer fees.
Dr. Barb: Yeah. Be real about it for [00:34:30] sure.
Tiffany: So I think that’s the first thing. And most people, like we find, like once we have that conversation and point me will do like, card consulting as well for people and there’s, we have a quiz too that people can do that can help, like find, help them if you’re just totally overwhelmed, just like start orienting you.
But when, once we have that conversation, we generally find that most people double or triple how many points they’re earning in a year just
by taking that step back and be like where do I actually spend money? And like, let’s get a credit card that matches that. Poof.
Dr. Barb: Yeah, share a bit about what it is that you do [00:35:00] and how you help women or clients, or consumers really make the best selection of points, or is that what you do?
Tiffany: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s layers to it, right? And when I look at my career and how it’s flowed through, it’s really been about opening up these loyalty programs to a broader audience and, you know. Thinking differently about the financial systems and the whole ecosystem of it with point me how that works.
You know, it’s designed to be very [00:35:30] friendly for consumers and really to be an educational tool as much as anything else. So again, we believe that like a rising tide lifts all boats and
there’s space for everyone to win here. And that’s like when consumers are getting what they want. It’s also.
Helpful for the airlines, it’s helpful for the loyalty programs, it’s helpful for financial institutions. So it’s like how do we educate everyone and get everyone on the same page? Because at the end of the day, nobody wants an airline seat to go out empty.
And banks want you using a credit card, not a debit [00:36:00] card.
Right? So like those are our anchoring points. Points. And I think like that’s a lot of what pointy does. So showing that transparency of like, here’s all of your options for flights. Here’s the credit card that are going to get you these flights. And then like degrees of help, right? There’s a lot of stuff that’s self-serve.
There’s also some concierges, there’s some great points, advisors that just sort of, depending on like how much help people need. And really the idea being, you know, when we started point me, there were blogs and subreddits and like deep in flyer talk, talking about [00:36:30] frequent flyer programs, but there wasn’t tooling.
There wasn’t really the same. National conversation about it. So I love that. Like ultimately what we’ve done is we have elevated the conversation, right? And we were successful in disrupting this space in a way that’s like really bringing more people to it. And like second order consequence is that now it gets almost a little bit more overwhelming because now you know that you’re missing out.
So it’s but there’s lots that can help lots of experts out there. And I think being [00:37:00] able to narrow the focus. Is what’s most helpful for most people.
Maggie: Yeah, I’m excited to, to use it for my next trip. And I was poking around, I was like how do I get to France faster? So we’ll have to, I’ll have to assess my credit cards. I think it’s all spending on groceries. So what else is new?
Dr. Barb: Well, we’ll put all that information in the show notes if people are interested to connect with you and learn how to navigate the site.
Maggie: Yeah, this has been a lot of fun. Great conversation. Great learning tips. There is a question we ask all of our guests. [00:37:30] So Tiffany, to wrap us up, what does financial freedom look like for you in this season of your life?
No pressure.
Tiffany: No, that’s actually, I think maybe a bigger question you were realizing, but we won’t get into that ’cause we’re at the end of the podcast. for me, I like having the ability to have choices. Like that’s ultimately what it is for me. I you know, my parents got divorced when I was really young.
My grandmother was also like a single mom, you know, in the sixties on effectively no income. And so I think [00:38:00] one of the things that I feel so privileged and lucky about is I have had a lot more ability to make good choices. Like I’ve had good choices available compared to like previous generations of the women in my family.
And I really like, don’t take that for granted. I want to be able to have good choices. I don’t wanna be in a situation where it’s like, which of these awful choices, like what’s the least bad thing I can do here?
So like, that’s really how I like to structure it. probably more in my emergency fund than is sensible that I could be investing. But a [00:38:30] little bit of a dragon, like I just like knowing that I have options. So I think it’s that for me.
Maggie: I love that. ’cause there are sometimes we have options and all of ’em are great. You’re picking the best from the worst, but I like how you really reframed it. As you know, you wanna pick the best option for you that you can do. So that’s amazing.
Dr. Barb: Wonderful. This has been really fun. I’m glad we dove into this topic because you answered a lot of my questions and now when I look at those offers, I can really discern. And assess is this best for me, right? So [00:39:00] everybody has their own way of living and their own way of spending, and once you determine that, then you have an easier way of really selecting the right choice.
Tiffany: Yeah, absolutely. I love that summary.
Maggie: Thank you so much, Tiffany. We appreciate you coming on and sharing your expertise and until next time, I hope everyone is financially fearless. Thank you.
Outro: You’ve been listening to Women Money, the shit we don’t talk about. Now it’s time to take what you’ve learned and make bold moves towards financial independence. Stay [00:39:30] in the know by joining our newsletter for exclusive tools, resources, and updates that keep you financially fearless. Head to PurseStrings. co and sign up today. Need a financial professional who gets it? Turn to PurseStrings Curated Directory, your go to resource for financial experts who know how to put you first. Love this episode? Leave us a review and help us empower even more women to own their financial power. Until next time, be financially fearless.
From $220K Debt to Financial Freedom with Haley Brown-Woods
What would you do if $600,000 landed in your lap at 23? If your first thought is to pay off debt or buy a house, Haley Brown-Woods and her husband came into that exact windfall and just three and a half years later, they were $220K in debt.
In this episode, Haley Brown-Woods, a financial coach and founder of Price of Avocado Toast takes us behind the scenes of how they went from living large (wine tastings on Wednesdays with $400 bottles) to arguing over a $7 box of pumpkin muffins. That moment became the wake-up call that changed their entire financial future.
Have questions? Click this to check out our expert Q&A for tips from industry experts, tailored to help women address their most common financial concerns.
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(This transcript was generated using AI, so please excuse any misspellings or errors)
Barb:[00:00:00] You know, Maggie, I was thinking about
how much debt people have and how much angst and pressure and anxiety and shame it puts on them, especially women. I know, you know, kind of the media shames us. However, you know, it’s important for us to take on debt as we’ve talked about before. There’s good debt and there’s bad debt.
For instance, you have a job and you need transportation. There’s no public transportation to get you there. You need a car. I needed a car when I was very young to get to work, and also I was going back to school. I bought a new car, but it was the cheapest car on the lot. I remember it was.
$6,000, which I financed for three years and it had nothing, no air conditioning. It was back in the day when you rolled your windows down. The only thing I got on it was, a cassette player. ’cause you know, I love my music and it was even a five speed. So, I took on debt, right? And I was making a pittance, but I needed to take [00:01:00] on that debt because I needed to go to work and I needed to go to school.
so that’s good debt. And some might say, oh, you should have bought a used car whatever, Well, I’m not a car person. I just needed a reliable car to get me where I needed to go. But there’s also the debt where you unconsciously are spending money where you’re not really quite certain where it’s going.
And before you know it, boom, Diddy boom, you’ve got tens, $20,000 worth of credit card debt, And it happens.
maggie: it’s not hard to do either. I mean, spent some money that was like, well, I know I’m gonna get this job soon, which is gonna pay me more. you should not spend money that you don’t have life advice.
Barb: Well, on future, we’re gonna get, I’m gonna get, that might not happen. And then, you know. Credit card debt, 27% interest. It’s so expensive and ultimately you’re just paying the interest. That’s how banks make so much money and they make it so easy for you too. So that is something that we talk a lot about at purse strings.
We don’t want anyone to feel shame about it. [00:02:00] We know why this happens and we have ways to work it.
maggie: yeah, I mean, it’s hard. I know there are times where like people just like literally can’t sleep at night. It wakes ’em up in the middle of the night and it’s hard to like swallow that frog and just get started, like I’m gonna do this thing. It’s kinda like going to the gym, like, all right, now we’re gonna commit and do the thing.
But that’s hard to get started. You spend a lot of time just thinking about it, pondering it, trying to make different plans of how to do it. But it’s just getting started and actually doing it, that is the hardest part, but makes all the difference.
Barb: Yeah, just getting started, it’s like with anything, just getting started is such a positive step. Like we say, you know, getting started at purse strings, downloading a guide or meeting with a financial professional. But on our podcast today, we have someone who not only got started on her debt, but her story’s incredible.
I don’t wanna spill the beans, but she got started and paid down an incredible amount of debt. Incredible. And it just shows that it is [00:03:00] doable. It’s doable. And she’s talked about how she got into debt. how she realized they needed to put the brakes on. How she learned what she needed to know to start changing her behaviors, put some things into place and paid down an enormous amount of debt.
And what I love about it is she showed how it’s possible.
maggie: Paying off the debt is only just the first stop. That’s not, life is, I’m a debt payoff person. It’s alright. Now, what do I wanna do with this money? How am I gonna stay out of debt? What dreams do I wanna fulfill now that this is done? Because that’s not your identity as a debt.
I pay down debt. It’s so much bigger than that, and I think that’s one of the best things that she shared, is that now helping people pay down their debt and just accomplishing the things that they wanna do, whether that’s leave relationships, build families, travel, you name it, you can do it.
Barb: great point. Yeah. Paying down the debt, getting through that step one big, step one, step two. Okay. Now that you are a debt free person, how are you gonna live your life? What is [00:04:00] it that you want out of your life? What do you wanna do with your money? How do you wanna live financially free?
So let’s listen to Haley Brown Woods. And how she helps people get outta debt and live a life that is full of choices.
maggie: Let’s get started.
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 is women in money, the shit we don’t talk about.
maggie: Haley, welcome to Women and Money, the shit we don’t Talk about. We are excited to have you on today. Before we dive into this episode, could you give us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Haley: Yes, of course. First [00:05:00] off, thank you so much for having me, and I love the name of your podcast. It’s just very to the point, everything we need, things we weren’t taught. I love it. Love it. Okay, so a little bit about me. My name is Hailey Brownwoods and I am an accredited financial counselor, which sounds super legit and awesome.
And I help people pay off debt and do all of that. But my story actually started with my own debt-free journey that led me to doing what I’m doing today. I’m actually a former elementary school teacher and my husband and I. When we first met, we met online and hit it off really fast, and my husband received $600,000 from a wrongful death lawsuit payout after his grandma died of mesothelioma. So if you think of the commercials that are like called one 800 whatever, if you know someone who has meso basically that’s the situation.
And his grandma had contracted mesothelioma. She passed away and the family filed wrongful death lawsuits against like how she got it and one millions of dollars. And my [00:06:00] husband’s father. Had passed away. So whatever would’ve gone to his dad went to his heirs. So my husband, my brother-in-law and sister-in-law each got a million dollars.
But after the lawyers took their cut. Yeah. It was $600,000 a piece. So let’s just talk about how we’re all in the wrong field. That’s 40%. I’m like, that’s a lot of money. But he got $600,000 and I met this guy and we were like, cool.
We’re madly in love. We have all this money. Let’s go shopping. And he was 24 at the time, and I was 23, so we were super young and a little context into how we were raised. We were both raised by single moms, low income situations. They did the best they could, given the situations and the knowledge that they had at the time, but we didn’t have a financial foundation, so we got lottery sized.
Winnings just plopped into our laps in our early twenties, and we spent a lot of money very quickly. [00:07:00] We blew through the $600,000 and then got into over $220,000 within a three and a half year period
Barb: Wait, wait,
wait. Stop right there. What. Did you spend this money on? I just have to know.
maggie: It has to be something good, right?
Haley: well. I mean, we did buy a house, but like we live in the San Francisco Bay area. We could have just purchased a whole entire house at the time but we didn’t. And we put down a major, like 50% down payment on the house. So that’s, 250, $300,000 of it. But then when we really look at where did this money go, it just kind of slipped through our hands little by little.
Lifestyle inflation. We were just spending money. We were traveling, we were going on wine tasting dates on a Wednesday and dropping $400 on wine little things like that weren’t little, but that compounded over time very quickly and we got into a lot of debt, and [00:08:00] the beginning part of our story, but we dug our way out of $132,000 of debt in a year and a half as teachers, and that led us here.
I decided I didn’t wanna be a teacher anymore and I wanted to help people get out of debt.
Barb: But at what point did you say whoa. Wait a minute. Let’s put the brakes on this. Like we need to just halt. Like at what point was it
Haley: Well, I was pregnant with our first child and we were both done with grad school making the most money we’d ever made. We were a public school teacher, so we weren’t making a ton of money, but it was the first time we had salaried incomes, and in California teachers get paid once a month, so we got paid on the 30th and by the eighth of the month we had no money.
So I went to Costco. I went shopping, got some groceries, and I came home with some pumpkin muffins. ’cause that sounded good ’cause I was pregnant. And then my husband and I got in an argument over having. Purchase the muffins, and it really wasn’t about the muffins. We didn’t have [00:09:00] $7 to be spending on muffins.
We were out of money. Everything was going on credit cards, and so that was our wake up aha moment of like, what is happening here? We need to fix this quickly because it’s going down the wrong path
Barb: Got it. The muffins every time.
Haley: Yeah.
maggie: And so looking back, what was the hardest part of facing this money situation and how did you find that courage to take that first step? ’cause I know it’s not easy.
Haley: The hardest part was looking at the reality of the situation and looking in the mirror head on to say, what the hell happened here? How did we have $600,000 and now we’re drowning in debt? Just having that really uncomfortable conversation with myself and with my husband to figure out what is going on was really the hardest part.
’cause once we got going and we saw how bad it was, we were pretty motivated to get out of debt. But facing the reality was very difficult in the beginning.
Barb: Was there a lot of resentment around the situation or like what was your [00:10:00] emotional state on that at that time?
Haley: I wouldn’t say resentment, but there was a lot of guilt and shame associated with it. You don’t know what you don’t know, and at the time I was just looking at the facts and the numbers. There were $600,000 and now we’re negative 220. That means we spent $800,000 in three and a half years. How did that happen?
And when we took a step back and we started doing our own research and talking to other people. We realized that this is very common. When people get windfall money that they are unprepared to manage, they’re not going to manage it. They will mismanage the money, they’ll spend it, and windfall money can look like a $5,000 tax refund that’s gone the next month.
Or it could look like an inheritance from a parent or grandparent, it could be $10,000 or it could be a hundred thousand dollars or a million dollars. Right. But if you’re not ready to spend the money or to manage it [00:11:00] the right way, it will be spent. And when I started doing research that looked into the people that win the lottery and the music artists and the sports people, football players, basketball players.
70% of people that get windfall money like that will end up filing bankruptcy at some point. That is a lot. That is a lot. So once I realized we were not alone with the behaviors and the things that we did, that helped me really move through the guilt and the shame and. Realize, okay, I am not stupid. I’m not bad with money.
I did what majority of people would’ve done. We always ask people, what would you have done if you got $600,000 at 23? And people wanna say they would’ve bought a house or paid off their student loan. And I’m like, what would you really have done? Like, let’s be real here.
maggie: It is hard. And I think about those times where I did get like a tax refund and all of a sudden, I thought I was gonna do all these great things with the money and then it was just gone. And I was like, wait, I thought I was [00:12:00] gonna use it to pay down debt or build that emergency fund or invest, but all of a sudden it’s like disappeared.
And that’s, it’s true. You don’t always know what you spent it on. It doesn’t always add up. I’ve seen that with so many athletes, especially those young ones who are like 20 out of college, playing for their first sports team, and all of a sudden it’s like, no money to hundreds of thousands and poof, it’s gone.
It’s like a magic trick.
Barb: All right, so you put the brakes on, you ate the great muffins, you had conversations with your husband. Then what?
Haley: The muffins were really good. We did what most people do when they are in a situation where they’re trying to get out of debt. We did a little research and we said, how Google, how do I pay off my debt? Dave Ramsey pops up. This was 2019, one of the biggest names in the personal finance debt community pops up.
So we started listening to his podcast. We listened to his audio book and we realized, okay, there are other [00:13:00] people paying off a lot of debt. We can do this too. So that was the first boost of motivation and then we went. Full speed into paying off our consumer debt. We do still have student loans, but that’s a whole nother, we just don’t care about them at this point.
But we paid off a lot of our debt very quickly by doing our own journey. We did things that kind of don’t really recommend for a lot of people. We cashed out some retirement. We sold everything. Everything that we possibly could. We sold a car, we downsized. We did a lot very quickly. And also it was during the pandemic, so it was really easy to not spend money when you’re locked in your house.
And we also got second and third jobs and just put every single penny towards our debt as fast as we could.
maggie: I like that you made some of those bigger moves as sometimes it’s always like, cut the coffee or, these like $5, $10, $20 switches, but [00:14:00] like selling a car, that’s a nice big move that can move you, forward. Same with the house. Those are big things where sometimes people say like, are you kind of drastic, but like.
If you want to move ahead quickly, these are the things that need to be done. It’s not, oh, I mean, calling your phone bill and saving $20 a month is great. I encourage you to still do that if you can, but that’s not gonna get you, that $200,000 paid off. And so I love how you guys made those big leaps and not just the, picking apart the minuscule things and taking, all the muffins outta life.
And then, somehow all the debt is paid off.
Haley: Yeah and we sold our house and moved to a lower cost of living area after we paid off $132,000 of debt. After we did that, that was like the final move for us to really get things going. And then we were able to fortunately, take a ton of equity because we put a lot of money down on the house.
We were able to take the money and then fund our savings and put money into sinking funds and our emergency fund and fund getting my business off the ground running [00:15:00] looking back at that. I’m thankful that at least we bought a house originally because we were able to get some of the money out when we sold stuff, including the brand new car that we got. We had a brand new 2018 runner that we were, that we bought, were able to just sell and liquidate $30,000 very quickly, even though we lost a lot of money on that. That was a big move when you’re looking at getting things done quickly.
Barb: But that’s it. Like Maggie said, it’s not the little things, it’s really committing. Right? It’s committing and I remember years ago before we had so much access to lots of different resources and paying down debt. The book. Popular book was The Millionaire Next Door. And the way the Millionaire Next Door was, is they never bought a new car.
They lived below their means. They weren’t building the McMansions at the time, the big houses. They were just living in a house that was, just fine for them. And so a lot of it is that, and it sounds like you went to that place where you didn’t need that [00:16:00] car, you didn’t need those bigger houses.
And when you downsized. It was fine and it was more manageable and you were able to pay down that debt, which I think makes so much sense.
Haley: Yeah, and now we drive a 2007 Honda CRV. I mean, that car is about to be 20 years old, but it’s great. It’s so sturdy. You guys, I gotta tell you, we went through a generational snowstorm where we live that had trees falling all over, like on houses and on cars.
This 2007 Honda CRV survived massive trees falling on it. Like USAA totaled all of our other stuff. They didn’t total this car. They were like that thing’s good to go. They just replaced the hood and it got the most boom.
Barb: Wow.
Haley: It had the weight of the tree on it.
That’s
Barb: We are not sponsored by Honda CRV, but if they would like to sponsor us, they certainly can. Thank you.
maggie: So for other listeners who are stuck in debt, like what are some ways to help them [00:17:00] feel less shame about where they are or start moving forward from where they are?
Haley: When trying to focus on healing the shame and the guilt that you feel with your debt, the biggest thing that I recommend is naming the feeling that you’re feeling name it to tame it. How are you feeling? Why is this happening? Where are you at?
When you can do that’s where you take the look in the mirror and you can kind of work through it because this is. For the most part, not really a numbers problem. When you’re feeling the shame, that’s the mindset in your relationship with money, and that’s the hard part when it comes to healing all of it.
You can pay off debt as fast as you can. Cool. But. It’s gonna be kind of worthless at the end if you feel terrible about yourself, you’re not able to enjoy your money, and then you just binge spend because you have so much resentment about the process. We can’t do that. So we really need to work on healing the shame while we’re paying off our debt so [00:18:00] that when you get to the other side of being debt free, you can actually enjoy your money and do it without guilt because the guilt leads to shame.
maggie: Yeah, I love that name at detainment. That’s awesome. And so let’s dive into then you kind of creating your business price of avocado toast, what, encouraged you to do this and tell me a bit more about the name as well.
Haley: Price of avocado toast is, it was named from an Instagram poll during COVID. We were paying off our jet with. So much vengeance. We were doing it as fast as we could and we were talking about it all the time to all of our friends and family, and they were like, could you just stop talking about this?
We don’t really wanna hear about it anymore. We were like, this is so fun. Look at us. We paid off an extra $500 where we paid off this one little student loan go team, and people just couldn’t care. They were so over it. So we decided to start a podcast during [00:19:00] the pandemic, during the original shutdown when people were literally at home doing nothing.
And we wanted to talk about our own journey and just kind of normalize conversations about money because we were getting so excited about this journey we were on. We could see the future and the ending, and we had this, we were dreaming big together and everyone else was like, why are you guys talking about this?
This is so awkward. Why are we talking about debt and money? And we shouldn’t talk about this. This is something that stays in the house. You don’t publicly do this.
Barb: The shit we don’t talk about right.
Haley: Exactly. You don’t talk about it, and when you do, it’s inappropriate. That’s what we’ve all been told, right. And so we decided to launch our podcast and I went on an Instagram poll and said, Hey, what do we call this?
We wanna talk to millennials about debt and price of avocado toast was born that way. That’s kind of how it originally started. We started with just a podcast and zero intentions of [00:20:00] starting an actual business or anything else. We just wanted to document our own journey. So we started that in June of 2020, and then we continued our own journey.
The early stages of our podcast are really just us talking about our journey, how we’re paying off debt and everything, and then. We get momentum going. We started working with our own financial coach. We decided to sell our house. I decided I didn’t want to go back to teaching. I was on maternity leave at the time and I said, maybe I will do this financial coaching thing someday.
That’d be cool. It’d be cool if I could teach people about how to pay off debt and do this in a one-to-one space. And then I kind of just left it there and. On our season one finale, my husband announced Haley’s gonna start her financial coaching business at the beginning of season two.
And I was like, okay, cool. I guess we’re doing this. And we had sold our house and we had a little bit of extra money to kind of supplement my income while we got things [00:21:00] going. And I was like, we’re doing this. We’re just gonna start my business. I mean, why not? Right? So we had a year.
Under our belts with the podcast of, creating a community and having some listeners and followers on social media. It was nothing big or anything at the time that we started, but we got going pretty quickly. Because of the trust that people already had, they had already heard me talking about my journey.
I have yet to hear a story that’s worse than mine. So people can easily come to me and say, Hey, I’m in $50,000 of credit card debt, and I’m feeling really bad about it, and I can say, great. Let me help you through that. I blew $600,000, so there’s zero judgment coming from me, and I think that they trusted me much faster because of that.
They knew my story, they knew the things that I talked about where I said, Hey, I messed up here and here. Let’s try to do it better. And I started my business in August of 2021, like a year after we started our podcast. And here we are. My husband now does [00:22:00] this full-time with He has since left teaching as well.
Barb: Wow. I love that. So it shows that’s an issue, right? Guilt, shame, all of this is an issue. I think it stems from what you said at the very beginning of the broadcast. No one taught us about how to manage money. Financial literacy is not taught in schools. It’s a tool like driving a car. It’s like someone gave us the keys and didn’t give us the rules of the road.
And there’s a lot of shame, especially at women around money. And we, like you said, also, no one wants to talk about it, right? It’s taboo. It’s culturally not okay. To have conversations like that, but that’s why we’re having these conversations today. Exactly. Because we need to start talking about money.
If we’re not talking about it, we’re not learning about it. Haley, I love your story. And I think you went through that for a reason because you can say to people, you’re in debt $50,000. I respect that. And [00:23:00] your shame and your guilt that comes with it. Happened to me, 600,000, we can do this. Ah, we got this right.
And people probably go, phew. Thank goodness I’m with somebody who’s been in my shoes, multiple times over and can help me and has strategies. So what are some of the first things you do to help people work through this?
Haley: The first thing, the very first thing that we do is we do a whole entire session about how you grew up. Tell me about your mom. Tell me about your dad. Were they married? Were they divorced? Are they still alive? Do you have siblings? Are your siblings still alive? And that all leads to, oh, no, my dad left when I was five, or my mom passed away last year of cancer and I got a $5,000 thing.
Okay, cool. Let’s talk about that. Because every single thing leading up to where we are today has created our relationship with money. And kind of going back to our own journey, we started with Dave Ramsey. We got really good at paying off debt. That was cool. There was a [00:24:00] massive disconnect between life after debt.
Anybody can pay off debt, but how do you stay out of debt? That’s the hard part. And you stay outta debt by looking at how you got into debt. And I wanted to create my program. I wanted to create everything with the lens of sustainability, like sustainably paying off debt. You have, chunk of time, maybe six months or five years, where you’re hammering this out, but then you have 50 years after this how do we sustain this so you can enjoy your money?
And have it be something that doesn’t feel bad, and that has to come from the initial reflection. So the very first thing we do is look at how you were raised in sections like childhood and then your first job and then the college years, and then were you married once or twice before? How was that? And then your current marriage, if you’re married all the way up until today, really helps people say, okay, wow.
[00:25:00] That makes a lot of sense. I can kind of start to see where this stems from.
maggie: And I’m sure people sit down right away and they’re like, why is Hailey not asking me for all my numbers and all my accounts and all my things? And you start it kind of, not as like a therapy session, but like, tell me about your family. It’s like, why are we talking about my mom? I’m $50,000 in debt, but it is so interesting how much that is correlate and the more that you dive in, it’s like, ah, I see. I’m doing just the exact same things I was like Sublimely taught, you know what I mean? And so I know a lot on your social media, you talk about guilt-free spending. So like what does that mean and how can women start doing that today?
Haley: Guilt free spending to me means that you don’t work this damn hard to not spend your like you’re allowed to spend money. So how do we do that in a way that feels empowering and not. Guilt ridden. That’s not fun. And the way we do that is by being intentional with our budget and our planning. I talk a lot about the different stages of budgeting.
You have to make the [00:26:00] plan that the original. Budget part, and then we have to actually track our spending to make sure we’re, are we on track with phase one? The first thing we did, we made a plan. Are we even on track with that? And then the third piece is reflection. And if you get to the third piece and you’re reflecting, oh wow, I went to Chipotle and I got a pedicure with my friend and I.
I got a massage and I didn’t plan for this all during stage one. Why did I do that? Where did my money go? That is where the guilt and the shame starts. So if we can intentionally put those things that you are just quite frankly, gonna spend money on anyway, let’s be real. We have to be very realistic.
You’re gonna spend money on it anyway. Put it in the plan, and then when you get to the reflection stage, it’s like, ah. I planned for this and that feels good. I had the money for it, and it feels awesome and it feels empowering, and that has to come from also this lens of value-based spending and what’s important to you and how you’re going to prioritize those things.
Everything can’t be a value. If everything’s a value, [00:27:00] nothing’s a value, but if you can intentionally put the things you value into your spending plan, you will feel so much better about it, and then the guilt just won’t be there.
maggie: Yeah, definitely. And I think that’s the biggest thing is so often we try to create these budgets that are like, not realistic to who we’re gonna to, I’m never gonna go out to eat. Okay, well, we know that’s false because I go out to eat three times a week. So like, we’re not going to, a hundred to zero real fast.
Like, you’ve gotta be realistic. And so, I think that’s even the harder part to accept is right if the beginning it’s like, I am gonna spend this money. It is the way it is. It’s just, you can’t, don’t lie to yourself.
Barb: Yeah. So I’m curious about some of your success stories and what are some big money moves people have made through your coaching?
Haley: So paying off debt is super cool. Love that. I love to brag about how my clients have paid off over three and a half million dollars of non-mortgage debt. That’s really awesome. But I think the bigger things are beyond money. So I’ve helped [00:28:00] clients exit abusive marriages and relationships and make a plan that is terrifying to do, but a financial plan to get them out of that situation.
Or same thing with a toxic job. Being able to leave that situation and say that this is no longer serving me. I’m out of here. That is always very rewarding. And then anyone who’s planning to have children through fertility struggles of some sort. That is the most rewarding work to be able to help someone be able to do that from a place that feels empowering, whether it’s IVF or surrogacy or adoption or anything like that, that all costs a lot of money and I’ve helped a lot of clients go through that.
And at the end of the day, I get to look at them and be like, that kid is here You don’t have a bunch of debt because of that, because no one wants to feel the pressure. Anyone who goes through fertility struggles, they usually are not feeling [00:29:00] resentment of that debt. If it is debt that they acquired through IVF, but it is kind of this pressure on them.
It’s still there, right? If you can do that and do it from a place of, oh, I have the money. I plan for this feels good, then everything just feels so much lighter now. You got your family, you got your baby, everything is here, and the financial stress is not there. Now we can make the plan for you to afford to have the child and childcare and move forward or maybe have more kids in the future.
And those are my favorite success stories because money is cool all day long, but those are transformative life things. You can make money and spend money and pay off debt, but. When I see people doing truly life changing stuff like that, it just feels so good to be a part of it.
Barb: Well, I would like to ask, what’s one habit or mindset shift that really makes a difference for someone trying to get out of debt?
Haley: That’s a good question. I feel like we need [00:30:00] 5,000 habits in mindset session, okay. I believe that a necessary mindset shift for everybody is to step into doing this like fully embracing. I am going to. Pay off my debt. I’m going to start this journey and it might be hard, but I’m going to do it.
When you’re kind of half-assed, like, oh, maybe I’m dipping my toes in it, you’re going to, you’re gonna move at half-ass speed and for some people, that’s totally the speed that they wanna move at. You don’t get a reward for doing it as fast as you can. I’m still waiting for. Forbes to call me and give me a front page and say, Hey, we wanna reward you for paying off $132,000 of debt.
It doesn’t work like that, but when you fully step into it, and if you’re in a relationship with a partner, if you guys do it together, you are unstoppable. That is the mindset shift, and it happens in your brain. All of the behaviors will follow, the habits will follow. You have to really embody, I am someone who pays off [00:31:00] debt.
I am doing this.
maggie: I feel like I hear so many of these stories and it’s so interesting of so many of their couples, their partnerships, and it’s like you really needed each other to lean on for those days that are hard to encourage each other to move forward. And like, yes, we got into this together, we’ll get out of it together.
But it’s really just this teamwork. And so I think it’s great. Even if someone’s, single and doesn’t have that partner to lean on, they can lean on you to kind of have that support as well.
Haley: Yeah, and I actually see that most common with my long-term financial coaching clients. The single women will hang out much longer. I do a six month coaching program and a 12 month coaching program, and my single ladies will stay with me for like two or three years, and it’s because they don’t have a partner to also hold them accountable.
It’s them on their own, and we all know how hard it is to have that. just do it. Just show up and do it mentality and the motivation and the accountability. That’s not easy [00:32:00] on hard days, but when you have someone else in your corner, I can hold your hand to say, Hey, we’re gonna do this together. Or at least you can have someone to talk.
Through the hard things with, whereas people who are in a relationship, they have that in their house every single day and it’s really hard. People don’t talk a lot about the single tax, and it is very difficult to do this as a single person. It’s doable, very doable, but it’s hard.
maggie: Yeah, being single is expensive as well. So it’s nice that they have you to lean on or to have that community because anything we do days get long. There’s hard times, there’s times where we need that compassion and there’s times when we need to kick in the butt just to keep it in gear.
So it’s nice to have that team right there as well. And so Haley, we like to ask all of our guests this question, and that is, what is your own definition of financial freedom?
Haley: Ooh. Financial freedom. I feel like it could mean so many different things. Okay. For me, it’s being able to spend my time and my energy, my money with my young [00:33:00] kids. We had three kids in three and a half years, and now that we work from home, finally, we’re only gonna have one in at home.
Two of ’em are now gonna be in school, but up until recently we’ve had all of these kids at home. I’m working running a business with them is the hardest, coolest thing I’ve ever done. But then I also think of for other people and what I see every single day, I think financial freedom is being able to choose to exit situations you don’t want to be in.
Whether that’s divorce, leave your person ’cause they are terrible to you and you deserve so much better. Or a job because you’re just another person. To them, you are replaceable and those things are really hard. But when someone has the financial freedom to be able to do that, then you get to choose your situation.
You have so much more control and that Is it. I’m not advocating for everyone to get a divorce and leave their jobs, but I think that a lot of people just settle for really shitty situations [00:34:00] that they don’t realize that they can get out of, and they’re deserving of so much more.
maggie: Yeah, it’s true.
Barb: Amen.
maggie: And so Hailey, of course we’ll have everything in the show notes, but what’s the best way for people to connect with you, continue to follow you and work with you?
Haley: We are at price of avocado toast.com or price of avocado toast podcast or price of avocado toast social media. We try to keep the same name across the board for everything and simplicity reasons, but we are at price of avocado toast. And you can just send us a message and say, Hey, I love when people send messages saying that they heard an interview on another podcast.
I think that’s really cool. So if you’re listening, please say hi. .
maggie: Well, thank you Haley, so much for coming on today for sharing your story and your expertise. I can’t wait for the community to hear this and to reach out to you and just tell you about how great you were on this episode. Be sure to check out Haley. All her information is in the show notes and we’ll talk to everyone again soon.
Until then, be financially fearless.
Outro:[00:35:00] You’ve been listening to Women Money, the shit we don’t talk about. Now it’s time to take what you’ve learned and make bold moves towards financial independence. Stay in the know by joining our newsletter for exclusive tools, resources, and updates that keep you financially fearless. Head to PurseStrings. co and sign up today. Need a financial professional who gets it? Turn to PurseStrings Curated Directory, your go to resource for financial experts who know how to put you first. Love this episode? Leave us a review and help us empower even more women to own their financial power. Until next time, be financially fearless.
From $1m In Debt To Financial Freedom with Naseema McElroy
What if your biggest money mistake turned into your greatest comeback?
This week on Women & Money: The Sh*t We Don’t Talk About, we’re joined by the unstoppable Naseema McElroy, labor and delivery nurse, founder of Financially Intentional, and mom of three who paid off over $1 million in debt in just under three years.
Naseema takes us behind the scenes of what that financial rock bottom looked like- and how she climbed her way out with a plan, a podcast, and pure intention. From student loans and a Bay Area mortgage to budgeting breakthroughs and wealth-building for her kids, she shares it all.
Have questions? Click this to check out our expert Q&A for tips from industry experts, tailored to help women address their most common financial concerns.
Subscribe to our newsletter to receive financial tips delivered weekly here!
(This transcript was generated using AI, so please excuse any misspellings or errors)
Maggie:[00:00:00] sometimes I’m on Reddit and there’s people on there who are like young and they’re like, I have $2,000 of credit card debt. Like, how am I ever gonna get out? it’s two grand, and then I have like other people on Reddit who are like, I have $160,000 of debt. They’re like, should I declare bankruptcy?
And then you keep scrolling and then you’ll see someone who’s like, I have 500 k of debt. can I get out? And it’s just. You got the whole board, and part of that is, always college debt. It’s not always credit cards. Some people are, this one was 200 and and most of it was credit card debt, which is I think, much harder ’cause of interest rates.
Barb: Yeah. You do have to look at what kind of debt it is. Credit card debt a mortgage and it’s different from, student loans, but with student loans. I go back and forth on this. If you’ve got student loans, but you completed your college education, it’s still an investment in your education and in yourself, and you still need to pay that back.
You always need to pay it back. What I think is more difficult is [00:01:00] if there’s student loans and you haven’t completed your education, that’s really a bummer because you still have a lot of debt and you don’t have that education to really show for it. And, i’ve read a lot of circumstances where that can be a real bummer, but nonetheless, debt is debt.
You need to pay it back.
Maggie: Well, it’s also if you have federal loans versus private loans for your student loans, that’s very different as well.
Barb: yeah, and auto loans, that’s different. Like if people wanna go buy a big fancy car and they take, I don’t know, they can be upwards of 50, $60,000.
Maggie: I can’t believe how expensive cars are getting.
Barb: Or I saw this one TikTok where people were like, what’s your loan payment monthly for your card? People are like, oh, 475. One guy was like, oh 998, and I’m like, oh my gosh.
Wow. When I think my, when I had a car, it was probably in the two hundreds or something manageable, but you know, cars have gotten [00:02:00] expensive.
Maggie: Well, then you see these commercials where they’re like the lowest down payment and the longest extension, which like I get vibes, like you need a car. But it’s also like, all right, then this is gonna be a long time payment.
Barb: And you pay a lot more for that car than what it’s really worth.
Maggie: how debt do you think you could live with?
Barb: Not a lot. I’m not good with debt. No. I remember, lived on my own for a long time and I watched every penny. As I said, I recorded everything, coming in and going out. Of course, I had to take on some debt to get through school and to get a car and things like that.
But I was never one to overspend on credit cards or anything like that because, I knew I couldn’t afford it.
Maggie: I hate. When you tell your story about how you could just work two jobs and pay off college at the same time, like that is so not attainable anymore,
Barb: well, remember I went to junior college for a couple years and that
was
Maggie: did I.
Barb: yeah. And you had someone helping you pay, which I didn’t. So, you just do what you gotta do and I was able to take advantage of some [00:03:00] work payment. Tuition payment, which was a good reimbursement. So took advantage of any benefit that I could get that way and just paid every month at it, just as a routine.
So, debt’s a funny thing. How much is like your limit to where you can’t sleep at night and it’s outta control. But what if you got into let’s say you found yourself a million dollars in debt.
Maggie: I would have to know what. My assets are, like, could you, could I sell off most of the things and then have it be a draw? Like is it a big house? ‘Cause I have a ton of money and I just took it a house. But yeah, a million that would get me itchy.
Barb: A million dollars in debt. Yeah, and that’s what our podcast guest. Paid off in three years, a million dollars in debt.
Maggie: That’s wild. I’m still impressed,
Barb: It’s impressive. And what’s most impressive is it’s because she didn’t know how money worked or where her money was going. And when she finally got the [00:04:00] come to Jesus moment that said, I need to really figure this out, she figured it out. She made adjustments, she learned, she put some processes in place, was consistent
Maggie: I think we all need that moment that just kind of pushes us to be like, alright, I gotta do the thing now.
Barb: Yeah, because if we don’t, it only gets worse and worse. You need to face your fear. Like I said before, the only thing keeping us from moving ahead in our lives. Is fear and vulnerability, but when you have community like you do at purse strings and like you do at other, community groups or whatever around you, that’s when you’re gonna get shit done.
Maggie: I just wanna send people letters every time they pay off like a debt payment. Like let me know. I’ll send you a card. Congrats. I’ll do a dance with you, but. Until then, let’s dive into this episode with Naseema and learn how she paid off a million dollars and is now growing wealth for her and her children.
Barb: Yeah, let me tell you that there are children have a [00:05:00] lot of money saved, and they’re only in grade school.
Maggie: All right, let’s go.
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 is women in money, the shit we don’t talk about.
Maggie: Today we have Naseema on the show, and boy does she have a story to share. So before we dive in, Naseema, will you take a minute to introduce who you are and what you do?
Naseema: Sure. So I’m Naseema McElroy, labor and Delivery nurse by trade. Personal finance enthusiast for fun, mom of three girls, and have been on this crazy [00:06:00] journey of figuring out my finances and taking people along the way with me since 2016. And so just excited to dive into my story and share more with your audience.
Barb: All right, well let’s get to the heart of it, right,
how does one get to be a million dollars in debt? Take us there.
Naseema: I love that question because it’s just like, First of all, why would you wanna listen to somebody that has a million dollars in debt? They must be really stupid, but actually quite opposite. So I have two master’s degrees, one in healthcare administration, one in nursing. So student loan debt is.
Part of that. And for context, when I was going to school, it was like $40,000 a year and I have over eight years of school. So I think I came out good with $200,000 in debt for that. And then you know, I live in the San Francisco Bay area where the median home prices are. Were at that time when I paid off my home or [00:07:00] sold my home was $700,000.
So, I mean, 200 plus 700, you’re already at 900. So like the rest of it was just like regular debt cars, taking out loans against your retirement account to put down payment on your house, paying for braces for your ex-husband. Like all of those things that we do, you know?
Maggie: Yep. Life, which love that it’s no Gucci purses, no extravagant vacations. Nothing out of the ordinary to get you there. It’s hard to do,
And so when was the time? We said, enough is enough. And it really made you shift from earning six figures, but still struggling to deciding I’m gonna wipe out this debt.
Naseema: I didn’t even like look at it like that. I was like, I just need to figure out this money thing. And I thought it was like, I really need to understand investing. ’cause that’s something that I never really understood and I was like. I just need to know how money really works and I invested so much [00:08:00] time in my education and now I have like the time, like I know how to do deep dives into things.
Like I know how to implement things into my life. Like now I need to use it outside of my career. I need to use it for me and I was a single mom, it was me and my daughter. We lived in this big ass house. Like we had everything like that was like Instagram popping. But on the inside, like I was so scared that if something were to happen to me, like I don’t know who would take care of my daughter.
Like, and I just had this extreme sense of urgency that I had to figure it out. And so I was just like. This is it. I’m gonna do this. And I had an hour commute to work one way. And I was just like, oh, I’m listening to NPR podcasts. I might as well listen to personal finance podcasts. And I started listening to personal finance audio books.
And so everything that I was consuming turned into those things that I needed to learn. Plus, like that’s, you know, when Instagram was really taken off and so started [00:09:00] curating the people that I follow to, the people that I aspire to be like. And so I changed my circle of influence and those were the messages that I got.
And then realized that it wasn’t, that I didn’t know how to invest it was that I was kind of under this mountain of debt, that if I got from under that, then I can really be in charge of my finances, and it was in that process that I understood identifying and having a plan around my money gave me so much control as to where before I was making really good money, but I didn’t understand where it was going.
But it was that intentionality of understanding and applying your money and putting it where it needs to go. That changed the game for me.
Barb: That’s so cool and I love how you used your time in the car to listen to the podcast. We hear this a lot. You know where women have this. Moment that’s like, I don’t know this and I need to listen to it. We had someone who said every night after [00:10:00] work, she’d go to the library. All the librarians would wave, hello.
’cause I knew she was coming in. She’d sit down with those finance books and they would just start learning. So it’s just about really getting started and learning and digging in. You were making a good income and like you said, it’s just about knowing where your money is going and putting it in the right places.
So good for you. That’s fantastic. So what were some of the changes that you made?
Naseema: So the first thing that I had to really do is understand what was going in and coming out every month. And then putting a plan in place for where that money was going. And that was called budgeting. I was like one of those early adapters event. So I thought that because I was categorizing my transactions that I knew how to budget.
But really understanding like how to give my money a plan, understanding like exactly where it needed to go and putting it there gave me so much control and so much power over that money. [00:11:00] It shifted that dynamic and so now my money was working for me. So budgeting was like one of the biggest things that really shifted and then just focusing on one debt at a time.
Because, you know, like if we give our attention to too many things, we can’t really make the progress that we want. And so just focusing in on, you know, paying one debt off at a time and just continuing. Like learning along the process. And what really helped me was I actually started my platform just to share with my close friends.
I have a group of girlfriends, we’ve been friends since middle school and high school, and I just wanted to be a centralized place ’cause I hate repeating myself, solidifying those lessons that I learned. Teaching it reteaching. It is the way that you actually can learn something. And so those were the big things that I did to really accelerate my path to being able to pay off a million dollars in debt in under three [00:12:00] years.
Maggie: Wow, that’s impressive. it’s so interesting is everyone, we always tell people to start with, know it’s going in, know it’s coming out, and people are always like, eh, yeah, yeah. You know, like it’s, it’s ppo. It’s like, Hey, I know, garbage in, garbage out, all the different things and it’s just.
Anybody that we talk to who’s paid off large sums, made a lot of money, all this stuff, it always comes back to know what’s coming in, know what’s going out, and it’s just, it doesn’t matter how much you earn, you have to know those numbers no matter what. It’s just like through and through, and so it’s everyone we hear it from, it’s just you can’t say it enough.
Naseema: Yes
Barb: because there’s no magic. Code or secret handshake that makes money drop out of the sky to pay your bills off. I mean, it’s the same routine, right? It’s what you have to do. But I’m curious, so when you went to the budgeting, were there ahas about what you learned about the way you were managing money versus once you started budgeting, like changes that you made in the way you spent your money or saved your money?
Naseema:[00:13:00] I just realized I did not have any clue where my money was going because like I didn’t make more during the time when I started paying off this debt. The only thing that changed was my intentionality, like actually paying attention to where my money was going, and I was just so blown away. Like I had this tool in my, purse the whole time.
Like I could have been using this and I think people. Really don’t understand. Like I really think it’s underrated, like you said, like you can keep on stressing, like understanding where your money is going, but in really understanding that and then having a plan and just being like, this is what I’m prioritizing and everything else needs to stay in whatever lane is gonna fall into, but this is what I’m prioritizing.
And that getting done, hitting that goal every month, just because you have a simple plan, it’s like. Oh my God. Like where have you been all my life.
Maggie: hate that it’s so easy that you, why didn’t I sooner? [00:14:00] You know? And then it’s
like
we can’t live on that shame and guilt right now. We’re gonna. Pick up and move on. And so I know like your, group is called financially intentional. You talk a lot about being financially intentional and we love that.
And so what does that look like in everyday life? What are the habits or decisions that like help you break those cycles?
Naseema: It is about being really thoughtful about what you consume and where your money is going. And it’s not about deprivation. It’s about living the life that you wanna live and knowing that in order to do that, it’s great to be able to spend on the things that really bring you joy, being like, I don’t need that thing out of the $5 section at Target.
Like it’s really not that serious. It’s really not going to bring me that much joy. And understanding that in practical, everyday decisions especially when you have kids that just think that they wanna pick up everything and being able to distill those messages into them, like [00:15:00] that’s what being intentional is to us.
Maggie: I feel like with kids you could always just be saying no. All the time. And so you really have to talk that through of like, why I’m not just miss No. But, there’s a reason why we’re doing what we’re doing and then I’m sure like a trip or something you go on, this is why we didn’t buy all those $5 things at Target.
Barb: Yeah, it is what I like to say, it’s like being financially conscious because sometimes we can spend very unconsciously because so easy. Right? Swipe and tap and hit your watch and blink just about and something, right?
Naseema: Exactly. Exactly. It’s so, they reduced all the levels of friction from, you know, getting the things that you need and they make it so convenient and they just drop it off at your doorstep and it’s there. Sometimes it’s the same day and it’s just like magical. And so why wouldn’t you want those things?
Barb: I know we’re going up against a lot of the marketing tactics that they use that are kind of [00:16:00] subliminal and make want all of these items that we don’t really need in the long run. So I know a lot of our listeners are in healthcare service, professions working their tails off and still feeling stuck financially.
So what are a few money myths you would bust for them right now?
Naseema: I think like everybody is like, oh, you know, there’s so much burnout in healthcare and you know, like everybody is like being sold like these entrepreneurial dreams. And what I like to say is like, even if you do wanna exit, like you don’t wanna trade your time for money and all that kind of stuff, you know, that we hear.
You have so many things that you can take advantage of in the healthcare spaces. Number one, you have really cheap insurance. Like I pay $26 every two weeks for insurance for a family of four. Like, okay,
Maggie: that’s impressive.
Naseema: okay, okay. So then you [00:17:00] have all these options of where to put your money. You have all these benefits.
You have your education that they can pay for, in the healthcare space, there’s so much opportunity to really support and advocate for people. You’re in a unique position to really change somebody’s life. So instead of looking at all the bad things that are happening in the healthcare system, use your position in life to really pour into people because it’s gonna come back to you.
But like on both levels, you have the tangible, like you can be saving in so many assets where it’s matched. You have all these opportunities to get things paid for, but also you’re in a position to serve people in a way that nobody else can, and you need to fully take advantage of that.
Maggie: Those are all great tips because I think sometimes we forget that.
it’s just, it’s way more than what the paycheck that hits your bank account and if that’s the only thing you’re trying to match, you’re missing out on a lot of benefits. also get to hold the new fresh babies,
Barb: Yeah your labor and delivery. That’s like the best of the best.
Naseema:[00:18:00] It is. And when it’s up, it’s up. But when it’s down, down too. You know, like we have some really, really hard times too, and experiences that we have to go through. And those are the experience that you don’t ever forget. And so to be in a position to be able to serve people and those times the best and the worst of times is a unique experience that I don’t take for granted.
And people always remember. There are birth stories. And so I’m in a unique position to be able to influence that in a positive And I love that. I mean like there’s some, there’s obviously problems in the system and all that kind of stuff, but on a day-to-day basis, being able to serve those families is just, I feel like it’s a gift for me.
Maggie: Yeah, I thank you for doing that. ’cause man, I could never, so anyone who go and do that, like please, let’s keep ’em there. Let’s do the thing. Because there’s other ones out here who we will just never be able to do that. so you are also a mom of three. So talk about being a mom [00:19:00] for a second. How did becoming a mother kind of influence how you think about money and legacy and like kind of what you leave behind?
Naseema: It’s crazy ’cause oftentimes we won’t do for ourselves what we would do for our kids. And it’s easier because sometimes we feel like, oh, it’s kind of too late for us, but we can get a head start. For them, but people lose sight that you have to model that behavior for them for it to stick and learning that, I mean, it wouldn’t, if it wasn’t for my oldest daughter, this whole platform wouldn’t exist.
Right. And so she motivated me to do that. But what I had to understand is that it wasn’t just about making sure she was straight financially, it was about. Making sure that I was good in a good position so that she didn’t have to take care of me like so many of us have to take care of our parents and all that kind of stuff.
I needed to set myself up first and then I would be able to put her in a position where she could succeed and, modeling those things [00:20:00] that I want her to be financially. And so that’s what I’ve done. And you know, uniquely for me, I’ve been able to take my kids on this journey with me and they’re part of my brand.
And so they get to hear these things over and over again, you know, and so hopefully like some of that is seeking through. Osmosis and then we have money lessons every day. And I know that they show up because they say stuff to their grandma, like, I don’t know why you have all those things in your grocery
my mom has way more money than you when she don’t spend all that money at the store.
Maggie: The lack of filter, my God.
Naseema: Right. But it’s just, it is just that. And like being able to be in a position to. Not have my kids start from zero or like me going to the adult world or starting at a deficit I feel like is a superpower. And so I’m just really blessed that I am able to be in that space and that they get to be a part of this world too.
Maggie: I saw a post looking [00:21:00] uh, we got on this call about how, like you didn’t hit six figures until like your mid to late thirties, and your kids have like a six figure net worth. how would you recommend to others to start building wealth for their children if that’s something that they’re, interested in doing?
Naseema: Yeah, I love teaching parents about money and investing for their kids, number one, because I trick them to get in the room. Because like they think it’s gonna be about their kids. And then I’d be like, if you ain’t maxing out at least a Roth, IRA, then get outta here. Okay.
Right.
I teach ’em how to do it.
Right. But so that’s number one. Number two is, is that I think like kids have the power of time on their side. so with very little, you can make a huge impact on their lives. And by very little, I mean like as little as $5 a month. Like you can make a, a impact depending on what age you start at.
So it doesn’t take a lot. It’s just as about forming those muscles and then also [00:22:00] instilling the values in them. To be able to carry on. And so my kids have three investment accounts. I was heavily focused with my older daughter on her setting up her 5 29, and I was able to get that started for her when she was around three, going to four, and been able to put money in there.
And I don’t even invest in that account anymore, but it, because I was able to start it so early, it’s like grown crazy, like of that a hundred thousand plus dollars in there. 80 something of it is her 5 29 and I haven’t touched that account in over five years. And then, you know, because my kids are part of my brand, I’m able to create retirement accounts for them because they have earned income.
And then I use a brokerage account to combat those messages of consumerism so that they understand that they’re owners in companies and not just consumers like, yes. You like Roblox, like yeah, I can give you some Roblox, but I can also just buy the stock for you. So it’s a little bit of [00:23:00] a balance.
And so understanding that and kind of gamifying it. ’cause my two older ones are really competitive and being like, well, you got the same? $20 this month, like, what are you gonna pick? And then at the end of the month, see how in returns it’s done. And they’re just like, oh, I beat you and you know, my company is better than yours.
And you know, like, so that’s what I’m able to do with investing Again, it’s not about just like giving them money and like throwing them out into the wild. It is about teaching them the lessons early on so that they can be responsible adults and hopefully keep on passing that on generationally.
Barb: Just brilliant. It really is. Thank you for saying all of that and doing all of that with your children. There’s no financial literacy in schools. It really has to take place at home and it just doesn’t. Right? It just doesn’t. And because we. So many of us haven’t been taught that, and we haven’t made that a conscious effort in our own households, [00:24:00] but look how much we can learn from you and what you’ve done.
It’s really a wonderful what you’ve done.
Naseema: And I’m just, I’m still learning. Like I just want people to know, like they don’t have to have it all figured out. You just kind of have to do one thing and not be afraid to make mistakes and just keep on going. I mean, it’s not linear. Like I have had several stumbling blocks. I’ve had a lot of setbacks, but it’s like, I keep on learning and I keep on sharing and, you know, hopefully it is impacting people.
Maggie: And the other thing you know, I wanna just re-highlight is the importance of, you just saying to all these moms out there, like you have to put yourself first before you fund all your kids. And we see this way too often where they’re paying for college when their retirement is not settled, like.
They’re gonna go get a job and then back up your retirement. Like that’s not, at least that’s not what I signed on to.
Naseema: I’ve seen even worse, like I’ve seen people pull out of their retirement accounts to fund their kids’ college, and I’m like, if that ain’t the most backward thing I have ever [00:25:00] heard, like you better not touch that retirement Like your kids are gonna be okay, but you are not.
Barb: Right.
Maggie: and it’s just a, another message. We can’t, say enough it’s, like we say, it’s like the airplane. You gotta put on your own oxygen mask first. And You have to fund your own retirement first. And as much as you want to give to your kids, sometimes you just can’t, and that’s that.
They’ll figure it out. We all, I mean, a lot of us have, and so I just really appreciate you practicing that and preaching that because it is so important especially for women as we’re such givers to everybody. We have to make sure we’re filling our own accounts, our own cup, whatever it may be.
Barb: I just wanted to say, especially with those, I see those parent plus loans for kids to go to college. That just, it scares me so much because, and if children don’t finish college, and those loans are still out there, we know women are gonna live longer, typically outlive their spouse, and that’s a time where they’re gonna need more money.
So even more so good reason to share that [00:26:00] message that women need to fund their retirement account and think of themselves first. So thank you.
Maggie: And so you’ve been, where a lot of women are right now, kind of tired, buried in debt, overwhelmed. What is like the very first small step someone could take today to kind of start climbing out?
Naseema: I know this is kind of sound woo, but like, just believing that you’re capable of doing it is like the first thing. But I just think that people just don’t know what’s possible for them. If I’ve done it, please know that it’s possible for you.
And it’s probably not gonna look like what you think it’s gonna look like, but it’s possible for you. But like really that first step is understanding where your money is going,
understanding what’s coming in, what’s going out, getting a firm grasp of that, and then you can start. Making your money work for you by creating a spending plan or a budget, wherever you wanna call it.
That sounds great for you to make your money, do what it needs to do for [00:27:00] you.
Maggie: do you use like a, an app or something now for your budgeting spending.
Naseema: Daily, like, personally, like I use Monarch but I have tools for people like, like there’s my budget coach where you can get personalized budget coach that is like, you know, like walks you through that. I love my budget coach and I have a profile on there. I always like kind of hold back on, like refer, like recommending a budgeting tool because I feel like.
Sometimes people like try something. It’s like, oh, this didn’t work for me. So I always say, use the budgeting tool that works for you that you’re actually gonna use.
Maggie: But it’s still great to hear that even these years later, you’re still using an app. You’re still tracking it. It doesn’t go
away
Naseema: No, no. It does not go away. It does not go away.
Barb: And I’m gonna date myself, but. Years ago when I was single, we had this thing called a checkbook, and our money came into our account, and then every time you had to pay a bill, you had to write a [00:28:00] check. It was like a budgeting app because you knew with every check where everything was going, you were writing it all out and subtracting it from there.
So you were really writing out your budget and it was right there in front of you in your checkbook,
Naseema: It’s just the days like now, there’s like Klarna, Afterpay credit cards, like the people’s money is being taken in so many different places. Like it’s so easy to lose track, like where your money is going and where it’s coming from, what payments you need to make, how do you even track.
But credit cards, if it’s not due on a certain day, and technically you don’t have to pay the full thing. It’s a little bit more complex. And I wish it was just as simple as, you know, sitting down and just like balancing your checkbook. And I remember that that’s the financial literacy lesson they used to teach in school.
Right. But now there’s apps and resources that can kind of simplify those things for you. it’s a little bit of a learning curve for some people. And like a lot of [00:29:00] people are really just intimidated because. is scary.
Maggie: Yeah.
Naseema: It’s scary. Or they think that they should have been able to figure it out by now and have a lot of guilt about not having figured it out.
Barb: Oh yeah we see that a lot and that’s why our podcast is called Women and Money, the Shit We Don’t Talk About, because we’re starting to have these conversations and saying, you might be overwhelmed. You might say, I don’t know, we don’t care that you don’t know. All we care about is that you get started today.
And you start asking questions so that we can answer them and get you on the right road so that you have these beautiful tomorrows. ’cause when you look back, if you get started, you’ll be like, wow, look how far I’ve come. I paid off a million dollars. Right? Unless you get started, it’s never gonna happen.
Naseema: And I just love you guys’ podcast and your story just in general because yes, like women have been so underserved by the finance industry and like talked down to and like we, there’s a lot of guilt and shame and people just don’t act. And I’ve seen it [00:30:00] firsthand because like at my hospital, we have a great retirement plan.
Which, you know, not everybody can say ’cause we have a 4 0 3 B and they, you know, have a little bit less regulations around it. But I’ve looked through it and it’s amazing. But like the person that sits in the cafeteria and administers it is like this guy who can be a little bit intimidating if you. I mean, he’s great to me.
I love to death. Like he doesn’t intimidate me, but I’m not a person that’s easily intimidated. But you’re in a field where there’s nurses and you know that personality type is usually. Like a little bit submissive and a little bit like, like I, they need to be coddled a little bit with information like that, especially if they already feeling like they don’t understand and they think that they should know and they’re far behind.
And so I was just saying like, I just really love what you guys are doing and the messages and the empowerment that you’re giving to people because you recognize this need in this space that these [00:31:00] women are out here so, so underserved.
Maggie: Appreciate that. Yeah. gotta get them the right help that They need to really their future. ’cause it’s a lot. You need a team Right. There is a question we like to ask everybody on our podcast, and now it’s your turn to answer. And so what is your own definition of financial freedom?
Naseema: financial freedom is having the control to live your life on your terms. Period.
Maggie: got prepared. She’s ready to go.
Naseema: Yeah.
Barb: Yeah. Simple
Naseema: Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of people don’t have control over their lives because of the money decisions that they have made or the money decisions that have been made for them. And shifting that relationship gives you so much control back over your life.
Barb: Yeah. Well, thank you for the work that you’re doing. You’re helping so many people step into their financial power. I mean, you are. We are. It’s gonna take all of us, right, to lift [00:32:00] all ships and make sure women know that there are all these resources out there for them. Don’t need to be afraid. Don’t need to be intimidated.
One foot in front of the other. Reach out to Naseema. She’s got a great Instagram. I’ve looked through it. Good humor on there as well. had a few chuckles, so, where else can they connect with you, Naseema?
Naseema: So along with Instagram where I hang out, unfortunately every day a little bit too much. you can listen to me on the Financially Intentional Podcast. I have nearly 300 episodes, probably more. And yeah, just even if you just in a podcast app, just put it Naseema, it’s not a lot of namas out there.
Put in Naseema Naseema McElroy if you’re feeling frisky. And just like, it’s so much information that I’ve shared on different platforms. Just hang out with me there. I’m very responsive to dms on Instagram if you have some questions for me. But yeah, Instagram, financially intentional podcast.
I have a website. But yeah, those are the places.
Maggie: Awesome. Well, yeah, we [00:33:00] appreciate you taking the time today and having this conversation. It just is inspiring that, anyone can do it a million dollars in debt and you’re still now raising three badass daughters who’ve all are making their own money as well. So we love to see it. And it really shows what, some financial education can do for all of us, and so all ships will rise.
And yeah. Thanks for coming on today.
Talk to everyone soon. Until then, be financially fearless.
Outro: You’ve been listening to Women Money, the shit we don’t talk about. Now it’s time to take what you’ve learned and make bold moves towards financial independence. Stay in the know by joining our newsletter for exclusive tools, resources, and updates that keep you financially fearless. Head to PurseStrings. co and sign up today. Need a financial professional who gets it? Turn to PurseStrings Curated Directory, your go to resource for financial experts who know how to put you first. Love this episode? Leave us a review and help us empower even more women to own their financial power. [00:34:00] Until next time, be financially fearless.
Debunking the Bankruptcy Myths with Adrienne Hines
Think bankruptcy means failure? Think again.
In this episode of ‘Women and Money: The Shit We Don’t Talk About,’ we sit down with Adrienne Hines, a seasoned bankruptcy attorney and relatable straight-shooter who’s using TikTok to make financial freedom feel possible again.
Adrienne discusses how societal stigma and misinformation prevent people from seeing bankruptcy as a viable financial tool. The conversation covers the emotional burden of debt, different types of bankruptcy, and the myths surrounding bankruptcy’s impact on a person’s future. Adrienne explains that bankruptcy can significantly improve credit scores and financial stability within a short period after filing. The episode also touches on the role of medical debt in bankruptcies and Adrienne’s efforts on social media to educate and empower people, particularly women, about debt relief options.
Adrienne also breaks down the legal process in everyday language and helps us see bankruptcy for what it really is: a second chance, not a moral failure.
Have questions? Click this to check out our expert Q&A for tips from industry experts, tailored to help women address their most common financial concerns.
Subscribe to our newsletter to receive financial tips delivered weekly here!
(This transcript was generated using AI, so please excuse any misspellings or errors)
[00:00:00]
Maggie: mom. Have you ever filed for bankruptcy?
Barb: No, never. Never ever.
Maggie: Why you say that? Like there’s so much shame around it, girl.
Barb: Because there used to be, and every time I think of bankruptcy, I think it’s such a negative thing and don’t even assume I would do such a thing.
Maggie: Yeah, I think a lot of people carry that belief as it kind of just had that connotation of like, you’re bad with money, you couldn’t manage it. Now you got yourself into this hole and you should deal with it. There’s so many people out there who I know are like, you should deal with it, instead of just filing for bankruptcy.
Little did they know, they didn’t listen to our podcast.
Barb: I know it’s pretty brilliant. All that we learned on our podcast about bankruptcy because it’s not a negative thing, it’s a strategy.
Maggie: It is a tool. A tool. They’ve been hiding from you because the man created it and the man doesn’t wanna tell you about it. And we’re here to talk about that shit [00:01:00] because that’s what this podcast is all about.
Barb: Yes. So thank God we met Adrienne because she’s unpacked for us everything you ever wanted to know about bankruptcy and how it’s not a dirty word.
Maggie: I think we did kind of fly off the handles sometimes with the amount of questions we asked her, but I just like couldn’t wait to get in because you hear so much in the news about businesses, about all these people filing for bankruptcy, yet you still see them out there. And so I was very confused. But then she enlightened all of us and learned that there are different types of bankruptcies. And what,
Barb: There’s different types of bankruptcies.
Maggie: and they can really be a tool in your toolbox. It’s not all bad.
Barb: Yeah. And it’s interesting ’cause you had a really good question about how much money is bankruptcy for, is it 20 K or 200,000 k? And really her explanation, and I’m not gonna tell people what it was ’cause you have to listen, but it was brilliant and I just feel so enlightened about bankruptcy, and I think [00:02:00] there are many people out there, many women especially, that are inundated with a lot of debt that maybe
they had no part in. For instance, she said there’s many reasons. There’s seven reasons why people get into debt, and spending was like six or seven. It’s not about people buying plush bags in fancy clothes. It’s for the most part, when something happens to them that’s out of their control, like they get in a bad car accident and suddenly they have a lot of medical bills or somebody gets sick or they have to leave work to take care of somebody else.
And suddenly they don’t have a lot of income, so maybe they have to put things on a credit card debt. When life happens to you and it incurs a lot of debt and you’re overwhelmed, and you’re stressed almost to the point of depression, you need to think about filing for bankruptcy.
Maggie: yeah, she just has such good emotional connection of understanding how to come over this, how it can be helpful, and how we can really launch you forward. So I’m excited that we had her on ’cause I learned so much. And I’m ready to share this [00:03:00] with the rest of the community so they can use this tool to launch forward.
Barb: Yeah, and I kept thinking in my, the back of my mind, kinda like Oprah, you should file for bankruptcy and you should file for bankruptcy and you should file for bankruptcy. So bankruptcy, it’s not a dirty word.
Maggie: Barb’s not giving any advice on this show. And with that, let’s dive in./
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 is women in money, the shit we don’t talk about.
Maggie: Adrienne, welcome to Women and Money, the shit we don’t talk about. And today we are diving into [00:04:00] it. I am thrilled for this conversation around bankruptcy. But before we dive in and get started, could, would you be able to introduce yourself to the audience?
Adrienne: Absolutely. Thank you guys both for having me on the podcast and we’ve been looking forward to this. My name is Adrienne Hines and I’m a bankruptcy lawyer in northwest Ohio. I live in northwest Ohio with my husband and our son and our dog, and I pretty much, I have a regular, normal practice. I’m a bankruptcy attorney.
Have clients and a paralegal in office. But I also spend a lot of my time on social media trying to educate people about debt, about debt relief, about what options are really out there and what their safe and legal options are. So I’m a bankruptcy lawyer and an internet bankruptcy influencer. That’s what I do.
Maggie: It’s so fun. And I was reading, and we dove into this bit, but [00:05:00] I’m a big Reddit person and I love to read on there all these people who think they should or shouldn’t file for bankruptcy and all the reasons because of course why not talk to a professional but just go out there on social media and ask and everyone else there knows.
So, Adrienne, you’ve been helping people with that for almost 30 years, so what made you want to be a bankruptcy lawyer in the first place? We don’t come across a ton of people who are dying to get into bankruptcy.
Adrienne: Like, I can’t even believe I’m a bankruptcy lawyer. I can’t even believe I love doing this because it is fair to say I didn’t always love this, and I certainly did not envision that this was going to be who I would end up being. I went to law school. My, my parents got divorced when I was very young and my mother remarried when I was a teenager, and she remarried a lawyer.
I had already decided in my mind that I was gonna be a lawyer someday because my second grade teacher told me I should either be a actress or a lawyer. And I figured lawyering. See, there are schools everywhere for [00:06:00] lawyers, and you had to go to a big, you had to go to LA to be an actress. So I thought, well, I can go to a school to be a lawyer, so that’s what I’ll do.
So I thought it was kismet when my mother married a lawyer and I hung on his every word, and I followed his footsteps and I went to the same undergraduate school. School that he went to. And I tried to go to the same law school, but they didn’t quite let me in, so I had to go to a different one. But when I came outta law school, I went to work with my dad my stepfather, and I started doing workers’ compensation.
So most people. Most of the colleagues that I’ve had over these last 30 years know me as a workers’ compensation attorney. I was a specialist. And if you Google me, you’ll see a lot of references to workers’ comp. But what a lot of people in that field did not know about me is that I had interned with a federal bankruptcy judge when I was in law school.
And while I’d had no desire to do any bankruptcy work, he was a mentor to me and we stayed in contact. [00:07:00] And as my workers’ compensation practice became more and more dangerous and scary the safety nets being pulled out from under people. My, my old mentor, my, the judge that I interned for asked me why I wasn’t doing bankruptcy work myself.
I was always trying to find somebody to refer people to, and so he just sat me down one day and said that I needed to start doing this because I had such a tremendous need in my practice and I couldn’t continue to rely on other people to do it. And so I quietly started a bankruptcy practice largely to help my own clients in their problems in a different area.
And I am an incredibly passionate person. I’ve come to learn. I’m an incredibly empathetic, passionate loyal defensive kind of person. I got very involved in politics for a period of time in my life, and that became very frustrating. So I took all that energy and I think I just started channeling it into helping.[00:08:00]
People who don’t even know they need help. And I felt very safe in that space because I had already spent a lot of years, with men with injuries and kind of navigating complicated things, talking about depression and inability to work and those types of things. So I felt like I was already well seasoned to kind of trans transfer into this.
And over the years, it just truly became my passion. I love practicing bankruptcy law because I understand it and I know how valuable it can be for people, so I love sharing the word about it.
Barb: Who knew?
Adrienne: Who knew?
Barb: So glad that we met you because I think about. Bankruptcy and the negative connotations like bankruptcy. Oh, you’re a low life. You filed for bankruptcy. Just all this terrible negative stuff about it. But then when I met you, you were like, no, this is not a bad thing.
This is not a negative thing. There’s a lot of really [00:09:00] super cool things about bankruptcy and we wanna unpack that today. So we can’t wait to dig in and learn more about it.
Adrienne: love it.
Maggie: So I know like, what was your first big lesson about how people really feel when they’re drowning in debt? Because I’ve seen people who say, I’m $20,000 in debt. I think I should file for bankruptcy, and I’m $220,000 in debt and I think I should file for bankruptcy. So yeah. What’s that kind of feeling that you recognized?
Adrienne: The feeling is the feeling that I recognize is hopelessness and complete chaos and fear. And it doesn’t matter whether you have $20,000 in debt and credit cards and medical bills, and. Payday loans burned down $20,000 to a single mom who’s working at Bob Evans, who’s not receiving child support.
Feels the same as, $200,000 in debt would feel to somebody like me, right? So it’s all [00:10:00] relative and relativity matters. What I understand is the shame and the fear that people bring to the table. I certainly recognize and do not discount the fact that we have been inundated over the years with with media and with the concept that bankruptcy is bad.
And I certainly put a lot of blame on the makers of Monopoly for this. Because they’ve led us to believe that filing bankruptcy is worse than going to jail. And what the reality is that bankruptcy, it’s like going from a like a caterpillar to a butterfly, right?
It is an amazing tool, but we’ve been conditioned to think that it’s bad. Even though it is widely used across the United States for businesses and corporations today as we sit, Rite Aid is in bankruptcy, and Johnson is in bankruptcy, and red [00:11:00] Lobster is in bankruptcy and we don’t we don’t. say to ourselves, they’re horrible. They should be ashamed of themselves. They’re just bad, horrible people. In fact, I just saw a press conference from the president a couple of days ago, and Johnson’s products were behind him as if he was trying to show that their fabulous.
They’re in bankruptcy right now.
And so what I know is that bankruptcy is a financial decision and you make this decision with numbers and rationality, but we’ve been conditioned and we’ve been told to make our, those decisions with our hearts, with our guilt. And that I think is what I really came to understand is that there’s a propaganda out there that’s being pushed.
By a big corporation by lending companies to make you think that bankruptcy is bad. When in fact, if it were so bad, we would not have Disney World [00:12:00] because Walt Disney filed for bankruptcy after his first company Laff-o-matic. Went down the tubes, right?
Maggie: Matic, you don’t even know the
Adrienne: it was called and
laugh was spelled LAFF.
Laff-o-matic ,
but you don’t know about that. You don’t realize, well, Disney filed and his brother had to file for bankruptcy as a result of the, that failed business. You probably, most people don’t realize Henry Ford filed for bankruptcy and HJ Hines had a bad tomato crop in the late 18 hundreds and had to file bankruptcy has been around for a really long time.
And it is how Americans actually get through a difficult time and get to the other side and build wealth. And if businesses do it, why aren’t we doing it? Why aren’t we accepting this as a legitimate, safe way to manage our debt? And that’s really what I’m out here trying to do. So, yeah it’s that feeling that’s noticeable.
It’s that. I would do anything but this if I could, but there I can’t think of anything [00:13:00] better to do, and now this is my only option. So that’s what I saw.
Barb: So, when I hear companies are in bankruptcy, I always think, how come they’re still in business? Then I thought when you were in bankruptcy, it’s like, oh. We’re outta money. We’re bankrupt. We can’t pay all our debts, so we have to file for bankruptcy and close the doors, but they’re, they don’t, they just keep going in business.
So how does that work?
Adrienne: that works because there are actually two different types of bankruptcies. There’s two different types of bankruptcies for people, and there’s this almost the same two bankruptcies that are available for businesses. In fact, the first one is available to both. It’s called the chapter seven.
Chapter seven bankruptcy is what you are thinking of. It’s over. We’re shutting the doors. I gotta get out from under this debt and run as fast as I can from this. This thing that’s blowing up behind me, that’s chapter seven. Most businesses don’t [00:14:00] even do that. They don’t even go through the effort.
They just shut their business down. But people do, individual people file the chapter seven. But what a lot of these businesses are doing I is, they file what’s called a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which is a business reorganization. It’s identical in concept to a chapter 13 bankruptcy, which is a personal reorganization.
So you can either. Go into a seven and just shut the doors. It’s all gone. We owe more than any of this is worth. We gotta run for the hills, right? That’s a chapter seven, whether you’re a person or a company. But the reorganization is. Designed for higher income people who, individuals, people who have some money but just cannot meet all of their obligations.
It’s very similar to a business bankruptcy. A business goes into bankruptcy to cancel some contracts. Red Lobster very [00:15:00] specifically is in bankruptcy because they had gotten into two all these bad deals with their rental spaces, with their real estate. So they had gotten into. Bad contracts, they went into bankruptcy to cancel those contracts and renegotiate a lot of these contracts for their space.
And so you don’t realize that’s bankruptcy can, for half of the people who file bankruptcy, they’re filing a reorganization, which means that they’re reorganizing the debt and they’re gonna pay what they can afford to pay. But they’re, as long as they follow the rules at the end of their, at the end of this bankruptcy plan, some of their debt’s gonna go away because they’ve taken care of the most important stuff.
And that’s really what a business is doing. And it’s no different. In fact spirit Airlines went into bankruptcy last. Fall and they very quickly reorganized everything. They were able to ne negotiate and do stuff lightning fast, and they came out of bankruptcy and they’re operating. I’ve got a Spirit credit card.
It never was interrupted. I’ve got my spirit [00:16:00] points, I still got those. Spirit is better because they went through this process and most people are better for going through it because of the tremendous inherent advantages.
Maggie: Interesting.
Is very interesting. And so, if we wanna kind of take that fear and that shame away and use it as kind of a financial strategy to rebuild can you kind of explain for like a person what that would kind of look like in a simple way for someone who’s kind of scared and considering it, what kind of that rebuild would look like?
Adrienne: so again, these two separate bankruptcies, these two different types are really going to define what’s available to most people.
Maggie: How do you decide, yeah, what type you would do for a person?
Adrienne: Yeah, that’s a great question. So a chapter seven is the Easy Bankruptcy. It’s what everybody would want to file if they could, because it means that you go into bankruptcy, you pay money to file it, and then within three or four months, all of your unsecured [00:17:00] debt is gone, discharged. You come outta the bankruptcy, you don’t get to, you don’t have to pay any more of it.
And you come out and it’s gone. It’s behind you and you get to move on with your life. And that happens about three to five months, depending on the court. Okay? A chapter 13, which is what people would file to reorganize a Chapter 13 is designed for people who do not qualify for chapter seven. In order to file a chapter seven, you have to have a household income that is below a certain threshold limit based on the number of people in your house.
The state that you live in. So there’s an income requirement, you must be under it to file the easy Chapter seven bankruptcy. If I have clients who are over the income limit, then by definition we have to start talking to them about a chapter 13. Obviously chapter seven is what everybody would want.
People cry when they realize that, they might make too much money for a chapter seven. But a [00:18:00] chapter seven also has a second drawback, there’s a second test. In addition to being below a certain income limit, to file the easy chapter seven, you have to do an asset analysis.
And this is where a lot of people think, oh, I’ll lose my house, I’ll lose my car if I file for bankruptcy in a chapter seven. Every state has exemptions. And those exemptions are wildly different from state to state, and that’s the biggest problem. But every state has exemptions in the equity in your home, in the equity, in your car, in your household goods and furnishings in your business.
Your business implements. If you have a business. There’s a whole list of bankruptcy exemptions for each and every state.
So, for example, in Ohio, our exemption for our home equity is nice and big. It’s over $170,000 per person, so my husband and I could file a Chapter seven bankruptcy if our income was under the limit and we [00:19:00] could keep our house.
If it was worth up to $350,000 easily with no mortgage, we could just own it outright and file bankruptcy and get rid of 30,000 in credit card debt and keep our house. That’s possible in Ohio, but our exemption is $170,000 in Ohio, but it’s only $15,000 in Missouri. So if you’re a single mom in Missouri and your house happens to have 40 or $50,000 in equity because the housing prices of, And you’re under the limit. Your only option is going to be to try to file a chapter 13 to protect your home. So we file a 13 if your income is too high to file a seven or we file a 13. If in your state something would be at risk if you were to file a seven where you live, and those are really the two different reasons why you would file a 13 and that pretty much sums up sevens and thirteens.
Barb:[00:20:00] So when you talk about unsecured debt, let’s talk about what actually gets paid off
when you file
bankruptcy. Yeah.
Adrienne: it is. There are really three types of debt and in my book you’ll see I’ve got a little pyramid that I made. The pyramid, the debt pyramid at the very top, Ima just imagine a pyramid and the very top chunk of it is gonna be what I call priority debt. Priority debt is debt that is generally not gonna go away in bankruptcy, so the standards are.
Taxes, child support, alimony, student loans.
Maggie: student
loans are in there. That’s
Adrienne: Student loans cannot are nondischargeable as a general rule in bankruptcy. And that’s a big one. ’cause a lot of people ask about that. There are other things that are nondischargeable too. Like if you commit a crime, right? If you commit arson, if you burn down your neighbor’s house you cannot bankrupt the responsibility that you have too.
Fix their house. Right. So it’s an intentional
act. That’s fair. I had my law, my old law partner called me yesterday and he said If somebody’s [00:21:00] embezzled $500,000, they can file bankruptcy on that if they’re in, if they’re going to trial, right? I said, no, you cannot do that. You cannot do that.
Those are the things that don’t go away there.
There are few things that don’t go away. The big ones are taxes, child support, alimony, student loans. That’s at the top of the pyramid. That middle of the pyramid. We’re gonna cut our pyramid into three chunks. The middle part is what I call secured debt. Secured debt are car loans.
Mortgages, right? Your car loan is secured by the title to your car. Your mortgage is secured by the deed to your home. If you don’t pay it, they can come and get it right. That ring from K Jewelers, right? If you’re paying it on installments, if you don’t pay it, they can come get it. That’s secured. We’ll get back to that.
Everything else is pretty much unsecured. Credit cards, medical bills, payday loans, personal loans, lawsuits, things that lead to judgments. As long as it’s not [00:22:00] taxes, child support, alimony, student loans, right? Then it’s probably gonna be dischargeable in bankruptcy. It’s consumer lending industry and medical bills is really what it is.
Unsecured, unsecured lending and medical bills fall into that category.
Barb: So who picks up the debt?
Adrienne: That is a really good question. The companies that lent the money are the ones who pay for the debt. It’s not you or me, it’s not you or me. If Capital One is going to send $30,000 in credit card offers to a single mom who works at Bob Evans, that is a business model problem, and that is market correction when that mom has to file for bankruptcy.
I think a lot of people think that we all share the burden in this, and to the extent that we’re talking about medical bills, yes, we do. Okay. [00:23:00] That’s a different story, but that’s also just a different story in America, right? When it comes to credit, it is Capital One. It is Discover. It is the payday lender whose prevailing rate right now is 391%.
3 91. And we, people don’t understand that. And when you hear that,
of course they’re thugs. And we used to have laws in place that wouldn’t allow that. That used to be called loan sharking. So what happened to the laws? The laws were called USY laws. USY laws were designed to combat loan sharking with organized crime at the turn of the century.
Well, what did organized crime actually, or eventually turn into corporations? So really from the seventies on the corporations and lobbyists have removed those USY laws that used to protect us. They used to protect us and that’s why people think about [00:24:00] bankruptcy so badly because it was a different thing before the seventies.
It was a different concept for a large part because up until that point we had USY laws that capped interest and protected us, and those are gone now. The lobbyists, the companies the Capital Ones, the discovers, they paid a lot of money to have those laws removed and the compounding interest
is the gain. So when you say who pays for that, we’ve already paid it ourselves over and over due to compounding interest. And that is really what I’m on a mission to explain to people. When you borrow $30 from your credit card and you spend the next two years paying it off, you’ve paid them back $30 and then some.
You’re on the hook for the interest now, and now you’re just trapped in a cycle that you cannot get out of. And bankruptcy helps you get out of that trapped cycle you find yourself in. These lenders didn’t take a security interest. They didn’t ask for your ring, they [00:25:00] didn’t ask for your car, they didn’t ask for something in return.
’cause their business model is high risk. High reward. That’s who pays for it. I’m glad you asked because I think a lot of people think that bankruptcy is shameful ’cause somebody else is gonna pick up the tab and that is actually not the way that it works. And understanding that is so important to helping people get over that anxiety hump or that fear that shame in terms of finding some answers out.
Maggie: I can like feel your energy through this and I’m like getting pumped up about it. Like I can
just feel it
and how you’re passionate about it. And it is a little like stick it to the man a little bit, it’s always back on us not doing enough, not doing the shame where we’re just trying to keep our head above water and these companies are not.
Allowing us to, and they have enough money to change legislation and to do all the things keep you down and to keep them high and same story over again.
And so before, we get back on track to some other questions. The other thing I did wanna ask is like, the perception I’ve always heard was, you file for [00:26:00] bankruptcy you’re never owning a home again.
You’re not getting a car again. You at least have to wait seven years for it to fall off your record. So good luck doing anything else that you wanna do.
Adrienne: Yeah, well, I,
Maggie: that’s false.
Adrienne: it, well, it’s false because if you’ve watched any of my videos, you would know that is false. And, that is, again, perpetuating these myths that bankruptcy is so bad. Here’s the reality my clients. I say this almost in every single one of my videos.
My clients can and should be back to a 720 credit score within 12 to 24 months of filing a bankruptcy, filing a chapter seven. My clients can and do very regularly, almost every week. Definitely a couple of times a month, they buy a car the day after they file a bankruptcy. It’s unique opportunity that most of them have.
My clients have access to revolving credit cards within four or five months. And then my clients can buy a house qualified to finance a [00:27:00] house in two to four years. So when people say you can’t do anything, that’s simply not true. It’s categorically not true. And if you look at people like. Dave Ramsey, or notable people who have filed for bankruptcy and then rebuilt their lives into amazing things, the Walt Disney, right? I mean, these types of people are examples that filing bankruptcy is what allows you to get rid of your debt. I mean, you’re getting, my clients are getting rid of 30, 40, 50, 60, a hundred thousand dollars of debt, and if we can
push you through and you can see that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. The reality is what are you gonna be able to do in two to four years if you don’t file bankruptcy? What is your plan? How are you going to be materially in less debt than you are right now if you don’t do something big and drastic?
My clients who come in who have higher income, decent income and [00:28:00] who start working on their credit immediately, their credit scores can and do get back up to over 700 within six months. That’s not something I say is you know, I don’t wanna make everyone think that’s possible, but 12 to 24 months is definitely doable and should be done.
Maggie: Wow,
Barb: So I have a question. How many times can people file for bankruptcy?
Adrienne: Yeah. I mean, it’s every eight years is a chapter seven. You can file a chapter 13, four years after you’ve filed a chapter seven. There’s a lot of different rules, but it’s not the number of times in your life. It’s the number of years between, and does your finances fit into this?
Square peg today. That’s how it is. It’s not an emotional decision. It’s a where are my finances at and is this a reasonable option for me at this point?
Maggie: And so I know you’ve taken your advice to TikTok because clearly this information needs to be shared, why did you personally decide to go online and like, what’s the response you’ve been getting from women out there?
Adrienne: Yeah. So [00:29:00] like so many other people. I had children who were high school seniors when COVID came around and when COVID happened, my kids were very prolifically on TikTok and,
Maggie: Were they teaching you the dances?
Adrienne: , I wanted to do these dances more than they did. I got a little bit more into it than them, but a funny thing happened the right when COVID started I woke up in the middle of the night
was sweating and I was not feeling well and I thought I was dying of cancer because, it was COVID and you couldn’t go to the doctor. And turns out I was going through menopause. I was starting my menopause journey. I. But what happened after that, I’ve got it blown out straight today, but my hair went from pretty straight to very curly.
And a lot of my photos, a lot of my videos, you can see my really curly hair. I went to TikTok to figure out how to handle newly curly hair because I didn’t know, I didn’t know how to make it cute. And that’s what took me to TikTok. While I was there, I started looking around I saw [00:30:00] the difference with TikTok versus Instagram, how Instagram seemed real glossy and fancy, but TikTok seemed more gritty and real, and I thought.
I think I like it in the gritty real place, and I kept looking around and then one day I just started talking about what I was doing. I started putting up videos about running and juicing and all the simple little things. I think that we start with when we’re playing around with social media, I. And one day I just happened to mention what I do and a video just went viral.
And I realized in that moment that I had a lot of information to give about something that nobody else was really talking about. And it was an aha moment for me.
Maggie: And so what has your response from women like? Been out there, just all over it.
Adrienne: clearly my personality is very very in tune to communicating with people who are emotional. Who come from an emotional place. I’m very empathetic and so I [00:31:00] understand the fear, the deep fear that people have, but I also understand what it’s like to be at home and to have a bill in your hand and not quite know what to do with it.
And to know you have all these other obligations and maybe your husband knows about it, maybe he doesn’t. And maybe you’re trying to figure out how to get out from under this, how to not damage your marriage, how to not embarrass yourself. And those things just kind of all spiral up on themselves.
I know that when I know that women internalize this debt and they bear a lot of responsibility in the family for trying to make ends meet right this way and that way. Men have tremendous concerns too, but women it affects us emotionally. It affects our relationships with our children and affects our ability to see ourselves as strong and powerful.
And so, I want to empower women to take care of their problems. Push through the fear and the anxiety. Be strong. This is your [00:32:00] opportunity to be strong and do something very brave for your family. And so that’s, I think, kind of how people respond to that. And I just really enjoy helping women and people in marginalized groups because we are the ones who will suffer the most in an economic crisis.
Men rise to the top. They’ve got their own problems. But women have unique problems in this lane from the emotional standpoint and the responsibilities they have in the home.
Barb: It
is so interesting because all the people that you mentioned who filed for bankruptcy were all men.
And I think women have, this kind of underlying, for men it’s a business strategy for women, it’s I failed, I did something wrong. It’s shame. You know what I mean? But women bear the brunt of so much financially raring children, taking care of those who are sick in our family, and, it’s stressful.
It’s very stressful. So I love that you’re there for them. I love that they know that you’re out [00:33:00] there and we can’t wait to promote that you are out there as well. If they have questions like this, what do I do? Like, just the fact that you said 20 K is a lot different to a waitress than it is to somebody else.
I’ve been there. It’s huge. It’s huge. And I can only imagine. Can you speak a little bit to medical bills, because I think that was something you mentioned. Is that also something that gets paid off when you file for bankruptcy?
Adrienne: Yeah. If you are eligible for a Chapter seven bankruptcy, I just wanna make sure you understand that. You don’t pay anything. It just gets discharged. It goes away. Nobody pays it. They take a loss on their taxes. Medical debt is the number one reason for filing for bankruptcy in America.
In America, we do not have safe, affordable access to healthcare. We just simply don’t have it for that reason. Bankruptcy laws will never go away in America. They won’t go away because of medical bills, and they won’t go away because of their because of the [00:34:00] need to be able to start businesses. In America, right?
So medical bills are terrible, they’re overwhelming. And I live in the shadow of the Cleveland Clinic, right? Cleveland Clinic’s only an hour away. They saved my mother’s life. They also charge a lot of money. And they just came out with a new decision, a new rule starting June 1st.
You cannot be seen in the clinic for non-emergency service without paying your copay. And that alone is gonna be a real problem for a lot of people because a lot of people, they just don’t have the money for that. And so when people say, oh, they can get medical treatment for free, it’s all subsidized.
You can get emergency medical treatment if you are bleeding out and go to a hospital, but you don’t get the follow-up care, you don’t get the physical therapy or the cardiac follow up or the MRI or any of that stuff and [00:35:00] follow up. And people don’t understand that. So medical debt is a tremendous
problem in America, even people who have health insurance are overwhelmed with medical bills. I say a lot of the time, debt oftentimes happens to us. It happens to us and therefore we need to be open and ready for all of the ways to manage it. Because we gotta put that in motion aside.
It’s not your fault that you had to be life flighted to the Cleveland Clinic. You didn’t consent to it. You didn’t sign the contract that said, I’m gonna charge you $90,000 to fly you there. It’s just not possible.
Maggie: there’s no way to heal if you just have this huge debt carried over you. And it’s so hard ’cause it’s like, as we know, a stage one cancer is easier to beat than a stage four. ’cause you caught it early, but if you didn’t get in early, then you’re paying for it and
all the things. So i’m glad that’s part of it, and I’m glad we had this discussion, but let’s turn a little positive.
Can you tell us, about a woman who you’ve helped, who’s come out feeling just strong again and [00:36:00] really just, that the opportunity’s there because they went through this transformation.
Adrienne: I have helped so many women that it’s hard for me to think about any one individual person. I just got a message on TikTok yesterday from a lady. I check all my messages. I turned it into a video because it was just so beautiful. But I have helped a lot of women very specifically.
I started a podcast not too long ago with a friend of mine who was my bankruptcy client. That’s how I met her, my podcast partner. We talk about being a moms and family and the different lifestyle that I have as a lawyer versus she as somebody who’s a homesteader, right? We have different financial groups.
But she came to me through TikTok. She found me through TikTok. She made an appointment to talk to me ’cause she doesn’t live far. And I ended up filing for bankruptcy for her and I became friends with her along the way and I was really able to get down into, what it was [00:37:00] really like for her.
So we talk about that a lot. We do videos together a lot. And what I know is that it changed the trajectory of their life. It changed their life. And I know that if we hadn’t filed a year ago, I know what their life would be looking like right now today. And her husband didn’t wanna do it, and then she kind of got cold feet, and I’m not really in the business of talking people into filing, but she’d become my friend.
So I started to bug her. I was like, you’ve gotta do this, you gotta do this. And so. I watched her go through the ups and downs, even though I’m a bankruptcy lawyer and I was wrapping my arms around her, like as a friend and texting her and calling, becoming actual friends with her, and she was still having trouble. Trusting me, but once she did, everything changed her. Her relationship with her children has changed. Her relationship with her spouse has changed. Her relationship with her family has changed. She was very [00:38:00] concerned about her family knowing. And then after she filed it, and finally she’s like, I’m doing a podcast and talking about it.
She had people popped out like, oh, I filed, oh, did you know your dad filed? Like, all of a sudden we’re like, okay. So I just, it was a very poignant step-by-step acknowledgement of how difficult it is for people to do this, but also how common it is. So everybody thinks that, oh, everyone’s gonna find out.
The reality is people, have already filed. I know, ’cause I filed for, I live in a small community wherever I’m at, I see people, whether I’m at the grocery store or at a restaurant or at the fancy club I belong to, I’ve seen people I’ve filed bankruptcy for at all these places.
’cause bankruptcy is supposed to turn your life around and get you back on track.
Barb: it’s like being
in the closet in the bankruptcy
Adrienne: It’s like being in the debt closet. Oh, I’m writing that down. Oh. Come out of the debt closet. Maybe do some, oops, I’m [00:39:00] sorry. Do some rainbows and stuff. I don’t know. I love it.
Maggie: All these topics we’ve talked about with money, it’s always so interesting is everyone feels so alone and so shameful. I mean on, divorce, on budgeting, on just money mindset, I mean, any of these things. And then once you open up and talk about it, all the hands go up. Yep. Me. Yep, me. I relate.
I’ve done it. And that’s why we want, to talk about this shit is because you’re not the only one, listening who’s ever felt this way, going through this thing, thought about it, had shame about it, wanna do it, all this. Stuff. So it’s like, let’s get the right resources, let’s talk about it.
Let’s bring it out of the closet and shine some light on it because it’s not foreign, it is fine. Let’s do it.
Adrienne: That’s exactly the point. The very first line in my book is, shame lives in darkness and Shame lives in darkness. And the problem is that when we are embarrassed or shameful about something, we won’t talk about it. That smell, we won’t talk about it. We don’t want to talk about it, but not talking about it is what puts us [00:40:00] in a position where we don’t have the information we actually need in order to make the right choices. So in order to deal with that smell, whatever it is, we’re gonna have to talk about it so we can fix it.
It has to be taken care of. We cannot keep ignoring it. It’s not gonna make it better ignoring, it’s not gonna make it better. And surprisingly, maybe not surprisingly, the moment people get it out of their mouths, they feel better.
Whenever I’m talking to somebody, you can just tell they’re hamming and hawing.
Well, I didn’t, and I’m a good person. I tried. I stop them. I say, stop. It doesn’t matter how you got here. Just tell me the number. How much do you owe? It’s the hardest thing for them to do. It flies outta their mouth. The best number that they can come up with. 40,000, 22,075,000 doesn’t matter.
Now it’s out. Let’s start talking about how we fix this. Let’s go through the reality and every [00:41:00] single time. They feel better just by saying it. And they were so anxious. It’s like stepping on the scale. When you go to the doctor, nobody wants to do it, but if you go into the doctor saying, today is the day I’m gonna do something about this.
Get on that scale. And when you get off, you have a different feeling, you’re like, I’m ready now. I’m ready. I wanna talk to the dietician, I wanna talk about that with gov stuff whatever you wanna do, you’re allowed to do it. But the point is you’ve gotta step on the scale and look somebody in the eye and say, this is the problem I’m dealing with.
And I think that’s the hardest thing for most people.
Maggie: we say so often, know your numbers and that we act like that’s a hard thing or, people act like of course. And it’s like, that’s the hardest part though, is knowing where you’re starting getting that first number, whether it’s your weight or your income, or your spending or whatever it is.
Like people just don’t wanna look at it. And so we’re always like, know your numbers. Yeah. No know them. Know what it is and say it out loud. Share it with someone you know, actually [00:42:00] know the number.
Adrienne: I gotta be honest with you and tell you that, I think one of the reasons why I love this area of law and why I get it, is because I’m very messy. I’m not your normal bankruptcy lawyer. I’m a trial attorney and I fly by the seat of my pants and I can talk my way out of a paper bag, but I’m not the most detail oriented person in the world.
I’m very messy in my own finances. We all know it. My husband acknowledges it. I talk about it a lot. I don’t always look at the numbers. I don’t like to do things like that. I get anxious, when there’s more bills than there is money. I get that feeling and I know. What it’s like to not have the resources there in, in those situations.
I know how guilty I feel. I know how I say to myself, if I just paid closer attention, I wouldn’t have made that mistake and let my insurance lapse. Like, those are the type of stuff I do. But I know how [00:43:00] hard that is and I know how embarrassing and shameful it can feel, and I know how important it is to be able to say it out loud.
Barb: Mm-hmm.
Yeah, we’re all human. We all do it. We all do it.
Adrienne: Yeah.
Maggie: So Adrienne we like to wrap up every episode with the same question to all our guests, and that is what is your own definition of financial freedom?
Adrienne: Yeah. So, there’s really no question I’ve had a tremendous amount of life changes in the last couple of years. My husband was in a near fatal plane crash. And because of that, I chose, I decided to leave my position as a partner in a law firm with my dad after 27 years and then just 30 days after I left my job we lost our 22-year-old daughter last summer and in a unexpectedly.
And so I say these things because I have thought about this a lot before. My husband’s plane crash two [00:44:00] years ago. I would’ve thought that financial freedom, financial independence look like something else. But I know very seriously in my core that financial freedom is the ability to know that your basics are taken care of, and to know that you have safety in where you’re at.
Financial freedom to me does not mean having lots of money. It means knowing that I’ve got exactly what I need in order to do the things that I want to do. If I hadn’t left my job, I would not have been able to grieve for my daughter. And so financial freedom in that moment was not having to work. It was being able to just cry all day and know that I could still pay the bills. That was financial independence and financial freedom to me in that moment. And it stays with me. My husband and I had this discussion after the plane crash. How much is [00:45:00] enough? Like, how much do we really need?
And it turned out financial freedom for me. Was my husband saying it’s okay to walk away. We’ve got this. So just lowering your expectations, and being able to exist comfortably with what you have. That to me is financial freedom and it’s a tremendously comforting feeling.
Maggie: Wow, that’s impactful. That was great. And so let’s share a little bit. I would love to hear, I know your book just released, so I want to know where to find you on TikTok, where to find your book. Of course, all the things will be in the show notes, but we wanna hear it from the horse’s mouth.
Adrienne: Yes, you can find me on all the socials, on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, tiktoks. My main that’s where I got all most of my catalog of stuff. I am the Ladylike lawyer at the Ladylike Lawyer.
[00:46:00]
Maggie: Awesome. This has been great Adrienne. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your expertise. So we encourage everyone to, share this podcast with a friend, reach out to Adrienne, give her a follow, grab the book. And let’s take the shame outta this bankruptcy and really use it for the tool that it is.
Barb:[00:47:00] Beautiful.
Maggie: Mic drop. All right, we’ll talk
to everyone again soon.
Outro: You’ve been listening to Women Money, the shit we don’t talk about. Now it’s time to take what you’ve learned and make bold moves towards financial independence. Stay in the know by joining our newsletter for exclusive tools, resources, and updates that keep you financially fearless. Head to PurseStrings. co and sign up today. Need a financial professional who gets it? Turn to PurseStrings Curated Directory, your go to resource for financial experts who know how to put you first. Love this episode? Leave us a review and help us empower even more women to own their financial power. Until next time, be financially fearless.
The Money Moves You Wish You Made Sooner with Bola Sokunbi
If you’ve ever felt guilt around money decisions, or unsure of how to take control of your finances, this conversation is going to speak right to your soul.
Bola Sokunbi is a Certified Financial Education Instructor (CFEI), finance expert, bestselling author of the books, “Choosing To Prosper”, “My Wealth Plan Workbook”, and the 3-part Clever Girl Finance Book Series, speaker, and founder of Clever Girl Finance, one of the largest personal finance media/education platforms for women in the U.S.
She gets honest about her early savings journey (yes, while working a demanding consulting job), the “treat yourself” purchases that felt good until they didn’t, and the moment she realized her closet was literally stacked with missed investment opportunities.
We also talk about the quiet but powerful influence of her mother, a woman who paved the way by choosing courage, moving across the world, and starting over so Bola could have more opportunities. And now? She’s helping women everywhere rewrite their own stories with real tools, zero shame, and an unapologetic reminder that you deserve to live life on your own terms.
Have questions? Click this to check out our expert Q&A for tips from industry experts, tailored to help women address their most common financial concerns.
Subscribe to our newsletter to receive financial tips delivered weekly here!
(This transcript was generated using AI, so please excuse any misspellings or errors)
barb:[00:00:00] Maggie, it’s amazing how many times when we talk to women who’ve become financial professionals or have some kind of role in the financial industry, how they have realized that they needed to get a hold on their finances. Couldn’t find resources and so many said after work, I’d go to the library. So many have said I’d go there so often the librarians would know me. I’d go right to the finance section and I’d go sit down and just read as much as I could about finances. Same is true with our guest bola today who said, she was insulted when talking to a financial professional, again, talked down to, was insulted by them and just, she left his office and said, I’m just gonna figure this out on my own. She went to the library, right? And she got two books. One was written by a man on how women can save and invest, and she loved it and she read it to pieces. And it’s just interesting how often women looked for resources and fast [00:01:00] forward how there are so many more resources available to women today, which I love love.
And of course, purse strings is one of them, right? We at every point in turn, give women free resources through our podcast, always through our money talks, through all of the downloads that we have through anything on our website. We have tons of resources on our website, and so does bola.
Bola has books, wonderful books that she gives out or you can purchase, but she has tons of resources on her website for free. So we see. As women needing to learn more about literacy, about finances, and realizing, gosh, there are really no resources out there for us. So what do women do? Mothers the necessity of invention.
So they go out, they learn what they need to know, and they start making more resources so that other women. Have what they need for free in their fingertips so they too can learn what they need to know to make good financial decisions.
Maggie: Yeah, [00:02:00] it is interesting how it’s very common. We hear kind of that same thread of story over and over again and. Granted, I don’t think it was the time of technology that we have today where everything can be on your phone, but it was a place where yeah, a lot of people hang out. It’s a great free resource just to get, your hands on those books.
And it’s kind of that first like great financial move to make is to use the free resource to get the free books, get in that knowledge’s, a place that’s usually got some AC going on if it’s the summer, and save a little bit of money
barb: What I love is that starting from parlaying from a few bits and pieces of information about finance typically written for men because the audience was always men and women. Out there saying, I’m gonna learn this. I’m gonna take it upon myself to learn this. And leveraging those few resources. And they would just study whatever resources came their way, and then they would turn around and then they started creating resources. Yes, along came [00:03:00] the internet. There’s more information out there. I think it started unveiling where, investing wasn’t just for men. It wasn’t everything behind this, secret. Vast wall of confusing information, although it still can be these days, but so many people have access to all this information to really understand investing. So what my. Call is for women to really step forward and leverage these tools. Start learning, start understanding that you have access to all of those fantastic resources. Ebola has put forth that purse strings has put forth that you can put. Look on the internet in lots of different invest topia, lots of different places to really start learning how to make good financial decisions because, and you’ll see as bola and her amazing story about getting started and what she did to really save money. And, it wasn’t a magic wand. It wasn’t just like she sat in a yoga position and manifested it overnight. She [00:04:00] did the hard work. She gave up a lot of things in order to save a hundred thousand dollars and she was only making
$54,000.
Maggie: can’t give away the whole story before we dive in.
barb: Well, let’s tee it up and get started.
Maggie: All righty then. Today we are thrilled to introduce Ebola. And Ebola is the founder and CEO of Clever Girl Finance. She’s named one of Money’s most influential women by Go Banking rights in the recipient of the 2021 Financial Education Instructor of the Year Award. She’s a four time bestselling author of the Clever.
Finance book series and Choosing to Prosper Mission. Choose a four-time bestselling author to the Clever Girl Finance book series and Choosing to Prosper. Her mission is to help women ditch the debt, save the money, and build real wealth. Let’s dive in.
Bola: / I got to the point where I’d saved over a hundred thousand dollars and I was like, oh, I have all this money. What can I buy? And I [00:05:00] was like, oh, you know what? Everybody talks about how every girl has to have one classic bag in her collection. I should get a Chanel handbag. So I went and I bought a Chanel handbag, and at i’ve saved enough money. Six months later, I should buy another Chanel handbag. So I went and I bought another one with $2,850. And before I knew it, every six months I’m like, I should buy a handbag. That was my treat yourself habit, buying a designer handbag. I did the math and I would’ve had $30,000 if I had invested that amount of money.
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 is women in money, the shit we don’t talk [00:06:00] about.
Maggie: We are so excited to have bola on today founder of Clever Girl Finance. So before we dive in, bola, could you introduce who you are and what you do to the audience?
Bola: Yes. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I’m excited to be here. And like you said, my name is Bola. I’m the founder of Clever Girl Finance. We’re an online financial education and empowerment platform. Focusing on women, and the goal is really to empower women to do well with their money make the right decisions and live life on their own terms. I’m also an author author of five books, currently writing my six books, so the Clever Girl Finance Book series my Wealth Plan Workbook, and my book about my personal story called Choosing to Prosper. So I’m really excited to be here, as I mentioned.
Maggie: Yeah, we’re excited to have you, and I know we’re gonna dive in today a bit about like your personal story as well is that kind of was your foundation or your impetus on getting started. And so I know your story highlights how your mother’s financial [00:07:00] sacrifices really inspired you to pursue that wealth building.
So what kind of lessons? From her journey can help women make kind of these bold financial decisions in 2025?
Bola: So I’ll give you some background on my mom’s story just for context,
Just to kind of help you understand why her story inspires me. But my mom got married very young. She was 19 years old. She had her high school diploma. That was it. My dad was. Much older, but I guess at the time that was the norm. My dad was in his thirties. I have a lot of friends moms who got married in their late teens, early twenties to 30 something year old guys who was a different generation. And so, she went on to have. Four kids housewife homemaker, caretaker of the children. And as she started to get older, she started to observe things that were happening with her friends that she just was not comfortable with. And I was born, my mom was in her early thirties, and so I was kind of in that witnessing stage of her seeing things happening. So I remember [00:08:00] being a little girl and being in the corner of our living room. And her having friends come over with suitcases and they needed to spend the night and they would be there with their suitcases and with their kids.
And they needed to spend the night because they couldn’t get me back home. And I realize now that they had been abusive marriages and they didn’t have any option but to come to my mom. They didn’t have any money. They didn’t have any way out, but they needed to find a way out. And my mom was they’re safe healing. There were situations where I saw her friends who had lost. Their spouse and there would be the conversations about how the family had come in and taken everything because he had left everything in their name or in his
name and nothing in her name. And so my mom just never wanted to find herself in that situation where she had nothing, no money to leave a bad situation, no money in the event that my dad was not there.
My parents have been married for over 50 years now.
But that was kind of her mindset. And so my mom said that she wanted to go back to school, and that was a challenge for my dad because the way he was raised and the way our society was, is that the man is a caretaker.
He’s, he [00:09:00] takes care of his family.
He brings in the income. And why should your wife be out there working? How does that make you look as the provider? So I meant provider, not caretaker. How does that make him look as the provider? And so there was a bit of, I guess conflict between both of them around that. My mom eventually went on to get her undergrad degree.
I went with her to all her college classes. I was, she was the mom in the class with a little child and she was always telling me to shh. And then she went on to get her master’s degree and then other certifications and she started making her own money and, started working in investment banking, opened her own businesses.
She used to have Coca-Cola franchise, a hairdressing salon. She opened a girls’ secondary school, girls’ high
school, and my mom was just very, she had a very entrepreneurial spirit within her because she always wanted to be able to have her own money and contribute to our household. And that was a really good idea because fast forward several years, my dad ended up having to retire early. From his job due to health issues. And my mom became about 15 years earlier than he had planned to retire, and my mom became the main breadwinner. This was at a [00:10:00] time where I was going to college as an international student. That cost a lot of money. Right. And there was a lot of other expenses with my siblings, my older siblings as well, that my mom ended up, supporting us through. And so. A lot of the advice my mom gives me and even my dad gives me, is about being able to stand on my own two feet no matter what. My mom always would encourage me to be independent, and my dad would always tell me. Don’t marry a liability and don’t ever let anybody be a liability on you. So my, so, so my mom, the way her, I guess what I learned from her would be relevant to women today would really be to empower yourself to earn your own money. No matter where you are, right?
My mom was a housewife. She was taking care of kids and she decided that she was gonna go back to school. She started that way, and even when she was a housewife, my, my dad would give her a monthly allowance. My mom would get really entrepreneurial with that monthly allowance, selling her friends little goods and services, like, if you help me do this, and I’ll babysit for you, and you gimme this. So she [00:11:00] was always trying to figure out how to make it work because she just wanted to have a sense of security for herself not because she was hoping that. One day she would be in an abusive marriage, or one day my dad would die. But just because you never know, and in her situation, it was becoming the breadwinner unexpectedly, right? And so, I think it’s for us being able to stand in our own two feet, being able to involve ourself in our family finances, if we’re choosing to be homemakers or that’s, what we’re giving to our family. Being aware of where things are. Knowing that it’s okay for us to ask for our names to be on the house title and on the bank accounts because we are part of the team that makes our households whole. And so those are the lessons I would say from her journey are relevant to me and to other women today.
barb: That is such a powerful story and what a beautiful mentor your mom was and a teacher showing you how important it is for you to be independent and on your own. And your father supported that as well. It sounds like he gave you that same messaging, which was terrific.
Bola: he got on board [00:12:00] eventually.
barb: Yeah. You got on board, huh?
Maggie: And it’s also amazing just to see how much she was helping all these other women and kind of knowing like, I have to support myself ’cause I don’t know who else will need me out there. And the opportunities that she was able to give and give that safe space, it’s just so powerful, especially as a young woman kind of seeing how she helps the community.
And I love that you also had to go to school with her. So did you walk across the stage, when you
were
As well, or.
Bola: No, I don’t. I was definitely at her graduation. I had a little cap and gown situation going on. I don’t remember if I walked across the stage with her,
but I was there. I remember being told, shh. That’s what I remember the most about the whole experience. And what’s really funny is that my mom was in college in her early thirties, and I ended up going to the same college as her.
And we had the same psychology professor. But I didn’t know it. And in the class, the professor would say, there’s just something about you that’s so familiar, I can’t place it. And she would ask me questions and I’m like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. She’s like, there’s something about you. [00:13:00] I just can’t place it.
And then one day I was talking to my mom and I’m like, there’s this woman in that teaches psychologist. She keeps saying that she can’t place it. There’s something about me and mom’s like, oh my God, I used to take you to her class. 20 something years ago.
barb: Wow,
you knew all the answers.
Bola: Right.
barb: That’s wild. Boy, you must have been a patient little girl to sit through all those classes.
Bola: I remember being under tables a lot.
barb: That’s crazy. So it sounds like you picked up some amazing financial habits and strategies. You even saved your first a hundred thousand dollars on a modest salary by building some habits like saving half of your income and. Starting a side hustle. Sounds like you learned a lot from your mom. So what small actionable steps can women take from this to replicate some successes?
Like, what did you learn, what did you do? What can you share for [00:14:00] other women?
Bola: So if I think back to me getting started with my financial journey, it was really graduating from college and getting my first real paying job. So when I graduated from college, I didn’t get a job immediately. I finished college in March. I didn’t have any classes until graduation In May, I finished. My classes early and I remember I was so anxious to get a job, but nothing was forthcoming. So I end up getting a job at CVS and working at the photo department
processing photos, and it was minimum wage. And at the time, I think minimum wage is about $15 now, but at the time it was like $5 or $4 and 85 cents.
It was not, but I was so desperate to have a job that. I just wanted to do anything and I got the job at CVS while I was still applying, and so the first thing I started doing was just saving as much as I could. ’cause I’m like my parents because my dad had to retire early. My mom became the breadwinner. My mom took on a second career to support me through college. So my mom I [00:15:00] mentioned was in investment banking, had her MBA in finance and all of that. But then my mom ended up moving here and. Initially when she moved here, she was a caretaker for other people’s children a nanny, and then she eventually went on to become a nurse because she wanted to support. Us. And she did this when she was in her fifties.
So I had this, I felt this obligation to just make my mom proud ’cause she sacrificed all these things. My parents had delayed their retirement so I could go to college. I didn’t qualify for any student loans as an international student. I had some partial scholarships, but I just wanted to make them proud.
So that was the motivation behind getting the CVS job. And so it was just saving as much money as I could. And then when IE eventually to get my corporate job, a few months later earning $54,000 before taxes, I realized that there were things I didn’t know and my parents couldn’t help me with them. My parents were immigrants.
I’m a first generation immigrant. They didn’t know about credit. They didn’t know about 4 0 1 Ks. They didn’t know about the us. Stock market or investing. So I had to learn all these things. And I remember going into, I had saved [00:16:00] us an amount of money, I don’t remember how much it was, maybe like $10,000 or something. And I went to a financial advisor’s office and I wanted help as to how to invest because I was told that, if you have money, go to a financial advisor to help you. And he was like, where’d you get this from? Do you have a boyfriend? Are you married? And he’s asking me all these random questions about what man is funding my. Saving that. I got nothing out of it, but I left angry
and so I was like, you know what? I’m gonna figure this out on my own. I’m gonna learn as much as I can about finance. And I started, I went on Google and started reading different finance blogs. I went to the bookstore. At the time, I only found two finance books, one by Susie Orman, and it was on wills and trusts. And then one by David back about a Smart Woman Finished Rich.
And that book became my Bible. I read that book to shreds until it was falling apart. I bought it again. And I just, I found it so ironic that there was a man that was writing a book
on financial women, but I was like, you know what?
If he’s the only one that’s talking about this right now.[00:17:00]
barb: Yeah.
Bola: So, and it was a really good book. I still love that book. I still have a copy of it. And so. I learned as much as I could. So I would tell you know, anyone, learn as much as you can. Empower yourself with knowledge so that when you go into the financial advisor meeting, you don’t feel like you’re being taken for a ride.
You don’t feel like you don’t feel weird or embarrassed. And you can also do things on your own. You can create your budget on your own. You can create a financial plan on your own. You can invest on your own. You don’t need to rely on anybody else. And a lot of times women, the most common trend I see with women is telling ourselves that, oh, I’m bad with money.
Nobody told me how to be good with money. And that’s I understand that, right? Because generationally money was not a woman’s thing.
We all
have a good recipe from our grandmother on how to make something, a cake, a pie. A main dish, something, and that was a thing back then, passed down recipes and it’s great, right? But sons were taught about family business taught about, money and buying a house. And, [00:18:00] it was, I think it wasn’t up until the seventies that a woman could open a bank account by herself.
So generationally, money has not been our thing. But in today’s world, money has to be our thing because we can have our own bank accounts. A lot of women are choosing not to get married, sole
household earners, breadwinners, single mothers. And we’re also earning more money than our grandmothers did, even despite that gender wage gap. So we’re in this position where. We have this money, we need to know what to do with it so that we can build a good life for us.
Knowing for ourselves, knowing that on average we live longer than our male counterparts, and we are the ones that are having the children that we now need to empower with
financial knowledge to make it better for the next generation. So definitely learn as much as you can and then don’t think that an amount is too little to save. I remember with my savings journey, I was just so. Focused on trying to save as much as I could that I remember having a spare $1 and I drove to the credit union, I had an [00:19:00] account to make the deposit, and the teller was like, did you really drive all this way to deposit the $1? Like the gas, it costs you to come here, girl. And I was like, I just need to stay consistent. Like. For me it was the consistency of knowing, okay, I had the spare money this week, I need to, because if I skip this week, and I’ll probably skip next week and I’ll probably skip the next week. I just had to bring the dollar here. That’s what I had to do.
And at the time that credit union did not let you transfer. You had to go in person to make your deposit, and so. Saving what you can. When you can, as you can, those small amounts add up, and that consistency matters because when you’re saving consistently, when you start earning a lot of money, which a lot of people say they’re waiting for, I wanna earn more money so I can save. When you start earning a lot of money, then savings becomes, it’s inherent to your nature. It’s already part of what you do naturally, right? So saving what you can and then investing. That is so important. Investing is how you grow your money. This is your money working for you when you’re fast asleep.
This is your money taking advantage of compounding and appreciation [00:20:00] and dividends. And this is key to building wealth. And just, the future when you look, you think with your mind’s eye of where you imagine yourself 10 years from now, 20 years from now, how you imagine your dream life investing is what can get you there. So empower yourself with knowledge. Save what you can. And then start investing.
Maggie: These are just such great tips and we’ve had a couple different women on here who were, first generation. American and it’s so confusing to learn all the new finances and the verbiage and the acronyms. Everything has an acronym these days. And so it’s just so important just to, learn and tell yourself that you can do this because no one else is gonna come and teach you and sit down and have that lesson. And so if you want it, you’ve gotta do it yourself. And you really showed that even, 54, thousand especially today is not a whole lot, it’s hard to find some to say, but you did that consistently.
And it is just about getting in those reps as I know sometimes it’s like, well, it is just $5, what’s that gonna do? It’s like, well. [00:21:00] 7% over 20 years, it’s gonna turn into a little bit more, but it is just getting those reps because eventually, if you kept saying, oh, that’s not enough to save, it’s never gonna be enough to save, two 50 won’t be enough, a thousand won’t be enough.
And so you’ve just gotta start and keep that habit going, and I love that.
Bola: Yeah. I mean, $54,000 after taxes is 40 K. About 40 K in New York City is not a lot. And so
you have to get, and people hear, they’re like, oh, how? But then how did you save a hundred K? And it’s like you said, I had a side hustle. I got creative with my savings. I was like, okay, how can I eat lunch at work every day? How can I make sure that work? ’cause I used to work in consulting and if you were at work, I think over 12 hours they would pay for dinner. I was like, how can I stretch? Myself to stay at work every day beyond 12 hours
so I can get free dinner. I’m like, who’s having a baby shower today so I can go and get free lunch?
I would tell the admins at work, if there’s a baby shower, there’s a birthday party. Retirement party tell me, and they it get it. Got to a point where they just knew to email me bola a free food at a conference room [00:22:00] and I would.
Okay, this, it was lunch and dinner and they just knew to contact me about that because I was like, if I don’t have to buy groceries this week, what could I do with that extra money? Right? If I don’t have to pay for this bill this week, if I could get it for free at work.
What could I do with that extra money?
And that’s what I was thinking. And I started doing a side hustle photography business on nights and weekends. And I was barely ever home because I was trying to figure out how to make more money. And that’s what really helped me. Save, I contributed to my 401k. I took my employer’s free match. The tax returns I got, I saved all of them. The little bonus I got at work, I saved all of it. And I always tell people there is, you can do certain amount of things for short periods of time.
Could I have been? And my grocery budget was ramen noodles and my treat was coke. So I would go buy the 20 pack of ramen noodles for like, I don’t know what, $5. It, probably still $5 [00:23:00] today or $10. And I’d buy a case of Coke, and that was my grocery shopping for the week. So, horribly un nutritious, terribly bad for your health. And I would try to buffer it in with food from work.
And for me it was like, how can I save? And I did that intensely for three and a half years or so, but, and I tell people, well, you can do anything crazy for a short period of time, but you have to make it worth it. And for me, saving that money was worth it because when I saved the first 10,000, I was like, wait a minute, girl, you can save 10,000. And then I saved 20. I’m like, wow, I saved 20,000. And I look at my 401k and there’s 40,000. I’m like, oh my God, I have $40,000. Like I was blowing my own mind.
And so it was like, let me see what I can do. And I didn’t have any kids at the time, right? Kids are expensive.
I wasn’t married. I didn’t have any big financial obligations, and it was just me, myself, and I.
And so I had this opportunity to really focus on just me [00:24:00] and being. ’cause I can’t imagine that even if I was married, that my husband would be like, oh, let’s eat ramen noodles and coke every night for day. So,
barb: You made some sacrifices.
Bola: Exactly. It sounds exciting, but there are some days where I was like, this is stupid Paula.
Maggie: I was gonna ask you if there’s ever, like, ’cause like you said, you can only stick to something so long before, after a while you crack and you’re like, I’m done here. And so I was gonna ask, is there like a treat yourself that you would always get? And so that was kind of a coke for you.
Bola: Yeah. So Coke is look.
Maggie: There she goes.
Bola: Coke is my favorite thing. Now it’s Coke Zero. And be mindful. But at the time for me, I was so busy. I worked in consulting. I was traveling every week. I was so busy that I didn’t really have the time to treat myself for that period of time. I didn’t really have the time ’cause I was so busy that I started the side hustle.
But I got to the point where I’d saved over a hundred thousand dollars and I was like, oh, I have all this money. What can [00:25:00] I buy? And I was like, oh, you know what? Everybody talks about how every girl needs to have the has to have one classic bag in her collection. I should get a Chanel handbag. So I went and I bought a Chanel handbag, and at the time they were $2,850. So I bought one and I was like, you know what? I’ve saved enough money. Six months later, I should buy another Chanel handbag. So I went and I bought another one with $2,850. And before I knew it, every six months I’m like, I should buy a handbag. My handbags are not $2,050 anymore. And so I got, that was my treat yourself habit, buying a designer handbag. And then I got to a point where. And I still love the designer handbags today. I still have them. But I got to a point with that particular brand of bag that I looked at my closet and I realized the only bag that I actually used was the first one I ever bought.
And all the other ones are just stacked up in my closet. And one day my HUS husband, who at the time was my boyfriend, said, this just looks like a pile of money sitting in your closet.
And I was [00:26:00] like, I need to let me do some math. And so at the time the bags had been increasing in price. So the 2,800 and 2008 $50 bag I bought maybe was about $6,000.
Then I was like, yeah, but my bag has appreciated, I spent some money, but then I went and I did the math on an online calculator. I was like, if I had taken this money for all these bags and I had bought Amazon stock, how much would I have had? If now I have 6,000 minus 28 50, right? But mind you, this is not a brand new bag anymore. It’s a beat up used bag. They’ve been sitting in my closet. They’re not current season, so they’re really not worth 6,000. I did the math and I would’ve had $30,000 if I had invested that amount of money. So I was like, you know what all of these bags, they gotta go.
So I sold them and a lot of them I made more than I bought them for a lot more than I bought them for. But if I had invested the money, it’s kinda like crying a risk spill milk,
I would’ve made a lot more. So that bag I bought for 28 15. Now today is, I think $12,000 now
with price increases and inflation. But still, if that bag is $12,000, [00:27:00] imagine what my stock market investment would. So, yeah, it’s like I can’t cry over spilled milk. Right. But I did sell most of them, including the first one I bought because I was like, you know what? This doesn’t make any sense. And eventually I did get back into buying bags I love, but at a more, a different pace and with a different mindset. So that was my treat yourself.
Maggie: I love that. And it’s true. I mean, everyone does need like a good purse, their go-to bag. So it sounds like you did get some good wear out of them, a good learning lesson and if you save that much money, I’m glad you did. Just treat yourself too a little bit more than a Coke.
barb: And it all started with getting the right resources in your hands. You went to the library, you got a few books. But I wanna circle back to the resources You are providing women now around clever goal finance and all the free resources that you provide women because now you’re the expert.
So share a little bit about the re the resources that now you’ve turned [00:28:00] around and you’re providing women to build their re their wealth.
Bola: Yeah, so I always, I, when I was in the process of creating resources, writing books, I always asked myself like, what would bola who. Got upset with that financial advisor who was asking her stupid questions. What would I have wanted to know? What support would I have wanted to have? The BAH who was reading the book by a man
about personal financial women. What would I have liked to have that could have helped me? And so that’s kind of like. The premise of what clever finance is based off of. What would, what type of resources as a woman would I find helpful to guide me, to not make me feel ashamed about not knowing something, to not make me feel embarrassed about money, mistakes I’ve made, like my Chanel handbag collection. Listen I did a podcast episode once and we talked about the same story, and when they did the intro. And I listened to the intro of the podcast that had been released. They were like, Hey, we have a ridiculous story to share with you [00:29:00] about a woman who, and I was like, wow. They basically shamed me. They basically shame me for having this handbag collection.
But everybody makes mistakes. And you know what I would even say that if I decided, if I had chosen to keep that collection over the years in which I bought it, it would’ve been okay too, because I had saved a significant amount of money. I had worked hard for them, and it wasn’t taking away from anything.
Maggie: It is funny how they still kind of wanna put that shame in there and
it’s like, I’ve done so much and overcome so much, and it’s hard to shake the shame. I mean, even if we shake it from ourselves, there’s still people out there who wanna put it back on us. And so it’s like, you gotta continue just shaking it off.
Bola: Yes. Because when a guy goes and buys a watch or a fancy car, you’re like, they’re like,
wow, what a cool dude. But when women do this, it’s like she’s a shopaholic, spendaholic, irresponsible sugar daddy. For anyone who’s listening to this, if you love designer handbags, if you have a [00:30:00] thing you love and it’s not taken away from anything, please go ahead and keep it if it’s not bothering you.
For
me was more of like, that was a me thing, the reason why I sold them. And like I said, I still have my collection of bags today. Whole different story. But going back to the question you asked me so I wanted the resources. To be, to not be shameful, to make you feel comfortable about money, and also to realize that money is a tough topic.
And so you have to be able to laugh about it because if you can’t laugh about, if I can’t laugh about somebody shaming me on a podcast or my back collection, I’m gonna sit here and cry with you like, oh my God. So we offer over 30 plus free courses. They’re all bite-sized courses, all foundational finance courses, business investing, raising your kids with money, planning a wedding updating your resume for LinkedIn budgeting just a bunch of. Of content around the finance universe. There’s also worksheets Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, principles. We have over 40 of them. Debt repayments, budgeting worksheets, investing worksheets. And then there’s our website. We have a ton of articles on there that [00:31:00] get updated very frequently. Our newsletter.
And I forgot to mention, our courses are all free. The worksheets are all free. The newsletter, you can join that as well, that is also free. And then we have a paid substack newsletter. It’s a nominal fee $5 a month for our discussions on current money topics. And then obviously there are the clever finance books, which I mentioned earlier.
So there are five books in the series right now. There’s a first book called Clever Finance Ditch Debt, save Money On Build Real Wealth. That’s the foundational book there is Grow Your Money, which is the investing book. There’s a side hustle guide, which is all about side hustles. There is my Wealth Plan workbook, which helps you create your own financial plan.
And then there’s my personal storybook called choosing to Prosper. And then I’m working on my sixth book now, which comes out next. Spring, summer, and it’s called Clever Girl Millionaire. And so that is our universe. And there’s also a podcast called Clever Girls Know and the Clever Girl Finance YouTube channel. And again, the whole premise is really empowering women and our allies [00:32:00] to be confident about making money decisions, having money conversations, and getting to a point where you can say, you know what? I’m. I’m confident about what I’m doing and I’m getting to a point where I’m living life on my own terms.
Nobody’s, it’s not about standards, about when I should get married, when I should have kids, or who says I should do what This is about me and me being ultimately happy and how I can leverage money as a tool to get me to achieving my goals, so that those are the resources that Clever Finance offers. And then we also have planners as well.
Maggie: Awesome. You got it all. I love it. And it’s so many good tools. I love, it’s so awesome when you can kind of channel that like your younger self or who you used to be of like what I needed at that time, and kind of go back and create that resource. Because sometimes you see these resources and it’s like, all right, this is written from an.
Expert who’s always been an expert or who has a lot of money, it’s all in jargon. It’s like, we’re not doing that anymore. This is just the foundations what you need to know. No extra fluff, just straightforward and getting to the point.
Bola: Yeah, and sometimes I go back and I [00:33:00] listen to or read what bola would tell bola to do.
So for example, I recently had a trip to Paris and I went shopping. And so I went back and I found the video that Bola made on how to put yourself in a shopping band.
And I watched that video. I was like, yo girl.
Maggie: I should take that more often.
Bola: Exactly. So, it’s just, it’s, I feel like sometimes people put finance in a square box. You cannot spend money to make yourself happy. If you are spending money and enjoying yourself, you’re irresponsible. You, it’s, but like life is meant to be lived.
And money helps you do that. And so there’s a lot of guilt women carry and even I carry that guilt sometimes just because of the way society has impressed this upon us. Like, if you are too happy, then you’re being irresponsible with your money. But what is the point of money?
barb: It is crazy the way that women are, the money messages that we’ve been [00:34:00] given that we have to unpack and reframe and. Get rid of. And I don’t know. It’s tough. It’s tough for women. And I think your resources are fantastic. I’m so glad to meet other women that are out there providing these resources for women free so that they can, live a beautiful life like we all want for women. But we always have one last question, Bola, that we would love for you to answer. We ask everyone the same question and that’s, what does financial freedom look like to you? Bola.
Bola: Financial freedom to me is having options to do what makes me happy without being tied, obligated to somebody else’s intention.
It means, and that’s part of why I started my business and that’s part of why wanting to build wealth was so important to me, especially as I had kids. It meant not having to ask my boss permission to go to all of my kids’ plays and all of my kids’ events at school. That’s, to [00:35:00] me, is an option and that is freedom. And in the earliest days of my. Business as a mom with young kids, I could had to pick which one I
was going to this month because it was such a stressor to go ask my boss, can I take half Another half day during the busiest time of the year da.
So that it’s options. It’s being able to walk away from situations that don’t serve me. I work for myself now, but if I was employed walking away from a job that did not serve me, it means that today I can walk away from business partnerships to business deals that no longer align. It means that I can say no to things and be okay about it and sleep well at night and not worry about how to pay my bills. It means that I can leave a legacy for my children while I teach them how to be responsible about money. So financial freedom to me is all about options. And it means being able to support causes that are
meaningful to me.
Because, many things happen in this world and many things are out of our control, [00:36:00] and sometimes we are powerless in terms of what has happened,
but we can, we are empowered with our dollars and putting our dollars towards causes that are meaningful to us that can impact change. So that’s the way I think about financial freedom.
Maggie: I think that’s a great answer. I love it. Yeah, that’s perfect. And so I just wanna know, can you share a little bit more about how guests can be connected? I know we’ll have all the links in the show notes, but just, where they can, register for your newsletter. And I know your book is anywhere where they sell books.
I’ve seen it in Target all the time.
Bola: so, you can find out about everything. Our free courses, our podcast newsletter@clevergirlfinance.com. We’re on social media on Instagram. At Clever Finance, YouTube, clever Finance, and we have a podcast called The Clever Girls Know Podcast. I host this. You guys should be guests as well sometime. I’ll email you separately. But clever girl finance.com, you’ll find that everything about our universe and I love for folks to join us over there.
Maggie:[00:37:00] Awesome. Well, thank you so much Bola, for coming on and sharing your story and your expertise. I feel just like extra motivated after this one, just to go out and get it, and maybe have a Coke as well, and so.
Bola: Coke Zero.
Maggie: We appreciate you coming on. Everyone connect with bola, check her out. She’s got so much great stuff going on and it’s amazing to be surrounded by so many powerful women.
So thank you for coming on and being our guest today, and we’ll talk to everyone again soon.
Outro: You’ve been listening to Women Money, the shit we don’t talk about. Now it’s time to take what you’ve learned and make bold moves towards financial independence. Stay in the know by joining our newsletter for exclusive tools, resources, and updates that keep you financially fearless. Head to PurseStrings. co and sign up today. Need a financial professional who gets it? Turn to PurseStrings Curated Directory, your go to resource for financial experts who know how to put you first. Love this episode? Leave us a review and help us empower even more women [00:38:00] to own their financial power. Until next time, be financially fearless.
Divorced, Broke, AND a $2 Million Tax Bill with Barbara Huson
What if you found yourself divorced with three little girls, your gambler husband disappeared overseas, and a $2 million tax bill landed in your mailbox? Oh—and you knew nothing about managing money?
In this episode of Women and Money: The Shit We Don’t Talk About, we welcome Barbara Huson, a renowned financial expert, author, and advocate for women’s financial empowerment. With decades of experience and seven impactful books under her belt, Barbara shares her personal journey from financial dependence to freedom and offers actionable steps to help women take control of their financial lives.
Barbara talks about the critical difference between money and power, highlighting that true power comes from understanding money. She outlines a simple but transformative three-step process: read about money every day, talk about money every week, and save money automatically every month.
This episode is for any woman ready to stop feeling powerless and start making bold moves toward financial independence!
Money Talks Thursdays: Register to our weekly live money talks and financial discussions every Thursday at 11am Central!
If you’ve ever wanted to be financially fearless, this conversation will inspire you to take that first step. Tune in, learn from Barbara’s story, and walk away with practical tips to create your own financial freedom.
Got a unique financial story to share? Whether it’s about crushing debt, building wealth, an unexpected windfall, or just a wild money moment, we want to hear it! Or are you a professional who helps women with money? If you’re a financial coach, attorney, CPA, or work in any area that empowers women financially, we’d love to hear from you too! Your story could inspire our community of women. Fill out our intake form here!
26:05 Addressing Emotional and Behavioral Barriers
30:16 Barbara’s Journey and Books
Episode Transcript
(This transcript was generated using AI, so please excuse any misspellings or errors)
Barb:[00:00:00] Maggie, what if you found yourself divorced with three little girls, your husband left the country, and a two million dollar tax bill showed up in your mailbox, and you knew nothing about money?
Maggie: I’d be shitting my pants. I’d be so overwhelmed I hope I never get there.
Barb: What a story, right? Oh my goodness. Barbara Huson who was on our podcast, who said she grew up talk about money mindset, her father told her one thing about money, don’t worry about it. So she didn’t.
Maggie: Which makes so much sense, you know? And I know so many people who would say like, I should’ve, I shouldn’t have listened, blah blah blah. But it’s like, yeah, if your dad’s telling you don’t worry,
okay, I don’t worry.
Barb: She said she came from a wealthy family, so money wasn’t an issue. She married somebody who was very smart attorney, a stockbroker, blah, blah, blah. But, he had a little habit that got them into a lot of trouble. Just the fact that she found herself almost out on the [00:01:00] streets.
Right? People don’t get serious about something until they’re up against a wall. And what did she say? She looked at her three little girls and thought, I need to figure this out. Right? And what did she say? No one’s coming to save her in that situation.
Maggie: No one’s coming and I think, I’d love to have these stories of some of these that almost seem so extreme, but it just shows that no matter what, there’s a way to come back to bounce back. Women are so resilient.
Barb: It’s crazy.
Maggie: We honestly shouldn’t be that resilient sometimes. it’s amazing the things we have bounced back from come back from.
Makes you really feel like you could do anything no matter how in the depths you may feel.
Barb: Because we’ve had all these amazing stories. She had money blocks. She didn’t even want to learn. She didn’t think she could learn. And truthfully, she said it was messy.
Wasn’t an easy road, think about that up, down, up, down, up, down in terms of how am I going to get through the day?
Right? And so it wasn’t like, oh, I just did wave my [00:02:00] magic wand and someone gave me the money and I was able to move forward. No, She went through the trenches and wow, came out the other side as an expert in finance, a coach, an author. She shared so many nuggets of wisdom just on our podcast that I was taking notes because she kept it simple yet consistent in the work that she did to get through it.
Maggie: and I just think this highlights, underlines, bolds, you know, why we need to be part of that financial conversation. No matter what your scenario is, you have to be part of that conversation. Even if you don’t want to be, you know, figure out why you don’t want to be. Go to some therapy and understand those limiting beliefs or why those patterns are there . Because it’s not about being a mathematician or loving numbers, you know, it’s a mindset thing, and it just shows how much you need to be part of these financial conversations because you just never know what might be coming in the mailbox.
Barb: for sure. When she said, you said, Maggie, money is power and [00:03:00] she said, money’s not power. Understanding your money is power.
Maggie: Yeah, so true. So let’s let everyone else give a taste of what Barbara has to offer. And get your notepad.You’re gonna need it.
Barb: Let’s get started.
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 is women in money, the shit we don’t talk about.
Barb: We’re so excited today to have Barbara Houston on our podcast. She empowers women through the outer, inner higher and deeper work of wealth. That’s just [00:04:00] fantastic. We have so much to go into and ask her about, but Barbara could please just jump in, introduce yourself to our audience and share your story.
Barbara: So I am a financial therapist and wealth coach, if anyone had told me this is what I’d be doing, Maggie, when I was
Yeah.
Have told them they were nuts I didn’t understand money. I grew up in a very wealthy family and I didn’t understand money. I just wanted to spend it. And the only advice my father ever gave me about money was don’t worry. Because under that was the unspoken assumption there’ll always be a man to take care of you. And I thought that was great advice. I loved
And indeed, there was a man. And he was a lawyer. Then he went to work for H& R Block, who was my father. And then he became a stockbroker. So he was perfect, right? I found out very early in our marriage. that he [00:05:00] was a compulsive gambler. And throughout the course of our 15 years I find out every year that he was gambling my money, my inheritance away. And I was so terrified by and intimidated by anything financial. I just let him, I let him manage the money. He paid all the bills.
He did all the investings. I just signed whatever he told me to sign. And Then, after 15 years, finally got a divorce. And I decided money’s not my thing. I do not want to deal with money. I have this theory if you don’t deal with your money, your money will deal with you.
Year, I got tax bills almost 2 million. We’re back taxes. My ex didn’t pay for illegal deals. He got us in and my signature was on everything because you know, I just signed everything
Barb: Oh my gosh.
Barbara: I did not have anywhere near a million dollars. Nowhere near my exit left the country. They couldn’t touch [00:06:00] him and my father wouldn’t lend me the money I and that’s when I knew I had to get smart. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I had three daughters.
Barb: Oh my gosh.
Barbara: baby. I was not going to raise those girls on the street. So I did everything they tell you to do. I read the books, I went to classes, and my eyes would glaze over and my brain would fog up. didn’t know what I was going to do.
But I had those three daughters and I was not going to raise them on the street. And I swear to God, I believe when you are committed, you know, again. No, no back doors. When you’re totally committed, the universe revolves to help you reach your goal. And
At the time journalist writing for the San Francisco Business Times. And I was hired as a I was hired as a, for a freelance project to interview women who were smart with money.
Those interviews changed my life. I not only [00:07:00] got smart about money, I wrote my first book Prince Charming Isn’t Coming, How Women Get Smart About Money. now, books later,
Barb: Wow.
Barbara: as a financial expert.
Barb: That’s amazing. Wait, let’s unpack some of that story. So, did you know every single year that he was gambling and you just looked the other way?
Barbara: Many, many times. No, I didn’t just look the other way. I saw it. I would confront him and he would speak in gibberish. I don’t know. He would just talk in circles.
And I felt stupid. I felt incapable. And my parents, because they didn’t teach me about money, sent that message that I’m incapable.
I really just felt trapped. I felt helpless. I felt powerless.
Barb: And he left the country and there you were with these three little ones. Wow. So, Isn’t it kismet that you were interviewing women who were smart about money? I mean, if the universe [00:08:00] isn’t telling you something, that’s amazing.
Barbara: Well, I really believe when you’re ready,
Maggie: Yup.
Barbara: peers, and I really do believe that commitment is the key, like a deep commitment, like no matter what happens, damn it, and I couldn’t have done it. Like I had a teacher one time, a spiritual teacher, he said, if you can’t do it for you, it for someone you love more than you.
And so I was terrified and my eyes would fog up, but all I had to do was look at my kids and I did not want to raise them to be like me,
powerless.
Barb: So, how do you go about managing a 2 million tax bill?
Barbara: Well, I got pitbull lawyers,
Barb: Okay.
Barbara: They got it down to a manageable sum that if I sold everything in my trust. I had to sell everything. I, there were three properties I couldn’t get to. So I sold everything. They could pay off the tax bills. But I knew if I [00:09:00] didn’t get smart, I’d get more tax bills. Something would happen.
Barb: Yeah.
Barbara: that level of commitment and looking at my daughters drove me. And I had some money coming in from those those properties. I knew if I really saved, if I really watched my spending, I could do it. And I did. And it was really tough.
But I did it.
But I still had problems.
And that’s why I say getting smart about money, that financial success is a four pronged process.
There’s the practical.
And I couldn’t get it. My brain could not comprehend it. I felt so incapable and I believed, as my father told me, man, making and managing money is a man’s job.
And I believed it. And our beliefs is what determines what we do. So I just was committed and I kept going to those classes. But what I did is I at the inner work of wealth. Going to [00:10:00] therapy.
Barb: Mm hmm.
Barbara: looking, and I remember in my first session at the therapist, I went in, and I, I said, I really want to get smart.
I really want to get smart about money. You’ve got to help me. I really want to get smart. And then what he did, is he moved his chair, and he said, now, pretend I’m no longer your therapist. But I’m a voice in your head. So talk to me like I’m a voice in your head. So I looked at him and I said, Okay, Daniel.
Okay, I didn’t say Daniel. I said, Okay, I really, really want to get smart. I really do. And he looked me in the eye as a voice in my head and said, No, you don’t. And it was like, I couldn’t argue. It was like someone took the air out of my balloon. I, I, I couldn’t argue. the moment I realized, Oh my God. I was terrified if I started taking charge of money, I’d lose everything. I’d better let my husband do that. I was terrified
of what my parents would think And I was really scared that a man wouldn’t love me if I was financially [00:11:00] successful. Now, I didn’t know all this.
That’s why our unconscious beliefs.
It’s so important. It’s not enough to do the practical. If you get stuck, it’s important to look at what your attitudes, beliefs and and decisions you made about yourself and money in the world. And then there’s that other, which is what I call the higher work of wealth. And that’s what really, after I got, you know, looked at the, the psychology, my emotional blocks,
I believe the higher work of wealth because I believe women, once we are financially stable, once we have food on the table, a roof over our heads, some disposable income to get our mani pedis or whatever we want, no longer motivated by money.
Yeah, we want to make money. But what motivates us is helping others.
And so what happened for me is I began to start understanding money. I realized what I want to do with this is use what happened to help others.
And so that’s [00:12:00] what also motivated me to keep learning and going through that hard, hard stuff and all the challenges and the obstacles. And then I’ll just, the fourth one, which was pretty new for me, was what I call the deeper work of wealth. And that’s the mind body, the mind, the mind brain connection. And that’s when I started using, I wrote a book, my last book was called Rewire for Wealth, where I brought in neuroscience and
How to train our mind to rewire our brain is what makes it so much easier for us to change our behaviors.
Barb: That’s so interesting.
What’s the fourth pillar?
Barbara: That’s it. It’s the outer work of wealth, the inner work of wealth, the psychological, the deeper work of wealth, the spiritual, and the deeper work of wealth, which is the mind brain connection.
Barb: it. Wow, you went deep on that from somebody who didn’t know anything to that. That’s amazing. [00:13:00] So,
Barbara: pretty amazing.
Barb: yeah, I mean, so tell us your journey. So you hired some attorneys that helped you with this tax bill. you made some financial changes, you kept your eye on the ball,
Barbara: No, it was messy, much
Barb: was messy. Okay, tell us the messy part.
Barbara: And it is for most women
Barb: Yeah.
Barbara: to get over this hump of fear. So while I was doing this, I was going to all these classes, these transformational classes. And so I was priming my mind to change. And I also found a book called A Course in Miracles. Which is a
Mm
And I started applying spirituality.
Maggie: hm.
Barbara: really working with my higher power. With God, Goddess, all that is. Whatever you want to call it. And so, I brought in all those tools. And as I did that, I don’t know. It’s just like the blocks and barriers started melting. But it was messy. It was messy and it was tough [00:14:00] for a while. And then. It became incredible.
Maggie: So it seems like your mindset played so much in overcoming this kind of daunting situation.
Barbara: Daunting! That’s a really good word, Maggie. That was
Maggie: Yeah.
Barbara: situation. I haven’t used that word to describe it. But yeah, mindset’s everything. Mindset is everything. It was completely mindset. But it didn’t come right away. I had to really work on myself and do the deeper inner work.
Maggie: And I appreciate that you share that it was messy as like, it always seems when you read a book or listen to these, some of these podcasts, you know, I did do a couple of things and bada bing, bada boom, I was there, you know, and, and it wasn’t, it’s not that way, you know, and. Hindsight’s always 20 20, but I know when you’re in it and you’re deep in the trenches, it’s, it’s not comfortable but you know, you do have to put in the work.
Barbara: That’s the key. The key to financial success is the willingness to go where you [00:15:00] fear. you ask me one thing, I would say, what is it, you know, I have my three daughters, now they’re all grown, they’re in their 30s, 40s, 50s. But they always call me. They always call me when they feel stuck or challenged or confused and they say, what should I do? Now they know the question I’m going to ask them and I always ask them the same thing and they don’t like it But they still keep calling and I always say well, what are you most scared to do? And they tell me that that’s where you need to go because success in anything. I don’t care if it’s weight or making money.
It always lies just outside your comfort zone So fear is the signal fear signals the path you need to follow
Maggie: think it’s so true though, anything I feel like I’ve overcome, I’m just like, yeah, you had to, we had to step out on that skinny limb, you know, and, and really be out there. And,
Barbara: And people think if they’re scared, that means they’re not supposed to go there. Well,
Maggie: which [00:16:00] is. You’ve gotta learn the different voices inside you and learn how to trust yourself. ’cause there are some of your gut saying, no, no, no, that’s not it. And then there’s other ones that are like, we know we need to do this. You know? And you have to know what voice to listen to.
Barbara: and the way you know what voice to listen to, and this may sound simplistic, it’s not if you try it, is how you feel. If it, if you feel scared and tight and frustrated, that’s your ego talking. That’s, that’s the part that wants to keep you safe, and it’s never safe. To you outside your comfort zone, you just feel like a calmness or yeah, I think maybe that’s right Or if you just feel good the sign.
That’s where you need to go
Barb: It’s interesting. So much of what we’re talking about is your inner self. Nothing about money in the bank.
Barbara: I’m gonna tell you something When I wrote my first book Prince Charming isn’t coming. I interviewed I don’t know over a hundred women [00:17:00] who were smart with money and I noticed something very It became very obvious after a while. And I remember interviewing a psychologist who specialized in money. Her name was Olivia Mellon. She recently died. I said, I think, I think I noticed something. I think I noticed that women who are I have trouble with money or afraid of their power and once they own their power, get comfortable with it, they get over it. I said, why? I said to her, why are women so afraid of their power? And she said to me something that gave me chills. She said, because powerful women have been burned at the stake. And I think that we have for centuries suffered horrible consequences. For demonstrating our power
Barb: even today.
Barbara: Oh, for sure.
For sure. So here’s the thing, women have difficulty [00:18:00] with their power with, with their money because it’s our fear of, or ambivalence of power that keeps us stuck. So when you stop focusing on the money. And you start looking at your power and my definition of a powerful woman is someone who knows who she is, who knows what she wants, and expresses that in the world And so in other words, That means saying no to what we don’t want. It’s speaking up and telling our truth.
But instead, we water ourselves down so we don’t Make waves because that thing, we think that’s how we keep ourselves safe.
So , this is about power. And
World needs powerful women more than ever. And that’s why I do this. It’s not for me about money. about empowerment.
Barb: You’re so spot on. I have chills.
Maggie: yeah, I couldn’t agree anymore. And you know, we always say money is power, and that is your power. No,
Barbara: money is not power. [00:19:00] Look at my marriage when I was married to my first husband. He had the power. I had the money. He didn’t
have any money I had the money, but I gave him the power by letting him make all the decisions. Money is not power, understanding money is power.
Maggie: That’s a good, that’s a good catch. Yeah. And so, you know, you shared that you grew up, you know, relying on your father and later your husband to handle the finances. And so what advice would you give to other women who might still be dependent on others for their financial decisions? And how can they kind of start that journey into financial empowerment themselves?
Barbara: A couple things. learn, start educating yourself, and two, get support. So, let me tell you an easy way to yourself. And this is what I did. Because, someone told me to to get the Wall Street Journal. Oh, when I interviewed these smart women, all these smart women for my first book, they all, most of them subscribed to the Wall Street Journal. I, I, so I subscribed to the Wall [00:20:00] Street Journal. That sucker comes every day. I couldn’t even understand a word it said, but I did something really smart. I took the finance section at the time, it was section C, and I put it on the kitchen counter. And every day I’d walk by it. I figured by osmosis. Well, I’ll tell you, that is, so let me give you three. steps to get smart or smarter about money because it never ends. I still do these three steps and it’s like this I call it this the the learning by osmosis but every day the first step every day read something about money even for just a minute or two because so much of getting smart or smarter money is familiarizing yourself with the jargon and the
Barb: Mm hmm.
Barbara: you know, even if it’s just opening the business section of the newspaper and perusing the, the headlines or just taking a book at the end of the day and reading one [00:21:00] paragraph. Or when you’re standing in line at the supermarket, you take a money magazine instead of people and you leaf through it. So every day, read something about money, even just for a minute or two. Every week. Talk about money with someone, preferably who knows more than you. Because I believe we women, it’s our secrecy and silence
Barb: Mm hmm,
Barbara: we don’t talk. So I just, anybody I found that knew anything about money, I’d say, Ooh, can I pick your brain?
Barb: mm hmm, mm
Barbara: don’t need to ask them how much they make or anything like
you ask them questions like, how did you get smart? was this? What was the biggest mistake you made? What was the smartest thing you did?
What’s the best advice you gave? What did you read? What did you do? So you ask them questions like that. And people, what I found, people really love to talk and
Barb: hmm, mm hmm,
Barbara: read a minute or two. Every week, have a conversation about money. then [00:22:00] every month, save automatically, automatically have money transferred from your account.
from your paycheck or your checking account to a savings account.
Barb: mm hmm.
Barbara: miss what you don’t see. You know, it’s the
Maggie: Right.
Right.
Barbara: saving. every day read, every week talk, and every month save. And you do this for three months and you will be amazed at the difference.
Barb: I’m writing that down.
Maggie: Yeah, those are some great tips. Super actionable. And so are you subscribed to the Wall Street Journal right now?
Barbara: Of course! I love
Barb: ha.
Barbara: love
Maggie: Now you’re one of those women that you’ve talked to, you know, and so it’s interesting to always see it come full circle. And I’m sure you pick up so much more now that you know the jargon, the lingo, the, you know, all this stuff you know, as you read it.
Barbara: Right. Do you read the Real Estate Journal, Maggie?
Maggie: I do read it some. I should read it more. I definitely don’t read it every day.
Barbara: You don’t have to read it every day. You’re just even leafing through it.
Maggie: Yeah, I’ll definitely leaf through and, you know, see, see the headlines, see what [00:23:00] I need to know about, for sure.
Barbara: You, you got this. You know this.
Barb: Well, and we’re at a place, you know, today where women are coming into the largest transference of wealth in history. To the tune of almost 30 trillion. And we want women to be ahead of the game and know what to do with that big wealth transfer, not give it away, really leverage their monies in a way that make builds them a creative, a beautiful financial life.
And really learn about money, as you’re saying, getting in front of it and really learning about money. What advice, what would you suggest women do? I know you just gave us three excellent tips. But with this great wealth transfer, what are some of your thoughts?
Barbara: So, it’s not just a great wealth transfer. There’s always been, when I was in my 20s, there was a great wealth transfer. There’s always a great wealth transfer. So, this is really good and I love it. But I also want to encourage women to know they can earn it.
Can earn their wealth. So, whether it’s transferred to them or whether they earn it, [00:24:00] key is other thing I said is, you educate yourself, but you also get support.
Mm hmm.
I created a community, a safe community where women, of like minded women, where we can talk about money as women.
Mm hmm.
about money as you know more than anyone, we talk about money very differently
Maggie: Yeah,
Barbara: And I used to teach, when I first got into this 40 years ago, I would teach co ed groups. No, I stopped that right away. Because women, when men would take over
Yep.
would stop talking and
I
intimidated. So, start finding a buddy or someone to do this with. start reading, to start classes, to start joining communities. where women talk about money. And in fact, Emory University did a study that they found that women learn best in groups with other women that parts of their brain [00:25:00] light up when they’re talking about money with women and they don’t have that when men are involved.
Barb: Mm
It
sounds reasonable to me. As you said, you know, women, they feel intimidated just having the conversation and then with there’s men involved, the men, you know, start mansplaining and it’s this conversation kind of goes south.
Barbara: And also for us, I remember, after my first book came out, Somebody from Harris Polling. I think it’s called Harris Polling. Anyway, he was a pollster and they were doing this big study for a brokerage firm on women and money he, so we were having these conversations and he, he called me one time. He had just gone from a folk come from a focus group of women.
They talked about money and I said, well, how was it? And he said something that I had to laugh because this was new to him. He said, Oh my God. Okay. It’s a really emotional subject for women.
Barb: Ha ha ha. You think?
Maggie: Welcome to the party!
Barbara:[00:26:00] look at the, look at the financial industry. They do not acknowledge that at all. I think the two biggest things women from really getting money, really getting it easily is one unhealed emotions like anger two is unhealed trauma.
So it’s really important if you’re like, I had a lot of unhealed trauma and it wasn’t until I could address that as well as my other issues that I could really break that breakthrough.
Barb: Interesting. Well, and we always say, you know, the financial industry is a model that was built. Buy men for men to sell to men and it really hasn’t changed. I mean today there’s only about 17 to 19 percent of financial advisors are women And even if women get into the industry It’s very difficult sometimes for them to stay in the industry because the model does not accommodate What women want and [00:27:00] need in a career?
Barbara: I know that’s why I love that you have lists of female -oriented
financial professionals. Because it’s very easy to get intimidated by someone who’s always looking at your husband instead of you
Maggie: many of these experts understand, you know, that it is emotional, that it is so much behavioral finance. It’s not just, you know, You know your returns and those numbers, but is everyone safe if is everyone protected will everyone be okay? If I’m not here, which are more of the questions on the mind of a woman, you know Making sure I don’t care what the number is.
Are we protected? You know, that could be 14. It could be 82 I don’t know what it is is are we protected? Are we safe? Are we gonna be okay?
Barbara: Yeah, and is it safe for me emotionally?
Safe because that primitive brain of ours are still afraid we will be punished.
Barb: Yeah. And that’s what we’re about at Purse Strings, a community where women can come together, have these conversations, learn from amazing women like you, Barbara, and your story. And so many women, you know, they [00:28:00] feel they’re stuck. And we know the foundation of getting unstuck is learning about and understanding money and knowing how to leverage it and how to save it and how to take care of yourself by
really managing. I love that nuance that you put it there. It’s not about having money. It’s about really understanding money. It’s beautiful.
Maggie: And so there is one question we do like to wrap up with and ask all of our guests, and that is what does financial freedom look like to you?
Barbara: Ah, it looks like freedom. It looks like choices. It looks like I can walk in a store. I can buy what I want and I don’t have to check my checkbook first.
It also means generosity
because we women, most of us are giving by nature, but to give without spending less, saving more and investing wisely is always an act of self sabotage. Not only do you jeopardize your future security, but you diminish the impact you can make with your money.
Maggie: Think that’s such a great nuance to put in there, is it’s all [00:29:00] about, you know, filling your cup first before you can help fill everyone else’s. And so we have to, you know, make sure that we’re okay before we keep giving back instead of just giving to everyone else before we fill our own cup.
Yeah.
Barbara: true.
Yeah.
I have half my clients go into Codependency. Look at their Codependency and go to Coda meetings. Codependency Anonymous. Yes.
I went to codependency
Anonymous for years.
Barb: I didn’t know it was a thing.
Maggie: yeah.
Barbara: Coda? Yeah. You have never heard of Codependency?
Barb: Well, yes, but in what realm? Tell us.
Barbara: So co dependence, I, I actually went to a treatment program
for co dependence. Co dependence is when you put everybody else’s needs before your own. And
Okay.
friends or family, but perfect strangers.
Maggie: Yeah.
Barb: Okay.
Barbara: so what happens is you come last.
You ask us to put ourselves first and we get [00:30:00] terrified.
It’s like terrified. it’s not in our DNA to do that. So much of financial success and learning about money is really a healing journey.
Emotional blocks and those barriers and that codependency.
Barb: Mm hmm. So interesting. Barbara, tell us about the books that you have.
Barbara: well, my first book is out of print, so I have seven books.
Barb: Wow.
Barbara: First is The Prince Charming Isn’t Coming. I knew, that’s helped me learn how to manage money and invest. That was great. But I didn’t, I was a chronic under earner all life
This was by the time I was in my fifties. And I wanted to overcome under earning. So, I interviewed women who made six and seven figures, and then my next book was Six Secrets of Six Figure Women. .
I started making six figures before I even finished writing that book. It was,
phenominal.
I never write about what I know. I only write about what I want to learn.
Barb: That’s brilliant.
Barbara: teaching classes called [00:31:00] Overcoming Underearning to see if I could teach others what I had learned from these women. And that was my third book, Overcoming Underearning. Then I self published a couple books. I published, one was called Breaking Through Getting Past the Stuck Points and another was Finding a Financial Advisor You Can Trust. Then I wrote a book called Sacred Success. I wanted to really talk about how spirituality really helped me. So it’s Sacred Success, A Course in Financial Miracles. And then my last one, when I really saw the power of neuroscience and the importance of our brain, I wrote Rewire for Wealth.
Maggie: Wow.
Barb: That’s one I’m going to get. That’s cool.
Barbara: I have to say it’s, it’s good. It was a bitch to write, but it’s a good book.
Barb: It was worth it.
Maggie: It’s worth it. And it’s something that we need to keep talking about, make a little bit more mainstream. You know, it’s not just these numbers and spreadsheets, but it’s a behavioral finance and down to this neuroscience of it too. It all really affects which I also, you know, things. That’s why we [00:32:00] don’t need to be so hard on ourself.
There’s a lot of work to be done and there’s a lot to dive into and there’s a lot to learn. So just a little bit every day, one step at a time and we’ll get there.
Barbara: Beautifully put, Maggie.
Maggie: Thank you. Thank you. Well, Barbara, this has been so much fun having you on today and having you share your expertise. You know, the links to all your books and all your social media, of course, will be in the show notes so people can get your resources and reach out to you. But I appreciate you coming on and sharing your expertise and taking the time today
to be on the women and money, the shit we don’t talk about podcast.
Barbara: The shit we don’t talk about. It’s a great tagline.
Barb: Thank you, Barbara. Thank you for sharing your amazing story. , it’s going to make a lot of ripples and a lot of interesting, thought provoking ideas for women who don’t think they can do it, but know that they can.
Maggie: All right. Well, until next time, be financially fearless and we’ll talk to everyone again soon.
Barb: You’ve been listening to Women and Money, the shit we don’t talk about. Now it’s time to take what you’ve learned and make [00:33:00] bold moves towards financial independence. Stay in the know by joining our newsletter for exclusive tools, resources, and updates that keep you financially fearless. Head to thepursetrings.
co and sign up today. Need a financial professional who gets it? Turn to the Purse Strings curated directory, your go to resource for experts who know how to put you first. Love this episode? Leave us a review and help us empower even more women to own their financial power. Until next time, be financially fearless.
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