41. Breaking the Cycle: Are you Too Broke to Get Ahead?

Join us as Laura Sexton shares a powerful message of hope and financial empowerment. She discusses the challenges many people face when it comes to managing their finances, including debt, low income, unexpected expenses, and a lack of financial education. The episode emphasizes the importance of taking control of your financial destiny, working hard, and making smart financial choices. Laura also highlights the need for financial education and provides resources and strategies to break the cycle of financial struggle.

In this episode you’ll learn:

·       to challenge negative thinking patterns

·     2 key factors to achieving millionaire status

·      practical resources to break the cycle

Hear a success story from one of my earliest clients.

Additional resources:

·         7 Steps to Set Your Kids Up For Financial Freedom

.      5 Massive Money Mistakes to Avoid in Business 

.      Total Money MakeOver - Dave Ramsey

.      Business Boutique - Christy Wright 

.      Ken Coleman’s Get Clear Assessment 

.      Smart Money Happy Hour - Apple

Learn more about working with Laura Sexton

.        Join the Facebook group Legacy Builders Network.

·        Book a Clarity Call. Learn more here!

·        Checkout the resource library here!

Want to ask a question Laura can answer on the podcast? Connect with her here!

Want to receive a live money or career audit? Apply Here

Send an email to Laura@AccelerateYourLegacy.com or send a DM on Instagram @accelerateyourlegacy

Elevate your coaching with daily devotionals and prayers from 'Seasoned with Salt.' Get your copy HERE!

Transcript

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Laura 0:02

Hello and welcome to the Accelerate Your Legacy podcast. I'm Laura Sexton, your trusted financial coach and money mindset specialist. Join me as we explore the world of money and money mindset while also paving the way for a lasting legacy that extends far beyond money. Together we'll eliminate stress, amplify freedom, and ensure you stop paying for your past so you can start saving for your future. If you're seeking peace in your finances, more margin in your budget, and a legacy that inspires generations to come, you're in the right place. Hey, accelerators! I had a conversation recently with a gentleman making 70, 000 a year. He had over 250, 000 in student loans, plus a car loan, credit cards, personal loans. You name it, he had it. He said he couldn't pay for coaching because he would never get out of this hole. It wasn't that he couldn't afford it. He simply had no hope. There's nothing that gets me more fired up than my deep desire to share with you that there is hope in whatever your financial circumstance is. There's something that we can do. There are changes we can make. You are not stuck. If anyone comes to you and says you were stuck and you have no hope and it's going to be like this forever, they are liars. I'm here to prove it to you. So first I wanna talk to you about the cycle. We've all heard the little man can't get ahead and people like us just don't ever make it outta this side of town. You guys have heard these things. This is what I call stinking thinking. You guys have probably heard people say that before, but basically you are all negative all the time. Here's a question. Who told you that? Who told you that you would never get ahead? Who told you that you would always have a car payment? Who told you that? Was it your family? Was it society? The truth is you control your destiny. You decide whether or not you're going to get out of this rut. 94 percent of millionaires agree with me. 94 percent of millionaires in America today say that they control their own destiny. 9 out of 10 people agree on something we need to listen. 79 percent of millionaires in America received exactly 0 dollars in inheritance guys. Millionaires. Aren't what they used to be. Millionaire status used to be hard to obtain, but in America today, becoming a millionaire is not as hard. However, what it takes to become a millionaire, that's still hard. The largest millionaire study done in America to date. Interviewed over 10, 000 millionaires, which 1, 000 is statistically significant, but 10, 000 is the number that they interviewed just to make sure they wanted rock solid evidence to this. And the millionaires that they studied. They said that the top contributing factors to becoming a millionaire in the world today are discipline and consistency. That's also known as hard work, guys. You have to put in the hard work. A lot of times, That looks like we're in overalls, right? I'm going to put in the hard work today and I'm going to go relax later. We think of a farmer, they go out and they work really, really hard when the sun is up, they don't have to work when the sun goes down, they get to go home and relax because their work happens during the daylight hours. And then at night, their job is to rest and replenish. That idea just came to me right now, and I'm going to take some time to mull that over at another time, but look, hard work, it's not always fun in the moment, but I can tell you that when you're working hard and you're working diligently, and you're being consistent, and you're doing the work, you sleep a lot better at night. That's one of the things we're trying to do here. We're trying to get you to a place where your money is peaceful, and you are restful. There are some challenges. To this millionaire status 1 people say, well, a 1, 000, 000 dollars isn't enough anymore. That may be so, but those people that are telling you a 1, 000, 000 dollars isn't enough for you to live on. Do they have a 1, 000, 000 dollars? What is enough to them? You know what? That doesn't even matter. What is enough to you? What do you need in your life to be able to live comfortably? You know, a million dollars invested in the stock market, making 10 to 12 percent on average is an average return of the stock market over time. A million dollars making 10 percent if you just lived off of the interest that you earned on that million dollars year over year, you could live on a hundred thousand dollars, right? Is that what you're making right now? Are you making more than that? Are you making less than that? What do you need to live? We need to we need to project ahead, right? All of our money is future thinking. All of our money is forward focused. And if what you're doing is you're focusing on the future. We can look at what our future needs to look like; what we want our future to look like, and then we can fill it in from there. We can make it look like what we need it to look like, because if we don't know where we're going, we don't know what our future looks like. We don't know what building blocks we need to put. To build our tower. I'll throw this here and I'll throw this here and then I get to the top. I'm like, oh, I forgot stairs guys. If we can say, okay, this is what the building's going to look like. I know I need this on the 5th floor. This on the 4th floor, this on the 3rd floor, this on the 2nd floor, but I'm building my foundation right now to build my 1st floor on. I hope you're coming along with this with this thing with me, because I'm doing a bunch of hand movements and I know you guys can't see me. There are some other challenges to hitting that millionaire status and, and 1 of those is debt. You guys know I love to talk about dumping debt. We don't want it. We want to stop paying for our past decisions. So that means we're going to have to get rid of that debt. I love the debt snowball method. There are other methods that you can use to get out of debt. This is just the one that I've seen work most consistently with my clients. Stop paying for your past so that your money can start saving for your future. Another challenge is low income. Guys, this is hard. This is hard if your income is not helping you get margin in your life, we've got to increase your income. And in a couple episodes here, I'm going to be talking about different ways that you can increase your income. That's going to be 1 of the things that we're going to focus on in the next couple episodes. Unexpected expenses. Those those will come up a roadblock. I had a client this week that said. Things keep coming up. She is she's diligently working and they finally had their thousand dollars and they were planning to get ahead on some of their bills next month. And then they got a leak in their shed that they didn't notice because they don't go in the shed every day and it ruined. A large majority of the things that were in the outside shed. This leak had obviously been going on for a while and things in the shed. They're not their everyday use things, but they went out there for something important and they realized that 75 percent of their belongings were completely ruined. Needless to say, this was an unexpected expense, and it was a big roadblock for them. They had actually gone out there to look for stuff that they could sell so they could get ahead faster. What they said was, it really feels like the universe is challenging me, and I'm going to get past this. I'm going to choose to continue down this path of getting control of our finances. That is not an easy thing to do, my friends. And majority of time people come to me and they say, I'm ready to get a hold of my finances and the world will step in and say, are you. Are you sure? That's when Murphy comes in. He's looking around looking for your soft edges and you're like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do great. I'm going to build myself up and I'm going to make something of myself. That's when the devil comes into your life and says, are you? What if I make it difficult? Are you still going to try to get past me? My friends, this is a challenge and a challenge is something to get through and get over and move past. There is one other big challenge that I get a lot. I hear this a lot from people and that is there's a lack of opportunity. Believe it or not, millionaires say that lack of opportunity is lowest down on the list of challenges, but non millionaires put lack of opportunity 2nd on the list. Why is that? Because millionaires believe they control their own destiny and if they don't see an opportunity, they'll go out and make an opportunity. I want that to be the way that you see this as well. If you're looking around and you're like, there are no opportunities in this town, it's time to move. There is an opportunity for you somewhere. But as with everything in life, you can have everything, but you can't have it all at once. You have to make your decisions. You could want to live in Los Angeles, but you can't afford it. So my friends, you move an hour outside of town. That's what we did. We could afford to live in Los Angeles, but we could not afford to live in Los Angeles and get ahead financially. So, what are you willing to give up to get to what you want? Because there may be a lack of opportunity where you are right now, but there may not be a lack of opportunity somewhere else. And it may take opening our eyes to this. And saying, there's a lack of opportunity in my field of vision. Where can I set my eyes? There are opportunities out there for you. We just have to find them. When we're talking about breaking the cycle and getting out of this too broke to get ahead mindset, I want really emphasize the idea of financial education. Believe it or not, only 24 percent of schools in America require a comprehensive personal finance class. That blows my mind because you know what I really needed in high school. I really needed to know how to make a budget. You know what I did not need the Pythagorean theorem. I don't need to know that a squared plus b squared equals c squared. That has not helped me in my life. It's great. If you are going into the math, or you're going to the sciences, you need to know these things. I do not need to know these things, but you know what? 100 percent of people need to know how to make a budget. 100 percent of people need to know how to live on less than they make. They need to know how To save and invest and grow financially, but we don't teach that in school. Do you know what that means? Do you know what that means for you specifically? You have to learn in the home. So, if you have kids, you need to be teaching them in your home. They need to be seeing you make a budget. They need to be helping you. I guess we don't write checks anymore, right? Like, I write checks for my school and I have my kids watch me write the checks for their school when they have like pizza lunches or. What did I just do field trips? I write a physical check and I show them we're paying money for this because I can go, I can Venmo it to the school, but then my kids don't see that there's any kind of interaction and they get this entitlement mindset of it just happens. It's just done for me. No, no, my friends know my children. We have to pay for these things and it costs money and it costs time to earn the money. I want them to know this and for your kids, you need to teach them at home. So, if you do not already have it, please get down in the show notes and you will see my 7 steps to set your kids up for financial success. This is. A comprehensive checklist with lots of extra bonuses. It says 7 steps and guys, I give you extra steps because I'm just a giver like that. And I couldn't stop at 7. I really tried, but I could not. So, if you have kids in your home, grab my 7 steps to set your kids up for financial success, and it will give you practical ways to teach your kids at home. And they're pretty easy to I didn't make it hard for you. If you don't have kids. But you still need to learn in the home because you didn't learn in school, here's some resources for you. You can read Dave Ramsey's total money makeover. This is the financial book that helped me change my life. So many of the principles that I teach I found in this book. Sign up for my Better Budget Boot Camp. This is a 5 day online do it your own pace, but I really want you to do it in 5 days, course, that will take 15 minutes a day. And you will have a budget based on what your family values, please. This is 27. You have 27 sign up for this course. You can join my money mastery program. If you need some handholding and you say, my plan is confusing to me and I, I just need you to help me walk through this and make sure I'm doing it correctly. Yes, I would love to do that for you. You can find all of these resources down in the show notes. It was very interesting. I had. Yeah. 1 of my most recent clients told me, I'm actually going to read this off of the email. He said, I guess I'm just afraid to be spending money on something. I feel I should already know. There's a lot of uncertainty. In that statement, but I feel like I should already know it. Why, if no one taught you, why should you already know it just because it affects everybody around you? Well, let me tell you 78 percent of the people around you are living paycheck to paycheck. 78 percent of the people around you 8 out of 10 people around you are broke. You don't want to do what the broke people are doing because that makes you normal. You want to be weird and you want to be wealthy and you want to be wise in order to be those things. You have to have a mentor in your quarter. You have to have somebody around you that is going to help you grow, because if not, you're just going to do what everybody else is doing. You're just going to be broke like everybody else. If you want to grow, you have to have somebody in your corner who's already done the thing that you want to do. So, I tell you, friends, if I can help you in any way, please reach out. If the people in your life are broke, they don't need to give you financial advice. I just said that. If somebody is coming up to you and they are saying that your financial plan is stupid, but they're broke, you're on the right track. You are doing the right thing. You need to focus in on you and what the wealthy people around you are doing. Now, I'm not telling you to go out and be a crook. I'm not telling you to go out and and rob people. I'm not telling you to go out and create a faulty product. That's not actually going to help anybody and try to scam people into into buying it. So you can make money. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying, let's be wise. I'm saying let's move forward in a healthy way. If your broke friend is making fun of your financial advice. You're on the right track. So I've already told you about the Better Budget Boot Camp. I've already told you about Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover. If you're looking for another podcast to listen to that's going to help you grow financially, I'm going to go ahead and recommend the Smart Money Happy Hour. It's Rachel Cruz and George Camel. It's a little bit of snarky. It's a little bit of pop culture. It's a whole lot of fun. They weave in trending topics with Solid financial principles. I think it's wonderful. And so I just wanted to give that to you. If you're looking for another podcast to listen to, thank you for being here. By the way, can I say that right now? This podcast is growing. I see it in the numbers every week. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here. I'm sorry if I don't say that every single time. I'm so thankful for you and your desire to get better in your finances and the fact that you were here with me, ready to leave a legacy of abundance. Instead of being in this cycle, right? Like, if you were in the cycle of the little man can't get ahead, I'm never going to do it. Like, I don't want you to share that with people. Don't, don't share stinking thinking. Share hope. That's what, that's what I'm doing here on this podcast, and that's what I want for you and your family and your legacy. The people that come after you will not feel like they are stuck, but will feel like they have hope, they have an upward trajectory, and that they are going to be a light in the world for others around them as well. If you want to get out of the cycle of being too broke to get ahead, here's some strategies. Go get a side hustle. You can do a lot of different things. The national average right now of selling pizzas 5 nights a week. Is 1500 dollars per month. That's going to make a lot of change for you. I have 1 client right now who's going to garage sales on the weekend buying things for a dollar and selling them for 5 on poshmark. That's a great way to do things my friends. Career advancement where you're at right now in your company. Can you get promoted? Great way to do that is to go to your boss and say, Hey, one, I'm on this financial journey and I just wanna make you aware of it. So if there's any overtime available, um, or another project I could take on, I would absolutely love to do that. Also. Going to your boss and saying, can you please tell me what I need to do to bring more revenue and value to the company so that I can make more. In my paycheck, how can I add value to the company? Because that's what I want to do. I don't want you to go into your boss and be like, look, these people over here are making this money. So I should too. Because no, should is not a word that we're having in this conversation. I would like to add more value to this company. How can I go about that? That's where you need to be focused. Also, are you in the right career? Are you in a place that lights you up? Ken Coleman has an absolutely wonderful career assessment. He really pinpoints it. Like gets into the nitty gritty of who you are, who you're meant to serve and how you're meant to do it. I've, it's been spot on with everybody I've talked to. I highly recommend it. Should you be an entrepreneur? You can make more money working for yourself as long as you go about a smart path. Not everybody's meant to be an entrepreneur and that is totally okay, but if you're going to be an entrepreneur, start your business without debt. I'm just going to go ahead and say this right here because. The next strategy to make sure that you can get out of this cycle, right, is to dump debt. Just be done with it. Anywhere you look online, it's like, manage your debt better. No, no, no. Just get rid of it. Don't allow it to steal from your future. And if you have a business, if you start a business as an entrepreneur, and you're going to move ahead with this, do not use debt to move ahead. You're going to make so many more creative and viable choices if you have to pay cash with it. Because if you use OPM, we talked about this a lot, guys. If you use other people's money, you're going to make silly choices. Because you don't have to put a whole lot of thought into it. But if it's my money and I only have 500 or my, my company's going to go bust, I better make a really smart decision. Use cash, build your company at the speed of cash. And I promise you, you're going to have more freedom in your business because I know people that owned gyms during COVID and they had loans out. And guess what happens when you owe money to other people? But you can't make money because the government said you can't run your business. You can either go out and get more loans to cover your other loans, or you fold and you go under and you're done. I don't want that for you. I want you to have as much of a boon in your business as possible. Start being profitable from day 1. Get scrappy. Start small. There are ways to do this. I highly recommend the book business boutique by Christie. Right? And also, I have the 5 massive money mistakes to avoid in business. If you're thinking about starting your own business, you need to pick that up again. These are going to be in the show notes. My show notes are going to be so clickable this week. It's going to be great. Right before we end here, I want to tell you about my client, Julia. Julia lived in Florida, and she was working at a company that she hated. It's very similar to an urgent care, and we were in the middle of COVID when this happened, and her boss was awful. He was trash, and she hated working for him, but she had been with this company for a really long time, and she had all these payments, and she was stressed, overwhelmed, and did not like it. The cycle that she was in, she lived in a family that told her she, she was the youngest of four siblings and her siblings treated her like the baby. She's a grown woman. She's in her thirties. There's no reason for them to be treating her like a child. And they coddled her and they told her, you know, you just need to do this and we'll take care of you. And, and she came to me saying, I don't want to live like this anymore. I don't like this. She had 10, 000 in credit card debt and we had to get her out of that. And she buckled down guys. She was making her meals at home. She was not going out to lunch. All she cut everything out that she had previously been doing, and she paid off that 10, 000 dollars in 4 months. She was paying 2, 500 dollars a month and she was not making that much money. She had paired everything back to bare bones because she knew she could do it. So, what happened? When she no longer had payments, when she no longer owed anything to anybody, her boss came at her and said something incredibly rude and she said, okay, I'm done here. He's like, no, no, no, no, no. Wait, wait, wait. Like, I need you. I need, I need you here with me. You have to be here because it would take, like, 3 people to do the job that you're doing. She's like, no, and she left because she had no payments. She had all the freedom and she went home and her her siblings are like, well, we'll take care of you. And she said, no, and she picked herself up and she moved to Texas. She said, I'm no longer going to be a victim. I'm no longer going to be put upon and stressed out at work. I'm no longer going to be treated like a child because I am a grown woman and I want to be treated like one. It's amazing what you can do when you have options and you don't have as many options when you are being told by banks what you can and cannot do with your money. Julia decided that she was no longer going to be a part of the system that told her people like her can't get ahead. People like her can't be wealthy. People like her work in these low positions at jobs like this. No, Julia said, not me, not me, no more. As of today, I'm out of this system. I'm out of this cycle. I will never again be told that I can't do it or that I deserve to be treated badly, never again. So she's living her best life right now, and I'm so incredibly proud of her, and I hope that she is listening to this today so that she knows how proud I am of her that I am shouting about it on the podcast. If you feel like you were alone and, like, the system is rigged against you, send me a message on Instagram. You can click over to my website. I have a contact form on there. The website is accelerateyourlegacy. com. If you are here and you're listening to this podcast, I want to be a resource for you, and I want to encourage you along the way. You can break the cycle. You are not too broke to get ahead. There is so much hope for you, my friends. And I can't wait to see what you do with the opportunity to put in a little bit of discipline, a little bit of consistency, a little bit of hard work, because that is what it's going to take for you to break the cycle and get ahead. Thanks for being here with me, guys. Go out and make a difference. Thank you for investing your time with us today on the Accelerate Your Legacy podcast. Remember, your legacy isn't just measured in dollars and cents, but in the tools, habits, mindset, and reputation you leave behind. Don't just listen to the show, but take action on what you've learned. Share this wisdom with a friend who can benefit and help us spread the word by rating and reviewing the podcast. For questions or encouragement, reach out to me on Instagram at Accelerate Your Legacy or explore the resources listed in the show notes. I will be back with you next week. Until then, build your legacy with intention.