Nitty Gritty, Not So Pretty Money Lessons

In today's episode, I'll be sharing the biggest money lessons I've learned throughout my journey, taking my net worth from negative $40,000 in credit card and student loan debt to a seven-figure net worth. 

I'll be opening up about personal stories that have never been shared publicly before, providing insights into these financial lessons. Some of the stories include being sued by my former employer, relying on my mom to pay my rent during unemployment and financial struggle, and being financially dependent on a cheating fiancé. 

By delving into these experiences, I aim to offer a holistic approach to money management and simplify your path to wealth. My goal at Holistic Money is to empower you with valuable lessons that you can apply in your own financial journey. Expect to hear compelling stories that provide great insight into money lessons you can also learn.

Key Highlights

[00:00:00] Holistic Money Podcast intro

[00:01:00] Introduction to today’s topic:

[00:02:15] My shameful financial situation in 2015

[00:05:50] My first biggest money lesson

[00:07:40] Quitting my job and starting my business

[00:08:01] Meeting a wealthy unreliable fiancé and the lesson this taught me

[00:16:09] Splitting with my fiancé, moving out, and finding a job

[00:18:16] Getting a six-figure salary job at a FinTech as a financial advisor

[00:18:47] Most important money lesson: Seeing lessons and value of every financial decision
[00:21:00] Holistic Money Podcast outro

Notable Quotes

• The first big money lesson that I learned is that just having a strong burning desire to do something, especially like start a business or take a low-paying job, is not necessarily enough to make it a great decision for you if you don't have a strong financial foundation to lean back on.
• Do not go for a relationship with a partner simply because they are wealthy.
• The next lesson I learned after starting my business was to take a manageable financial risk, like starting a new business or taking a job that pays you significantly less without establishing a secure financial foundation. It is so critical that you learn strong money management skills and that you have good financial habits before you take any large financial risk.
• After getting cheated on, getting sued, and moving out, I decided at that moment that regardless of everything that had happened in my financial life and the decisions that I had made, I was still valuable. The skills I had from my positions in previous financial roles were incredibly valuable, and the decisions I had made during that time did not define me.
• The most important thing in your life, and even with your money, is truth and acknowledgment, which is looking at what's happening and starting to address it and plan for it.

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Transcript

0:01

Hello and welcome to the Holistic Money Podcast. I'm your host, certified financial planner and money mindset coach Whitney Morrison. Over the past seven years, I've taken myself from credit card debt and no savings to a seven figure net worth. I did this without a budget or a restrictive money plan, but instead, smart, sustainable wealth building strategies combined with changing my relationship with money. In this podcast, you'll learn the ins and outs of my no budget philosophy, practical wealth building strategies and key mindset shifts to make it happen. There is no shortage of information out there to tell you what to do with money, but teaching you how to think and feel about money. That's my secret sauce. If you've been waiting for a podcast that gives you actionable strategies to not only build wealth, but also feel really good while you're doing it, then you're in the right place. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back to the Holistic Money Podcast. In today's episode, I'm gonna share with you the biggest money lessons that I have learned over my journey of taking my net worth from a negative$40,000 with credit card debt and student loan debt, to now a seven figure net worth. I'm gonna be sharing personal stories from my life that I have never shared publicly before. To help you understand some of the biggest financial lessons that I have learned, I'm gonna share about the time that I was sued by my former employer. I'm gonna share about the time that my mom was paying my rent because I didn't have a job and I didn't have any money. I'm gonna share about the time that I was financially dependent on a fiance that was cheating on me. You're gonna hear the ins and outs of my biggest money lessons so that you can take away. Some of your own lessons from my lessons, because really that's what I'm doing here at Holistic Money. I'm wanting to teach you a holistic approach to money so that you can learn how to have a simpler and easy path to wealth. All right, y'all, let's dive in. I wanna set the stage by taking you back to 2015. I was 29 years old. I was working at Wells Fargo Advisors. This was the first job that I had gotten out of college. I had been there for about five and a half, six years, I was not in a great financial position at this point in my life. I was so incredibly ashamed of this. I would say this was the height. Of my financial shame was right around this time in my career. And the reason why is because I was making about 65,$70,000 at Wells Fargo advisors. But the problem was that every financial decision I was making about my life up until that point came from the mindset of, I'll make better financial decisions when I just make more money. All I need to do is make more money. So I would just continuously make financial decisions based off of the money that I thought I was gonna be making in the future. At this point, like I said, I was making 65,$70,000. I was living in an apartment in downtown Austin. The rent was over$1,800. I had a brand new car. I had a Nissan Rogue. I was leasing it. I think my lease was somewhere around$400, and frankly, I just didn't have a lot of money left over for lifestyle expenses, you know, like food and gas and all the other things that I wanted to do. Go out with my friends. I was drinking. I was partying a lot. So at this point, I had about 10 to$15,000 in credit card debt. I had student loans that I was trying to pay off, and I had a great deal of shame about money. I had been a financial planner at this point for a few years. I started as an assistant and moved into a financial planner role, but everyone kind of looked at me as someone who they thought was good with money. They looked at my car and looked at my nice downtown apartment, and everybody thought that I had it made. Secretly in the background, I was really stressed out about money, so I had lied to pretty much everyone in my life at that point, including my family, including my boyfriends and partners that I had had at the time about my financial situation. And my money was just my dirty little secret. But regardless of my financial situation, regardless of the debt that I was in, I did not wanna work at Wells Fargo Advisors anymore. And I had a deep burning desire to leave that job and do something different. So I started trying to find other jobs, but I had a really difficult time breaking into the tech industry, which was where I actually wanted to work because I was hoping I could make some more money and have one of those cool, sexy tech jobs that I saw that all my friends were getting. But that just was not in the cards for me. I started to get desperate. I was highly, highly avoidant of my financial situation at that time. I was willing to do anything that I thought I could in order to leave Wells Fargo advisors. So I met this online course creator and she offered to pay me$1,500 a month to work for her full-time. Mind you, I had a job that was paying 65 to$70,000 a year. I couldn't afford my lifestyle. I don't know what in the hell I was thinking when I decided to leave Wells Fargo advisors and go work for this course creator and only make$1,500 a month. It was a big, big shift to my lifestyle in that moment, and I did make a lot of changes because of this job, because I really wanted to learn how to build a business and be entrepreneurial. I love that I got that experience. But I think the first big money lesson that I learned is that just having a strong burning desire to do something, especially like start a business or take a low paying job, is not necessarily enough to make it a great decision for you if you don't have a strong financial foundation to lean back on. The truth for me was that I didn't. I didn't have parents that were willing to pay my rent in the event that I messed up. My mom was single. My dad had passed away years before, and she was making about the same amount of money that I was sure if I really, really needed money, my mom could pay my rent. But it wasn't like a financially responsible decision for her either. I didn't have a savings account. I didn't have investments to fall back on. I didn't have any backup plans, so to. Take a jump to such a risky role with an online course creator paying me so much less money. I just wouldn't make the same financial decision at this time because what I didn't realize for myself was no matter how bad I really wanted to do that, I didn't understand how stressful it would actually be for me and how much pressure it would put on me financially. To actually do it. All I could think about was leaving and having flexibility and freedom and having a cool job and getting to learn a lot. But I wasn't really looking at my nervous system. I wasn't really looking at my money and what I needed to feel safe and taking care of financially. And so I would say this is the number one lesson that I learned. If you ever decide to make a big career change or start a business, make sure to have a strong financial foundation first before you actually decide to make the leap. Unfortunately, for me, I had to learn this lesson twice because after only one year of working with this course creator, I decided to quit my job and start my business again. But this time I was in an even worse financial position. Before I tell you about that, I wanna tell you a couple lessons that I learned while making$18,000 a year working for this creator. I went to work and I ended up learning so much. She taught me so much about money. She taught me so much about finances, things that I had never learned at Wells Fargo advisor. I was so thankful to her for that experience and that exposure. I ended up moving out of my downtown apartment into a four bedroom house where I rented a room paying$500 a month. I got rid of my Nissan Rogue and I ended up buying a used car, and I slowly started to make a little bit of progress towards my credit card debt, but truthfully not much. About eight months into working with her, she held an event in Austin. And I ended up meeting a man who would end up becoming my fiance only four months later. Y'all, I wanna give you a little context to my brain at this point in time, because money actually played a role in this decision for me. The man that I had met was seemingly very wealthy. He drove a nice car. He lived in a nice home. He was an entrepreneur that had started a bunch of different schools. In Austin and when we first started dating, he made me feel like I never had to worry about money. And at that point in my life, because of my financial situation, because of the credit card debt that I was in, because of the very limited amount of money that I had, I was desperately wanting to feel like someone would save me. And that is what I had initially started to feel. When I hadn't met this guy in my relationship, I was really, really not confident about myself, and I was really, really not confident about money. I didn't have the financial conversations with him in the beginning of our relationship, simply because I always felt like less than he was in the house that I grew up in. My mom would always put wealthy people on some kind of pedestal, like they were somehow better than we were. Like they were people that needed to be respected and we needed to act differently around them. And so innately, I just felt like I was less than him and trying to have any real conversations with him about money. I just didn't feel confident in actually doing that. So I met him and I got wrapped up into his world. Very quickly. I ended up moving in with him and he just started to pay for a lot of my life. Like I said, I just really wanted someone to save me, but I wasn't looking at what were all of the red flags around me. This man had three children. He had an ex-wife. He had gotten into some pretty intense legal battles in the Austin community. He had a lot of people who loved him, but he also had a lot of people that hated them. He was really secretive about how he used his time. He never would tell me where he was or who he was with or what he was doing. He was constantly going out and having meetups, and he started to drink during the day. We started to fight a lot more frequently, and I would get calls from his ex-girlfriends saying that he'd been spending time with them. As I'm recording this and saying all of this out loud and saying this back to you right now, I almost can't believe the amount of red flags that I ignored during our relationship, but I was so caught up in his charisma and his charm. And his money. So when he proposed to me only four months after being together, I said yes. Even though intuitively in my gut, I knew that it was not the right decision for me to marry this person. He had talked to me several times about starting my own business. He was very encouraging and he was a big reason why I decided after one year of working with this course creator, That I wanted to start my own business, but because him and I didn't have great conversations about money and I didn't really tell him the truth about my financial situation, and it turns out he didn't really tell me the truth about his financial situation. I ended up making the decision to leave my job from a very, very unstable place. I had no money in savings. I had debt that I had accumulated and I had no income, so truly I made the same mistake again. I ended up quitting this job without a sturdy plan and starting this business and just hoping, with my fingers crossed that this unreliable man that I had met in my life was just gonna keep bankrolling me to live and pay the bills, even though he was incredibly inconsistent. He was not a good partner, not a good communicator, and lied to me about. Tons of things. It turns out y'all, this was a huge and incredibly painful money lesson to learn because after quitting my job and starting my business for only a month and a half, two key things happened. First and foremost, my former employer, the course creator that paid me$1,500 a month,$18,000 a year, sued me when I started my own business. I got a lawsuit. Literally from her saying that I was going in direct competition with her. By the way, she was a multimillionaire. I had credit card debt and no savings, and she sued me and I freaked out. Then only two days later, I found out that my fiance at the time was cheating on me, and all of that happened in the same week. This was quite honestly. The most challenging time of my life, I'm even getting emotional, even thinking about this right now. It was the most challenging thing that I've ever been through that had to call my mother who came to Austin the next day to come get me out of the house that I was living in with my fiance at the time. She had to hire a lawyer for me. She had to help me get an apartment. She had to pay my first month's rent. She had to pay my deposit. She ended up having to pay a few months rent while I was trying to get on my feet and get a job. And the truth is, is that my mother was not in a financial position to do any of that for me. So as I'm sure you can imagine, this was a very potent money lesson for me to learn. Number one, it was to not go for a relationship with a partner simply because they are wealthy. And I know that saying this, it just sounds like, well, yeah, of course not. But in the moment in my brain at that time, the way that I was thinking about money, the way that I just wanted to be rescued and saved with money, I had to learn that lesson. I also had to learn how to have real conversations about money with future partners since I left that relationship. Every person that I dated moving forward. After that, I made sure to talk about money, to let them know my financial situation, how much money I've made, how much money I felt comfortable spending. I would ask questions about their financial situation too, just to make sure that we were on the same page financially. And so I wasn't putting them in a difficult financial position, and they weren't putting me in a difficult financial position. The next lesson that I learned again was to not take a big financial risk, like starting a new business or taking a job that pays you significantly less money without establishing a secure financial foundation. First. It is so critical that you learn strong money management skills and you have good financial habits before you take any large financial risk. And this was a lesson that I had to learn because I made the same mistake twice. I ended up taking big financial risk without having a solid foundation, and it made me so incredibly stressed out and insecure and depressed, frankly, simply because I was so afraid all the time. After I ended up splitting up with my fiance, moving into this apartment, And getting back on my feet, the first thing that I needed to do was to find a job that paid me well. I was in quite the whole financially at this point, and it was a really challenging thing for me to do mentally simply because I was looking to find a financial advisor position when my own financial life was such a mess. It took so much mental strength for me to go through this process to interview powerfully, but I decided. In that moment that regardless of everything that had happened in my financial life and the decisions that I had made, that I was still valuable. That the skills that I had from my positions in previous financial roles were incredibly valuable. And that my decisions that I had made during that time did not define me. I ended up interviewing at a few different places and I decided that I would not accept anything under a hundred thousand dollars. Mind you, the last job that I had was the one at Wells Fargo Advisors where I was making 65 to$70,000. I could have just taken the first thing that was available because I was afraid, but I knew that even though I was in the position that I was in, That I still had incredible life skills and money skills that I could bring into an organization. Instead of focusing on all the things that I thought I had done wrong with money, instead I focused on the unique perspectives and the unique value that I could offer a financial organization because of my story and because of my life experience. So I ended up reaching out to a FinTech startup that I had wanted to work for a long time. I just told them what I had been up to over the past couple years. I told them I was at Wells Fargo Advisors. I told them I quit to work for this course creator. I let them know all of the different ways that I was thinking about money, all of the lessons that I had learned over the past year, and guess what? I got offered a six figure role as a financial advisor at my dream company. This was a huge turning point in my relationship with money. This was a huge turning point in my confidence in myself and my story, and being authentic and truthful about money because I started to learn that what is most important in your life, and even with your money, Is truth is acknowledgement, is really looking at what's happening and starting to address it and make a plan for it. And that is exactly what I was doing and that was exactly the story that I was selling and the story that I was sharing. This is the last money lesson that I'm gonna leave you with on this episode. Because this is really when my financial journey started to shift from here is when I started to pay off my debt and save money. I met my now husband and we ended up buying a few properties together, and we have grown our net worth significantly over the past six years. But I wanted to leave you with this final money lesson, which honestly, I think is the most important money lesson. I have learned that is in this episode and just generally in my life, and that is that no matter where you're starting from, no matter what your current financial situation looks like today, no matter if you think you've made a lot of mistakes or you did it wrong, or you should be further along, or you're not in the place that you want to be, I want to tell you that you've got to start seeing the lessons and the value of every single decision that you've made leading up into this point. Because it is what is going to get you to your dream life financially. You have to be able to see yourself and the value that you have. It is the starting point for you to completely transform your financial life. I know from personal experience, because it's exactly what I did. It is the big shift in my money mindset that I had to make, and it's gonna be the big shift in your money mindset that you are going to have to make on your financial journey to get to that financial freedom goal that I know that you have for yourself. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Thank you so much for seeing me, for listening to my vulnerable stories. I appreciate your support and I hope that you learned some lessons from this episode. As well. If you did like this episode, please leave me a review. It means so much when I see the reviews that you all leave me. It also helps me grow my business and grow this podcast. And if you have a friend that you think would also benefit from this episode, send it over to them and let's start to work with them on their holistic money journey. All right, y'all. Oh, hope you have a great week, and I will see you in the next episode.