91. Legacy Building 101

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Hey accelerators. What you were going to be hearing this week? Is a replay of my legacy building 1 0 1 masterclass. We talked all about going from financial struggles to building wealth. And I think that you're going to, like some of this information, it has been edited down for time because the whole thing was about an hour. And I like to keep these podcast on the shorter side, because I know that you were busy people. So with, all that in mind, please enjoy legacy building. One-on-one. I know a lot of people on this call know what it means to be financially stuck. I was that way for quite some time. I still am on my own journey of growing in abundance and always growing, always learning. So I want to acknowledge that you may have come here tonight because you feel stuck. Like, there's no getting out of this rut and I want to make it clear to you that you are not alone. You are in really good company. The people that are here tonight have all felt like they were never going to make a change with their money. They were always going to be stuck in the same patterns in the same positions. And it's okay to feel stuck as long as we choose to not stay there. So a quick overview of what we're going to be talking about tonight. We're going to talk about the legacy mindset I'm going to give you practical steps for financial growth and we're going to talk about how to start taking control today. There will be actionable steps That you can implement immediately. I can guarantee you that that's going to come up. So we're here. Legacy building 101 turning financial struggles into future wealth. So what we're going to talk about is the legacy mindset. And I think that sometimes we forget what the word legacy actually means. A lot of people think that when we're talking about legacy, we're only talking about money. And I get that. I'm a money coach. That is what I do for a living. I coach on money, but I don't want to think that legacy is only about money. Money, right? Legacy is also the habits that we leave behind. It's the character that we leave behind. It is Your reputation when you leave this earth, what are people going to say about you? What are they going to think about you? That is what your legacy is. And so we can leave a legacy with our money. Yes, we can leave cash in the bank for people to have, but we also leave habits. We leave tools. We leave an understanding and we leave people feeling a certain type of way. This is really a long term stability, especially when it comes to money. It is all about long term stability, but this is also about your family and your community and how you can share that with other people. I wanted to share with you a story about someone that I know that shifted their mindset from survival to wealth building. That would be my friend, Tanya. Tanya came to me, she was a widow, and she had 91, 000 in debt, and she Was very scared. She had never had her own bank account before. She had always relied on her husband to handle everything. He had paid all of the bills. He had made all of the investment decisions. He had done everything and she had no idea what she was doing. And she came to me. She said, I have 91, 000 in debt and I'm certain it's going to take me 9 years to pay this off. I was looking at her number. She has some social security coming in from his death benefits. He was military, so he had death benefits from there. And she was still working, and she had a really good job. And so I said, Tonya, I think this is going to take you two years. And she looked at me like I was outside of my mind. There was absolutely no way that she was going to be able to pay this off in two years. And I said, let's just get together. Let's make a plan. And guys, it has been three years now. Not only did she pay everything off in 25 months, which is much faster than the nine years that she thought she was going to take to pay things off, it took her 25 months. We were so close to two years. And The crazy thing about it is now, she has gone from fearful, I'm never going to be able to pay these things off, to having a day where her car needed a repair. And I asked her, I said, well, how did you feel about it? She goes, Oh, it was fine. And I had the money. It was fine. And I almost fell out of my chair because I was like, I'm sorry, who am I talking to right now? Because she had gone from, I'm never going to have enough. I'm always going to be afraid to being at a place where she was fine. She had enough. She had an emergency fund. She was able to this last year, she paid to renovate two bathrooms in her house. She wrote an 18, 000 check and it did not scare her. She just kept going. So this is what I mean by going from being afraid. To moving forward. So one of the things that I want to talk about when it comes to this legacy mindset is that we have to shift from scarcity thinking to abundance thinking. Now, scarcity thinking is not something I want to spend a whole lot of time on, but I do want to talk about what it is. A scarcity mindset is the belief that there's never enough. Whether it's money, it's time, it's resources. It is a feeling of constant lack where financial decisions are driven by fear. They're driven by survival rather than growth. So maybe you've said things like this, or you've heard people say things like this, because people that are operating in scarcity often say, I can't afford that. I'll never have enough. It's too risky to save and invest. Those are the things that are very common. Those are things I hear most often. But I also want to point out that you could be somebody who says, if I don't get this now, I'll never be able to get it. Maybe, you know, somebody like that. Maybe you've been somebody like that. I've been somebody like that before where I think if I don't go to the store, I see something I like in the store. If I don't get it right now, I'm never going to get it because I'm never going to have the money anytime other than today. And if I don't spend the money today, I'm never going to get it. And that's false. Thinking if we can plan ahead, we can get to where we need to go. So I want to talk about how a scarcity mindset can impact our financial decisions. And if we don't make a decision because of fear, we're essentially still making a decision. One of my clients, Jeremy he won a settlement from an accident that he had been involved in and he had this money and it was sitting in a savings account. Making less than 1 percent in this traditional savings account, and he couldn't do anything with it. He couldn't invest it. He couldn't make repairs on his home because he couldn't decide on what to do. He was so afraid that he was going to lose the money that he decided not to do anything at all with it. So it sat in a bank account for years before he came to me and we decided what to do with it. And I said, for years, you've lost around 4 percent of the money. The spend ability of this money, the money itself has not changed, but because of inflation and other things, other forces, he's lost around 4 percent of the spending ability every year. You're actually losing something and so we have to be very conscious of this because being overly cautious or feeling anxious about spending even on necessities is holding us back. I used to be a person that would rewash my Ziploc bags because I thought I was going to need to use them again and I didn't have the money to go out and buy more Ziploc bags. Was that true? No, and I know it wasn't true because I had money to go buy new dresses for going out with my girlfriends and I had money to go out to eat, but I did have money to buy necessities. Simple things like Ziploc bags, I felt were a luxury and I might as well just go ahead and reuse 1. And now that I'm on the other side of it, and I'm on the side of abundance, I'm like, that seems a little silly. Look, there were times. When I was in a situation where that was necessary. And I had to do things like that because there was no going out and buying more because there was no more money. And when that's true, and when it's necessary, it's fine. But when you're stuck in that mentality, because you had been like that, and you're not choosing to escape it, that's a problem. Avoiding opportunities for growth, because they seem unattainable or risky is also a scarcity mindset. Sometimes we're not in a financial situation where we can go out and spend 10, 000 dollars. But when those situations arise, we have to make sure that we are making our financial decisions. It's not based on fear, but based on reality. If you were feeling envious or resentful of other people's situation, that is also scarcity mindset. Let's talk about abundance mindset. Abundance mindset is the belief that opportunities for wealth, success, and growth are plentiful and that you are capable of creating more instead of focusing on what you don't have. You focus on what you can build. And this mindset encourages optimism and proactive financial behaviors. When you are in an abundance mindset, you will say things like I can create opportunities for wealth. Now stick with me here. Sometimes when I talk about these positive things that we can say to ourselves, and I talk about a mindset and abundance mindset, people go, wow, she's gotten really woo woo. This is not what I want to listen to. And I just want you to stay with me for a little bit, because I do think that the power of life and death are in the tongue. Instead of thinking that there's never going to be enough People with an abundance mindset see money as a tool for growth. I think that's really important. I'm capable of learning and improving. This is really important Especially people that have never budgeted before or people will come to me and say I should already know everything I should already know this i'm like why who taught you? Who sat down and said, here, this is how you make a budget. Who sat down and said, here, this is how you invest. Because we don't live in a society where that's an important piece. We live in a society where people shove things under the rug and pretend like we're supposed to know what to do with our money. And we don't always know. Telling yourself I'm capable of learning. I'm capable of improving. I think that's really, really important. I have control over my financial future. This is so important to say to yourself. You do have control because financial challenges, they happen. They're temporary. You can overcome them. I think the strategies are very important. Okay, so I don't want you to think it's all mindset, and if I think mindset, and I'm out here, and I'm like, Whoo, if I say the right things, and I think the right things, it's gonna happen. It's not true. It's just the change in the mindset that's so incredibly important to start. You have to believe that you have the ability, and that's why I said, if you've heard any of my marketing for this, I say the first step is the hardest step, because the first step is reframing your thoughts. Changing the way you feel about money because you have money stories that have been in your brain since you were a child. Your parents told you stories about money whether they said it out loud or not. Your parents said things like money doesn't grow on trees. We can't afford that. You have to reframe the way that you're thinking. So that you can focus in on what's most important to you and you can start to say, okay, Here are the strategies that I need. I know what you guys came here for. You're like, I don't care about the mindset part. I just need you to tell me what to do next. I'm telling you, the mindset is so very important to know that there is hope to know that there is a future out there to know that you are able to leave a legacy, no matter where you're starting from, no matter where you're finishing up, you have what it takes to do this. And I'm very excited for you. I know you can do this because I've been in a very similar place. No matter where you're at. We're gonna talk about some practical steps to turn your struggles into wealth. These are my favoritest things. If you know anything about me, you know that one of my favorite things is the budget. People are like, ew, I hate that word. So sometimes I call it a spending plan. It's a plan to spend my money. I'm purposely spending my money. I love it. To get clear on your finances means that you have to understand where you were starting from. But you also have to understand where it is that you want to go. So that's part of the getting clear. What do our finances actually look like? I met with a gentleman today that was telling me he had a loss of income. He started out at 140, 000 a year and he lost that job and he quickly moved over to another job. He's only making 65, 000. And I said, so, what's going on with you and your family? Are you able to live on the lower amount? And he said, well, I mean, we're getting by. I was like, what does getting by mean? He said, well, you know, we, we haven't really changed our lifestyle much. There's 75, 000 that's not coming in every year now and you haven't changed your lifestyle at all. I said, are you putting 75, 000 a year on a credit card? And he was like, well, not that much. I was like, oh, okay. I said when was the last time you did a budget? He said about three years ago? He has no idea what he's spending, no idea what he's doing with his money. He has absolutely no idea where he's at today. He knows that he's putting plenty of money into his retirement. So he's feeling very secure about that. So, when he retires in 20 years, he's going to feel great, but he can't touch any of that money today. And right now he's stressed and he's anxious and he just wants to make a change. First of all, you want to know what your income is. You would be surprised about 50 percent of the people I talked to have no idea what their income is. They don't know what their yearly income is. They don't know what their monthly income is. Sometimes they know how much their paycheck is, and then we have to figure out how many times they get paid. Knowing what your income is and knowing what's coming out of your check is incredibly important. This is a very clear practical step that you can take today. Go pull out your pay stub. Sometimes it's online, so you'd have to pull it up on the computer. Go grab your pay stub and look at What do you actually have coming in? Where's your starting point? How much money do you make? How often do you make that money? And then we need to look at what that looks like over time. I want to make a plan for spending my money. And so I like to plan where my money is going more than I like to track it. But You need to stay on top of it. If you make a budget, make sure that you're staying within that budget. Sometimes that's hard, especially in the beginning, but it's so incredibly important. And then you want to know what your debt situation is. When it came to this gentleman that I was talking to today, I asked him about his credit cards and he said, well, I only have a couple. And so how many is a couple? He said two or three. I said, which is it? Is it 2 or is it 3? And he said, well, I don't really know because I also have this other credit card that has my student loans on it. I was like, so is that 3 or 4? He's like, well, and there's this other one from the store. And I was like, so are we at 4 or 5? And sometimes we get into the idea of, well, it's just a little bit. It's just a couple cards and we justify where we're at by tamping it down and pretending like we don't know what the real number is, but he knew what the number was. He knew how many cards he had. He had five, but he was lying to himself saying, well, it's just a couple cards. A couple is two. You have five. They're maxed out. So we need to make a change here. You have to be honest with yourself. You need to know how much you have coming in your income. You need to know what your debt situation is, and you need to pay attention to your, your spending habits. That includes creating a budget. I love using the zero based budget where you put you income for the month at the top of the page, and you write down your expenses. And then at the bottom of the page, you should have $0 left to spend. Because you've been very intentional about spending that money. Step two, small wins build momentum. This is huge. Start with a small financial goal. Sometimes, I don't like looking at the top of the mountain. If you guys know anything about my story, I started with 372, 347 in debt. That was a big mountain. I like to call it a dragon. And it was a big dragon. And do you know how you eat a dragon? You have to eat it one bite at a time, but you have to kill it first. And so it was a beast, right? It was very hard to tackle. But it was very easy for me to do the next right thing. Make the small wins, and sometimes those wins were not eating at the restaurant after I worked a shift. The wins don't need to be astronomical, but they need to start piling up because as you stand on a small pile of wins, and then you get another one, and you get another one, and you get another one, momentum starts to happen. Whether that is setting a certain amount of money that you don't want to go over and saying, okay, I've hit it, and like, I've stuck to my budget this month, that's fabulous. Whether it's, Paying off debt and you pay off the smallest one and you're feeling great. I have one client that paid off a their smallest debt was like 36 or something. I mean, it was really really small and they just been paying minimum payments. They're like we pay minimum payments on everything I was like, why are we paying minimum payments on this one that is less than an hour of work? Just pay it stop letting it go Come around and like, it's like a mosquito, which is buzzing around in your ear and it's biting you. Just let it go. Perfect for small win. Small wins can lead to big results over time. Speaking of small wins and how they lead to big results, I want to tell you about my friend Conrad. Conrad and his wife came to me and they were making a sizable income every month. But for 20 years, They had been over budget. For 20 years of marriage they had never once ended a pay period with a positive balance. They'd always either use credit cards to get through or payday loans, or they've recently started doing something called the Dave app, which has nothing to do with Dave Ramsey. They just call it that to get people tricked into using it. The Dave app allows you to pull out some of your paycheck early. And so they started using this and I was like, I don't understand why we're doing that. And it was just because they were not paying attention. They weren't giving themselves any boundaries. They were doing everything they could to enjoy everything about life, pretending like their future wasn't coming up. And when they realized that they were late on eight credit cards, late on two car payments, and late on their mortgage, they decided they wanted to change something. So we started working together. Now, can you change all of that at once? Eight credit cards, two car payments, and a mortgage. Can we get caught up on everything in a week? Absolutely not. But do you know what we did? We sat down and we made a budget for the week. Yes, we made budgets for the week, not for the month, we couldn't go that far ahead. We need to go from today to the next paycheck, one week. And at the end of that pay period, they had 35 left in their account. This was the first time in 20 years of marriage that they ended their pay period with a positive balance in the account. You would have thought that this couple had 35, 000 sitting in their account. They were so ecstatic. They're like, we did it. For the first time in 20 years. They have six children. So it's not like they can, they're, they're teenagers too. And so they have a lot of things that they had to pull back on and make decisions. They had to say no to going out to eat and they had to say no to giving you extra gas money. And they had to say no to a lot of things. They had to change things. But for their first time in 20 years they finished a pay period with money in the bank. It was 35 and it was a huge win, a huge revelation for them. It sounds small. 35 sounds small. Didn't we just say a couple minutes ago somebody had a 36 credit card that they just were letting go? By their ankles. And when you say it like that, it's like, it's only 36. Why don't you pay it off? And this time I'm saying they had 35 and it was huge. Money is very relative. It has a lot to do with those stories that we tell ourselves. It has a lot to do with the patterns that we have put ourselves in. And sometimes we have a hard time getting out of those patterns. The small wins let them build up because they will build momentum. The next very important thing. The third step is to invest in your future. Now this could be something small, like investing in education and I'm not talking college education, but like smaller pieces of education. This could be investing in the stock market and starting with that. And you don't want to start that big. You don't go, I have 200, 000 sitting here. I'm going to go jump in the stock market. That's not usually how people do things. But investing, even small amounts can work for you over time. And I think that sometimes we forget that the most important investment we can make is in ourselves is in growing ourselves and growing our businesses, growing our family, growing our faith and our spirituality. Those are very important things that we can invest in. If we start thinking about it as an investment is something that I can put my time, my energy and my money into that's going to grow and it's going to compound. We don't. Always think about and so I want to put that out there. Investing is not what I do. I do not sell investments. I do not. I will not give you an investment strategy. I can tell you what I do and I can tell you what I've seen other people do that has worked for them. I can tell you what has not worked for people. My job is to help you think through and critically discuss. The things that are important to you and figure out a strategy that's best for you. Here's the crazy thing. When we talk about investing, we talk about bringing somebody on in our corner and we're like, Who do I, who do I find? You don't have to do any of this by yourself. If you're like, all of this seems really daunting. I don't know how to change my mindset. I don't know how to get to the end of the pay period with 35 in my bank account. I don't know how to invest. I don't know what to do. You do not have to do it alone. That's why I'm here guys. I am a debt elimination specialist. I am a money coach. I'm a money mindset coach is what I like to call myself because I think that it's so incredibly important that we pass on to the next generation that we leave a legacy for the next generation that is based on. a growth mindset. There's so many people today that think that the best thing they can do for their child is to attach them to a credit card so when they turn 18 they can have a credit score. That's absolutely asinine. You can't pass on a credit score, but you can pass on wealth and you can pass on knowledge. And so I would absolutely love to be a resource for you or any of your friends or your children, because it's so important to me that people understand that we are leaving a legacy. It's very important that you surround yourself with people that think the way that you want to think. Surround yourself with people that are like who you would like to become. Do not surround yourself with people that are scarcity minded and sometimes you're like, this is where I live. The people around me. They're all scarcity minded. The people around me. Say all the time, the little man can't get ahead. That's all I hear. I hear I can't afford that. I hear we're never going to be able to afford that. I'm never going to be able to buy a house. This is a really big thing right now. A lot of Gen Zers are like, I'm never going to make enough money to have the things I want. It's not true. You may not make enough money today to get your ultimate dream, but I don't make enough money today to buy a mansion with acres and acres of farmland. But that doesn't mean I can't get there. It just means I can't have that today. And if I'm only focused on the things that I can't have, I'm never going to get them. So I focus on the things that I have today and I focus on the people around me, how I can support them, how they can support me, how we can grow together because people are going to struggle if they lack support, if they lack guidance, but the right help can help progress come faster and it can help it be more sustainable. Accelerators. There was a lot more to the legacy builders master class. And if you missed it this time, I hope that you can join me the next time I hold one of my masterclasses. I put out in my email newsletter that goes out every week the question, what would you like to hear? What would you like to learn? How can I help you grow? And so if you're not on my email list, if you're not getting to be a part of that Answer. And I can't do a masterclass based on what you want to learn. So please join my email newsletter. You can do that by clicking over to my website, accelerate your legacy.com. And all you have to do. It's join the email newsletter list. When the popup pops up and says, would you like more encouragement and inspiration? You just say, yes, it would put your name and your email address in there and you will get the next one when it comes out. Right now because it's fall. It is all things fall in spooky season that we were talking about. We will be talking about. How to grow in the holiday season, how to grow in abundance, how to grow financially. And we want to make sure that you have everything you need. To build legacy. That's it for this week, accelerators go out and make a difference.