How To Spend Less Money And Feel Great

feeling tired, feeling overwhelmed, feeling that you're not living your best life. We start the show. I want to just to about Orlo Nutrition. That's O-R-L-O Nutrition. I've got four kids, a job, a business, a husband, two dogs, and I was lacking energy. Let's be clear. I was lacking energy until I started taking these little beautiful algae capsules that changed the way my brain functioned. I got clarity. I started feeling more energy. Side effect, a little side effect. My skin started looking better. I felt more vibrant. My husband told me, what have you been doing, Julie? You seem a little different. It's all about Orlo Nutrition. Guys, get obsessed with Orlo Nutrition. I want you to check them out. That's O-R-L-O nutrition.com game changer. Now on with the show, get obsessed. Then you need things like a budget, a budget. People are like, Oh, dirty word. I don't like budgets. Please don't restrict me. When I work with clients to make a budget, we are not restricting you from doing anything. I'm giving you permission to spend money. That's what we do with a budget, right? Like instead of saying, Oh, you can't have that. You can't have that. I'm intentionally putting money aside. This is my money that I get to go shopping with. And I'm going to take that money. I'm going to go shopping. Hey guys, welcome to obsessed. Think of us as your personal development entourage all wrapped up into one podcast. If you're committed to your personal development and believe your life is meant for more, then get ready to learn the tools you need to elevate this experience called life. Get obsessed with your life. Just like us. We are Tia, Tristan, Mika, and Julie, and we are obsessed with humans on the verge of change. Hi, I'm Tristan, and I'm obsessed with your emotional well-being. Obsessors, are you in debt? Are you in over your head? So many Americans, so many people around the world are swimming in financial crisis. And this is a topic I have to say I've never been really well-versed at. So we brought our girl, Laura Sexton, in, and she is going to teach us all about money. And as I was preparing for this episode, I wanted to kind of get the landscape for what it looked like for, I'm just going to say Americans, I know that we have a lot of people listening globally. So we'd love your comments and thoughts on your experience with your financial literacy around the world. So you can DM us on Instagram at crown underscore compass girls, and tell us your experience. And we'll be happy to pass on these questions to Laura. All the information about Laura will be on our show notes. So take a look at our show notes, but only 30% of U.S. households have a long-term financial plan. And this is shocking to me. Those Americans do have savings account. The average amount is $7,000. And 43% have less than $10,000 in their retirement. I mean, I know if you're younger, you don't really think about having a retirement plan or savings. You're just trying to make it. But we have Laura here to set us straight, to kick our financial butts into gear. And we are so excited to have Laura Sexton here with us. Welcome, Laura. Hello. Hello. Nice. So Laura, your first time being a guest on our Obsessed podcast. And we have to ask you the million dollar question, what are you obsessed about? Other than Clubhouse, which is where we all met, there are a couple things that I'm obsessed about. I'm obsessed with my children. I have three and they take up all my time when I'm not working with my clients, but to not be on the big level, I have these friction pins that are permanent ink pins that you can erase. And it's my new favorite thing. I'm madly obsessed with them. Wait, friction pins, like explain that a little bit to us because we could become easily obsessed with this as well. So this is my friction pen by Pilot. It has an eraser. And so this one's pink, because that's how I like to do things. And it's spelled F-R-I-X-I-O-N, and it erases with heat. So the eraser is warm, and it takes the heat, takes the ink out of the page. I don't know how it works, but I'm obsessed with that. I love that. And what is the price point of that friction pen, by the way. Oh my goodness. It's like I bought seven of them for 10 bucks and it's all the colors. Yes. Okay. No. And thank you, Laura. And I think this is a conversation that we need to have personally. And I think a lot of people don't have the conversation because finances, you know, talking about money is really can be scary for a lot of people. Yeah, there's a lot of shame around money for some reason. There's a lot of guilt. There's a lot of negative energy around money. And part of that's cultural. Part of that's, you know, people come in and they're, you know, money is the root of all evil. We hear this a lot in churches, which is not actual scripture. Scripture actually says the love of money is the root of all evil. It's the greed. It's the things that you'll do to get money. That's where there's a tendency towards evil. So I think that one thing we can do is start having the conversation, start having it openly with my children. I have three children. Like I said, I have a five-year-old, a two-year-old and an almost one-year-old. And we talk about money. We talk about money in the house. I asked my five-year-old to say, hey, where does money come from? She goes, money comes from work. And she yells it out really loud. I thought it comes from trees, Laura. It does. You know, the money tree. Not anymore. No. Sometimes people think money comes from the government. They're like, oh, I got this refund check. It's like, y'all, Santa Claus does not live in Washington, D.C. That is not free money. You put that in to get that refund. Just saying. Wait, you could take me down a rabbit hole when you say money comes from the government, if you know what I'm saying. Yes, it does not. So I'm teaching my children from an early age. We talk about money. We are open about money. If we have a month where things are really tight, we're like, hey, things are really tight this month. But we have a plan and we have structures and systems in place so that we don't ever have to worry. And we are never giving our children more information they can handle. So starting with literacy from a young age, but if you're not at a young age right now and you are hearing this podcast and you're like, it's too late. It's not too late. You can teach an old dog new tricks. You can teach a young dog new tricks. It all about intentionality when it comes to money It all about intentionality Intentionality And okay so you have a personal story There is a reason why this is your mission And can you share a little bit of that story? Because it is profound. Thank you. So my story started in 2016. Up until that point, I was more than happy to have my head in the sand and not pay attention. If the bill came in, I paid it. I couldn't function. I couldn't look at it. I was terrified to look at my bank account. I didn't want to know what my balances were. And what I discovered when I finally did look at it was that I was staring down $372,347 in debt. Wait, say that again. And how does that happen? How old were you? Seriously. And are you including your home as well? No. Wow. What the heck did you buy, girl. Right. There were a lot of things on credit cards. So nothing, a lot of meals. So nothing. We had a condo that my husband was still, he and his ex-wife owned it together. So there was a lot of emotion there that was in Maui, still never been there. So we had a lot of emotion in Maui. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of emotion. We were completely upside down on that and underwater facing foreclosure. We had a new car that you have to have when you have a brand new baby. You have to buy a car. That's so not true. We had credit cards. I had $120,000 of student loans, which is an obnoxious amount of money for a degree I knew I was never going to use. I went there because I thought I was supposed to. And so I was drowning in nothing to show for it. We were living in an apartment in West Hollywood, we, I mean, even right now I'm shaking, just thinking about being back in that place of there's nothing I can do to get out from underneath this. And I really thought there was, you know, the morning that I discovered the amount, my husband started talking about bankruptcy and foreclosure and what that was going to look like for our family. And goodness, I'm getting emotional thinking about it. So the bankruptcy and the foreclosure talk happened. I got a letter from my OBGYN who said she was no longer taking insurance. So if I wanted to have another baby, it would be at least $10,000 plus labor and delivery. And when you're two months postpartum with your first child, you think the entire world's imploding, or at least I did. And that same day, my student loan company called and said, Hey, you know, instead of $22 a month that you've been paying that thing that we've been doing, it's been great for, you know, however long. You now owe $942 a month and we need you to start paying it next week. And I was just in tears. I was like, how do you do this? How do you get past this? There's no way to do it. And that's when I was like, I have a two month old and I have to go back to work. I have to go back to work. I can't make payments. I can't figure out life. I don't know what I'm going to do. And my boss was gracious. It was like, Hey, let me help you get on a plan. Let me help you figure out what the steps are and we'll work through it together and you're going to be fine. And we changed our life dramatically. We moved an hour outside the city. So my husband's driving an hour to work. We sold everything that was not nailed down. We changed our spending habits. We stopped going out to eat. We made radical changes. And in three years, we paid off that $372,347 in debt. And in five years, we are now at a net worth of on a conservative side, We're at a net worth of $120,000, which doesn't sound like a lot. But if you think about it, in five years, we made a half million dollar swing from the negative to the positive. And the situation, the kind of conflux of all these events happening at once, two months after having a baby and boom, bam, boom, you're realizing you're almost 400 grand in debt. But what was it at that point that sparked, I mean, besides desperation and filing bankruptcy, what was it that sparked you to go in such a positive direction and make this your life mission? I didn't want to file bankruptcy. I am a Texas girl and Texas girls have a lot of pride. And I signed my name on a piece of paper and said I was going to pay it back. And I felt like I had to. I wasn't going to skirt the system is kind of what it felt like. And no shame on anybody that has filed bankruptcy. I found out that week also that my parents filed bankruptcy while I was living in the home. I had no idea. Again, that shame. Nobody's talking about it. So we decided that we needed to pay this off. We made too much money to be that broke. We made too much money to be that broke. And we decided that we were going to make a giant change. And at the time, I was an actor and a screenwriter. And when we started moving forward and things started getting paid off and we were making traction, I was no longer desperate walking into an audition room. I was having fun. It wasn't book the call or, you know, I had to book the call because it was either book it and pay my student loan or not be able to eat. Like it was just crazy, right? Like in my mind, it was, you're never going to eat again if you don't do this. And nobody wants to work with desperate. And that's true when you're acting. And that's true when you have a sales job. And that is true when you work in corporate. People can smell desperate on you. You work differently than when you have a flow and an ease about you because it's not do or die. And I started having more fun. I started booking more calls. I started... I got a walk-on movie on a show on Lifetime because they were like, You're fun. I'm going to write you into the scene. I was like, Cool. That sounds awesome. So that type of thing started happening. because I was able to play, because I was able to have more fun. You know, and when 2020 happened, right, I had my first screenplay under contract. Like the world is my stage. Life is happening. And the whole world shuts down. And it was scary. It's scary for a lot of people. People started reaching out. They're like, help me, help me, help me. And I went back to those principles that my boss taught me a few years before that. I started helping people. And I was like, this feels good. this feels good, helping people, moving people forward. I was like, this is the day. This is the day that I changed my life and my future, take it into my hands and start helping other people do the same. And that's when I started coaching. I find that so fascinating. A couple of things stood out to me just in your story. The first one is that the generational habits and things we learned from our parents and your parents filed bankruptcy the week that you found out that you really were in a hole, if you will, you're decisively ending those generational habits. And I think I know the answer to this, but how would you, first of all, you will give a lot of people hope today because a lot of people are in financial crisis and that you could do it. Anybody can So how do you break those generational habits if you will Breaking the habits is hard but it starts with a choice And when you make the choice that you don want to continue that way that's the first step. You have to decide, I want to change my life. And then the next thing you do is you reach out for help, either from a financial coach like me, or you can go. There are plenty of programs online. Dave Ramsey has fabulous resources that you can go to. So once you make a decision, you say, okay, today's the day I'm going to change. Then you need a plan. And that plan starts with making sure your financial foundation is in order, making sure that you have things like life insurance, health insurance, a health event is the number one cause of bankruptcy in America. Make sure you have health insurance. You want to make sure you have life insurance so that your spouse and your children are taken care of in the event that something happens to you. People don't like to talk about wills and life insurance, things that you definitely need because they're like, oh, if I do a will, if I get life insurance, I'm going to die. Like newsflash, none of us make it out of here alive. Things happen. Make sure that you were taken care of and make sure that your children are taken care of when you're not there. So then you need things like a budget. A budget. People are like, oh, dirty word. I don't like budgets. Please don't restrict me. When I work with clients to make a budget, we are not restricting you from doing anything. I'm giving you permission to spend money. That's what we do with a budget, right? Like instead of saying, oh, you can't have that, you can't have that. I'm intentionally putting money aside. This is my money that I get to go shopping with. And I'm going to take that money. I'm going to go shopping. Because we put it in your budget and you're not taking money away from your food, right? Like that's what people are like, oh, if I spend money today, I won't have money to eat. We put you on a budget. You have money in that food category. you can go spend that money on that shirt that you want. And that's really what it is. Having a plan, knowing where you want to go, and then putting the steps in place to get there. I love that you say that because budgeting does make us feel like we're being restricted. And it's almost like you're in a financial lockdown in a way. And you're saying the opposite. No, you're giving permission to spend money because money is energy. You know, Jules and I believe that money is energy. And I want to ask you, because you mentioned so many great points. You mentioned how no one wants to work with desperate. You mentioned that a moment ago and that people can smell, they can feel that. And that's like pariahs. You feel like you're working with a pariah. Yeah. And that is a very unattractive quality for me whenever I'm in an environment and someone's trying to sell and they have that energy. And then I'm mindful too that I, or I try to be, if I'm coming across that way. And in the event that I feel that I have come across that way, I actually take a big step back and go, okay, I need to kind of air this out and back away. So it's funny that you say funny in an interesting way. You're able to actually book acting roles and actually get what you want by having play and enjoying the process rather than staking your whole life on this. Like I've got to get this. I've got to get this role. I've got to get this job. You know, there'll be no food on the table if I don't get this gig. And you go the complete opposite and you enjoy this process because number one, this is your passion. It's what you love to do. And you're sticking to that. And then you're being a magnet and attracting those yeses. They're saying yes to you or they're writing a role just for you to be on. That's incredible. And who knew that in some way that's attracted to finances? What do you think of that? One thing that you said really stood out to me, and it's kind of that feeling of all or never, right? Like it was, I'm so, if I don't get this, I'll never eat again. Like that was kind of the feeling. And there's a lot of all or never involved in finances. You're like, well, if I, you know, if I work on getting out of debt, then I'm not going to have money to go have fun. And like, I have FOMO and I can't do that. Or I have to put all of my money into retirement now because, you know, time and compound interest. And I need, there's so much space. And what I try to give to my clients is peace around their money. There should never be this desperate, tight holding onto everything. Because when you squeeze your hands, things slip through your fingers, right? Like you can't hold too tightly to money because then you're a Scrooge. Christmas is coming up. We all know what happened to Scrooge, right? He held on to everything so tightly that he lost everything around him. And so I don't want people to be like, okay, I'm going on this thing and I can't have any freedom and I'm going to hold everything super tightly. But I don't want people to think, well, it's FOMO. So I want to, you know, YOLO, I'm going to live my life. I want to live it. And then there's nothing in the future. We got to find a balance. We have to find a way to enjoy your life, but make sure that you can enjoy in the future. And one of my favorite phrases is that I want you to have what you want most. And to get what you want most, you have to give up what you want right now. Or you can have what you want right now and give up what you want most. And sometimes it's just sitting down and thinking about, okay, what do I want my life to look like in 10 years? How do I get there? Wow. And that is such a great philosophy and a great perspective because so many of us have this narrative, this money story that we come from, that we were taught. If our parents were always struggling, we hold on to our money tighter. And I love that visual of holding your fist so tightly, things squeeze through your fingers. And that's so true. There's nothing worse than going out to dinner with a bunch of friends. And you have that one friend that's itemizing everything. And so, you know, I only owe $6, not $8. And that's very off-putting to me. And that energy that is exuded is off-putting. So it does disrupt relationships, if you will. And money is energy. And that energy giving off like that, it's such a negative vibration that it keeps people away. And it's amazing to think of the ripple effect as well. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things generationally that I want to do with my children is I want to teach them to be generous because I feel like when you give things away with a generous spirit, you're going to get it back tenfold. So this weekend, my kids and I went to a pumpkin patch that our church does every year and proceeds from the pumpkin patch go to the God Care School in Bayamba, Africa. and we love giving to them. And I made my kids pay for their pumpkins, right? And we bought tiny little pumpkins about this big 20 bucks a piece Why are they 20 bucks a piece They were free We could have taken them off and not had to pay for them but we are giving generously to this charity I like your kids So I gave each of my kids 20 bucks I like go pay for your tiny pumpkin. Go pay for your tiny pumpkin. And that's just a chance for them to give and give freely and give generously. Something that would have cost us a dollar at a regular pumpkin patch. Why not give 20? Why not? That's beautiful that you're teaching your kids these life lessons, these financial life lessons. And I wanted to ask you a few questions. What do you think of if someone is single and they're looking for a mate, should they look for a mate with only good credit? I don't think that debt or good credit should factor into your relationship with a person as long as you are on the same page with money. Because money will get in the way of things. Money fights a money problem are the number one cause of divorce in North America. And that comes from being on two different pages. You were raised in two different households. You were raised with two different money styles. You just work. What you need to do is find out what works best for you together as a team. So I work a lot with helping people become debt-free. I do not believe that credit and FICO is an altar to be worshipped at. I believe that I can do a whole lot more with money in my pocket than I can with a credit score. Oh, then let me ask you this. What is your credit score? So my credit score is zero. My credit score is indeterminable. Zero. I do not have a credit card. I do not take out loans. I do not do anything that I cannot pay for cash. And the reason is cash in my pocket is king or queen, depending on how you want to look at it. Queen, you came to the right place. So going back to my situation where I was giving money and charity and things, I can give money. I can't give you a loan from the bank, right? Like I can't say, well, my credit score is really high, but I have all these payments that I have to pay so I can keep my credit score up. So I can't pay any money to your charity right now. I don't have that situation. I say, Hey, you know what? I got some extra money coming in this month. I'm going to give that all to charity. That's my favorite thing to do. My favorite thing to do is to walk into a restaurant and lay down a hundred dollar bill and say, thank you to my waitress. my food for a tip of 100 bucks yeah i feel like 20 bucks and i'm like here's a hundred dollar bill i was a waitress for 16 years you're invited to b&m bakery in winter havens florida i'll come in come on down to my bakery absolutely you know but i can't do that every time right but i can do it to bless somebody and i can't bless somebody if i'm making 600 in payments the average car payment right now in America is over $500, $508 average car payment, $508. What could you do to bless somebody with $508? Save that money up for five months, buy a single mom, a car. It's a beater that she can get around. She can take her kids, right? But you can't do that. If your car payments, you know, if you're making payments on what's sitting in your driveway, you can't bless other people with that. And just since we're talking car payments, $500 a month invested from the time you were 25 to the time you were 65, $500 a month, that's $5 million. I hope you like your car. Reality check. Wow. Reality check. And you're really using money as energy. And I think it is so important to give back, to give to others selflessly. I mean, isn't that the meaning of life, if you will? And this is a really inspirational story. And just in terms of investing, do you invest money? How do you teach people to invest? What's your strategy? Great. So I am not an investment professional. When I work with clients, I work with helping them to develop the habits, the tools, the mindset. However, I do work also with an investment person. So I will tell you what I do personally, because I think it's really important. I split my money between different types of mutual funds, growth, growth and income, international funds. So I want to make sure that my money is invested well. When it comes to investing, have somebody that comes alongside you and can teach you about investing. I have an investment professional that I go to and I'm like, hey, explain this to me. This is happening with the stock market. I'm scared. And he's like, whoa, like, let's take a step back and let's look at the track record. And like, don't jump out when things are going down. It's the worst time to get out. You sell high. He has the heart of a teacher and he teaches me how to navigate these things. Have somebody come alongside you that will do it with you. Do not give your money to somebody and go, hey, like, this is great. Here's my money. You make it work because it's your money and you're in charge of it. And stories happen where you give your money to somebody. You're like, here, you invest it. Johnny Depp gave his money to a guy, right? Said, here, guy, invest my money for me. And he lost $700 million because he gave it to somebody else to manage. If it is given to you to manage, it is your responsibility to manage it well. Wow. Amazing stories. And we always talk on this podcast about the power of one. One person, one kind gesture, one good deed, one change in your life can create miracles. And Laura is living proof from her boss, that one person that took her under her wing or his wing, I'm not quite sure, but changed the trajectory of Laura's life. And Laura is giving back, understanding that message, that lesson that you've learned and paying it forward. Laura, we're obsessed with you and So obsessors, if you are interested in learning more about Laura Sexton, check her out in the show notes. She's amazing. She's doing good. And remember, obsessors, get obsessed with your life. Thank you for listening to another episode of Obsessed. We're obsessed with you. Show your love by rating, reviewing, subscribing, and sharing with your friends. Every time you share, you are changing someone else's life. Until we meet again, get obsessed with your life. show to grow. Thank you for listening.