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Financial Fluency Episode #37: Worth it! With Amanda Steinberg

April 28, 2016/2 Comments/in Podcast /by Jen

I’m so thrilled to welcome this week’s guest to the show. I know I would absolutely not be doing what I’m doing on this show and in other areas in my life if I hadn’t met Amanda back in 2012.

Amanda and I spoke about what to do if you have a fluctuating income (which most of us entrepreneurs do!), how she’s ended up hanging out with European prime ministers and the different messaging women and men get from the media around finances.

You can listen in below and Tweet it out here

Favourite Quotes

I learned how to earn but not what to do with it afterwards – Amanda

I’m someone who isn’t afraid to put the ugly stuff out there along with the good stuff – Amanda

Are you sure you wanted to publish that – Amanda’s mother!

Men are spoken to about stocks and investing, women are spoken to about budgeting – Amanda on the disparity in financial messaging to men and women

It doesn’t mean you’re bad with money if your emergency fund is depleted – Amanda

I see credit cards as a fascinating video game – Amanda

If you have a fluctuating income, put yourself on a simulated salary – Amanda

Amanda Steinberg podcast Amanda Steinberg is the founder of DailyWorth, the leading financial media company for women. Steinberg is a thought-leader on the topic of women and money, working to advance women’s financial confidence and wealth. She’s an engineer by training, a sales woman by profession and a serial optimist at heart. DailyWorth serves millions of women monthly via its daily newsletters and Website focused on money and career advice.

Since its launch in 2009, Steinberg and DailyWorth have been featured in the New York Times, TIME, Forbes, Parenting, Cosmopolitan and on NY1, CNN, FOX, ABC and NBC news. Amanda is a graduate of Columbia University.

If you enjoyed this episode you can subscribe to Financial Fluency here on iTunes and listen every week. If you like what you hear, please also leave an awesome iTunes review

I do two episodes every week, one solo and one interview.

I also have the fantastic Mastering Money Matters group, a monthly membership group where you can join and we talk about all the different pieces week by week of getting our money systems set up and how we look at, think about and value money and all areas of our lives.

It’s a very supportive and private group just for women and it’s a safe place to hang out and talk. It’s kind of the extension of the interviews I’ve been doing with mainly entrepreneurs on this show, and it’s where we can talk about the things we may not want to broadcast out to a broader audience.

Let’s Keep the Conversation Going

If you’re enjoying the podcasts and something has lit a fire for you, carry on the conversation over on the Financial Fluency Facebook Group.

See you there!

Jen x

Financial Fluency Episode #36: Don’t go against your nature

April 26, 2016/2 Comments/in Podcast /by Jen

Today, I want to talk about the nature of things, about our nature, our personal nature, things that come naturally to us and how we can work with those things instead of against them.

You can listen in below and Tweet it out here

I have a few examples here from my own personal life. The first one is that I’m a pretty naturally disorganized person. A lot of people who meet me are confused when I tell them this but it’s true. One of the reasons I love systems and setting up things so that when one thing happens, something else happened, you know, sort of, “if this, then that” kind of systems, systems to automate my finances, systems to give me reminders and notifications of different things is because I can’t keep all of that stuff in my head, is because I am so disorganized. I need my systems. Let’s be honest, all of us have so many things coming at us every day now, who can keep everything in their head?

So, it used to be that this disorganization was a real pain point for me. It would cause me to be late for things. I would get working on something, I would forget to check the clock or the calendar. I would forget appointments. I would forget phone calls. I would double book myself sometimes because something I had booked and forgot to enter into the calendar wasn’t there, particularly things with my kids and work.

I used to keep separate personal and work calendars so if my kids had an appointment with a doctor or dentist, it wasn’t necessarily in the calendar where I could schedule appointments with people, which would mean I would end up having to cancel things; either I cancelled my personal appointment which sometimes cost money because you have to cancel more than 24 hours ahead of time for certain things or I would have to tell the other person, “I’m really sorry, I got double booked.” And I felt like it made me look bad. I would have to ask them to move their schedule around to accommodate me which did not feel great. I didn’t like it.

So I Created Systems

My solution for this was to create a centralised calendar; a calendar where any appointment I would put in there blocked out appointments in all other categories. I have a personal calendar, I have interviews for my podcast, I have work appointments, different kinds of things but if I enter something in, it gets blocked out in every calendar now so I don’t double book which helps a lot.

I also initiated a system of alerts and reminders for important “stop” and “start” times. I even started putting buffers in between things because sometimes I used to have appointments go back-to-back, some of which I would have to drive somewhere for so that didn’t work very well.

Again, I hated ending some of these appointments early to give me time to drive somewhere to get to one of my kids’ doctor’s appointment. So doing that helped a lot and also scheduling help ahead of time if I need help. If I need someone to watch the kids so that I can do something else because it’s a holiday or because there’s a snow day or something like that the sooner I can get that done and know that that’s taken care of the better. So that’s part of my system now.

They Say Spending Actual Cash Hurts More

Another example of how I’m a bit disorganized myself is, I’ve seen these studies about how spending cash, real actual physical cash helps you spend less because you feel the loss more when you hand cash over. I like that idea, I’ve tried it myself but the problem that I have is I’m not fantastic at tracking cash. If I spend cash, I go to the gas station, I put some gas in my car, sure they give you a receipt but if I’m not deducting it for taxes, I wasn’t always that careful about that receipt.

Buying a drink somewhere, going to Starbucks, picking something up, the cash would go here and there so at the end of the cash I would look at it and sure I knew where some of it went but I didn’t have it all tracked. For me that was more of a pain point, trying to figure out where the money went, than the help it was supposed to give me by me not wanting to hand over the cash. I decided,

This whole cash thing, it may work for some people but it’s not in my nature

I didn’t feel the pain I should have felt with handing the cash over, it wasn’t that hard for me to hand over and I had more of a pain point with not being able to track it. So, I switched mostly over to a non-cash system because then, at least, I can track where everything goes. It’s not that much harder for me to hand over cash than swipe a card and one way that I sort of build into this system some checks and balances is that I have notifications sent to me when any account reaches a certain point.

So if it’s a credit card account, I’m using a credit card to get the points, I have balance notifications set at certain levels so it pings me an email or a text when my balance gets so high and on my bank accounts it also does the same when my balance gets so low. So, that’s me working with my nature. I realize that cash is not a great option for me because I lose track of it so instead, I’d rather implement this system so the system makes it seem like I’m organized. The system for my calendar makes it seem like I’m organized and it’s stopped me being late.

The Two Areas I See This Impacting Women

There are some other areas that I want to talk about where this can apply and the two big ones are promotion and negotiation for women. I’ve seen studies that say that when it comes to negotiating your starting salary and subsequent promotions and salary increases, women fall far below men on being able to negotiate those effectively on being able to get the highest possible salary. This is partly why we have the wage gap since future salaries are based on past salaries.

So if you don’t negotiate well enough for that first salary, that has a knock-on effect throughout the rest of your life. If you and a man who has the same degree, maybe even went to the same college as you and you both have the same student loan debt load, if you go to the same company and start working similar entry-level jobs but for different salaries, that’s going to continue to be an issue and a wage gap between the two of you possibly for the rest of your careers.

I see that as a big problem, however, I’ve also seen some studies that showed that when women negotiated for a female coworker or colleague, they were much more effective at negotiating a better package and better salary for their female colleague or coworker than they were for themselves.

What does this say about us?

Sometimes we find it much more comfortable and easier to negotiate for and promote a friend than ourselves. Why is this? Personally, I think there’s a cultural bias against women promoting themselves. There’s a cultural bias against women talking themselves up, being vain, being seen as pushy or aggressive. If a man and a woman have a conversation with the exact same words, if a woman were to speak word-for-word the script that a man used to get a higher salary, she probably would not be seen in the exact same light that the man was.

The man might be seen as confident and assertive and the woman might be seen as pushy and vain.

These are some of the problems that we run into just with our cultural bias of how women are supposed to behave and how men are supposed to behave, but the fact that it can have such a huge effect on our overall earning potential for the rest of our life means that we need to find a workaround for it. So if you aren’t good at promoting yourself, if you aren’t good at negotiating those salaries for yourself, the fact that we can do it better for each other says something and I see that as something that we should all use.

I recently have been reading Gloria Steinem’s book, “On The Road” about her history of being an advocate for women’s rights around the world and especially here in the United States. Over and over she brings up this idea of talking circles and of organizing and women getting together for different things.

She also talks a lot about the Civil Rights movement in the 60s, but the talking circles seem particularly effective when it comes to women. Women sitting down together in a room, I mean for her, traveling state to state, college campus to college campus and things like that, it often would be in person. Though now, we have these virtual talking circles that we can use and that’s exactly what I’m trying to do with these podcasts.

Talking Circles & Wolf Packs

I would love for this Podcast to turn into a talking circle where we can all talk to each other about finances which is part of why I started a new Facebook group for it. You can join here It is a female only group and while I realize I do have some male listeners from time to time, for the most part this is all focused on women and I do want women to have a safe place where we can have conversations about money.

So, the talking circles are one side of it. I think that just being able to talk about these things really makes a difference. Part of the reason that women do get paid less is they don’t know what men are getting paid. So start talking about it, researching it, looking at what other people are getting paid in your industry and realizing that you are worth it, you are worth the top dollar, you put in the work, if you’re not putting in the work, go put in the work. If you’re not a top performer, go be a top performer and ask for the high salary that you need.

On the other side of things, I want to talk about wolf packs. So we have talking circles on one side where we really communicate, really hear what’s going on, find out what people are struggling with, get a better understanding of where people are coming from. Then there’s also this thing that I like to call the wolf pack.

Now, I first heard of the wolf pack idea from Nathalie Lussier. I was doing her 30-day list building challenge and she talked about having a group of women that is kind of your wolf pack as you start to put yourself out there online and really be more visible and her reason for doing was knowing that there were some people who have got your back.

You’re out there trying to get some articles published on bigger platforms, you get a Huffington Post article and you’re so excited but you’re afraid there’ll be crickets. Having this wolf pack, they’re all excited for you too, they go and they comment and they share and they help support you getting out there and you do the same thing for each one of them.

This is not about promoting something that you don’t believe in or haven’t used or anything like that. This is about having friends in business, where you all believe in the work that you’re doing, you’re all doing great work and you can easily go and support each other.

It feels great. I love it when I see one of my friends succeed and I totally want to shout it out everywhere. I want everyone to know how great it is. I think that having a new product or a new service or a new book get published, Wow! How exciting! I mean, I think that we should all share those things for each knowing that other people would want to celebrate when we have those things happen too.

My Little Wolf Pack

For myself, I have created my own little wolf pack now which is my Mastering Money Matters group. It’s a group of women, it’s still quite small and it is a monthly paid membership. Part of the reason for that is that we are working through specific content, we’re going through sort of a course of content to get your finances organized to do my calculate, eliminate, automate process. In the midst of that, we all end up talking out our projects and the articles that we’re getting published, the books we’re working on, all those sorts of things and we’ve really started supporting each other in a very tight knit friend kind of way.

I love it, I love having this group of women whose work I know about because we talk about it all the time in there and anytime they have something come up it is so easy for me to go and shout out how great they are because I can see what they’re doing week by week. We have weekly Blabs where we talk to each other about our businesses and we do a weekly co-working Zoom, which is very private, because often what we’re doing in it is our financial task for the week.

We sit down as we approach taxes, we work on tax stuff, as we get to our quarterly estimated tax payments, we talk about that, we talk about gross receipts, we talk about how much we’re spending on different aspects of our business and if anyone has a better tool or resource, it’s really nice. It feels great to have a group of women because online entrepreneurship can be so lonely, it’s different than the loneliness that the only woman in the office at a corporate environment experiences but it can still be very lonely so it’s nice to have some people who’ve got your back and who are ready to be encouraging and helpful in any way that they can.

So that’s my pitch for not going against your nature and finding ways to work with it. If you are in the corporate situation that I just mentioned, not the only woman I hope in a corporation, but going back to that idea of negotiating for each other, of putting each other forward for new projects and promotions, that can really be powerful.

Of course, you want it to be someone whose work you believe in and who you genuinely support and like. Hopefully, there’s someone like that in your organization so you can help each other out. Maybe it’s a mentor situation, maybe there’s a woman who’s higher up in the organization and who really had to fight to get where she is and would like it to not be as hard for others.

If you are that woman higher up in an organization, why not help make it a bit easier for others. Be that mentor, be that person who helps out and if you are an online entrepreneur get yourself a wolf pack or come join mine.

Come & Find Us

If you want to join mine, you can find Mastering Money Matters here or if you just want to come and join the talking circle, you can find us here. I would love to talk to you about what’s happening on the podcast and any ideas that it brought up for you. So many times I talk to someone about an idea that I had, something that I thought of in a certain way and they bring a new perspective and it completely changes how I see it. I have a new understanding based on someone else’s life experience and that’s amazing, that’s fantastic. I love it when that happens.

So, anyways, thank you so much for joining me today. I’m going to sign off now, keep this pretty short and sweet but just remember you don’t have to completely change yourself or change your nature, you don’t have to go into hard-nosed negotiations training to get the very best. You don’t have to change the kind of person you are in order to make your business work or get paid a decent salary. There are usually ways that we can do workarounds, we can find ways to make our own nature and what we’re naturally good at and what naturally feels good to us, work for ourselves in our businesses and our lives.

Financial Fluency Episode #34: Line Item Veto

April 19, 2016/0 Comments/in Podcast /by Jen

Today’s episode is called “Line Item Veto.” For those of us in the United States, that has a certain meaning. I found out this morning when I was talking to someone in the UK that they had no idea what that meant.

So let me explain it real quick. Here in the United States, we have our House and Senate, the Congress who make laws and make budgets but then those budgets get sent up to the Executive Branch and the Executive Branch has the power of veto. Here in the United States, the president does not have line item veto, they just have full veto which means they have to either accept or reject a budget completely the way the Congress sent it to them.

There used to be something called “Line Item Veto” for the president and currently 44 states still allow their governors to have line item veto. So what that means is Congress puts together this budget, it goes through both houses, if it gets passed, it gets sent to the governor and the governor can then go through line by line, item by item and accept or reject the pieces of the budget without accepting or rejecting the entire budget as a whole.

Well, let’s say they usually accept it. So they can accept the budget but reject a few things. The purpose of this is to get rid of bloated spending, pork barrel projects, things that don’t really belong in the budget for one reason or another.

At the national level here in the United States, they decided to pull that power from the president because they felt like there was too much risk of the president punishing political opponents by line item veto-ing their particular projects for their states and their constituents. For the President, he either has to accept or reject the whole thing.

Sometimes you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater or you’re taking the baby and drinking the bathwater.

Okay, that was kind of a bad stretch on that analogy but it means that a lot of times things that you wouldn’t necessarily get passed on their own, gets squeezed into a budget either put in last minute or put in in a way that is not quite bad enough for them to reject the entire budget because the budget has to get through, there has to be money to spend but a lot of things go through that some people, at least, wouldn’t want in there.

You can listen in to the full podcast below

So how does this apply to your personal finances? Well, to be honest, it’s a little bit of a stretch except I love the idea of going through a budget line by line. Now what I’m talking about is not you actually making a budget with lots of lines in it, I’m talking about going through all of your transactions over the last month, couple of months, if you’re really ambitious it can even be the whole year, and seeing what you have spent on in the past that you are going to veto from now on. How about that?

My Favorite App

A great tool to do this, my favorite tracking app which I personally use, Mint.com. There are a lot of different tracking tools out there, what I like about Mint is that you can put all of your different accounts in there. I hook them up to everything, personal and business alike, so I can see this as the one place where I see the whole of my financial picture all in one place at one time.

I have my mortgage in there, car loans, our credit cards are in there, business accounts, personal accounts, anything that we own that I can put a value to. I did even put in values for other things, different collections of different kinds, anything that had a significant value if we were to liquidate it, that’s kind of how I use it, I put in there because it also gives you your net worth which is great.

In terms of this line item veto that I want you to do a really neat function that mint.com has is that you can hit an “All Transactions” button and it will show you all your transactions across all accounts and all categories, chronologically. What’s neat about this is I feel like sometimes when people look at their personal and at their business and at different categories and different budgets there are ways that some transactions can hide when you’re only looking either at one account or one category at a time that you may not take into consideration when you’re looking at the whole.

So this way, if you go onto mint.com, hook up all your accounts; retirement accounts everything, let’s just see everything in one place at one time and then hit that “All Transactions” button and you can either print out the downloadable Line Item Veto pdf, download the PDFs or if you want to be old school, just take out a legal pad, and start going through every item line by line, every single transaction that you’ve made; deposits, spending, credit cards, everything.

KonMarie for Finances

Now, this is where I’m going to go a little off the beaten path. I recently read a book called, “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” It’s by Marie Kondo. They call it the KonMarie Method and I’ll be honest, I have not managed to completely KonMarie my house, I would love to and it’s definitely something I want to work up to.

I have two kids and two dogs and a husband, yes I will get there eventually but I’ve managed to do it in little segments so far, like my jeans. I KonMarie-d my jeans. But the point behind it if you haven’t read the book, one of my favourite parts of this book was the idea of systematically taking every single thing you own, every item in your home, holding it in your hand and seeing if it sparks joy. Now that might sound a little esoteric, a little “woo-woo”, a little emotional for you and it doesn’t quite exactly apply to finance because there are some things that may spark no joy whatsoever, but which we still have to do for one reason or another. Regardless I still like having that criteria in there.

Here is what I want you to do. As you go through item by item, transaction by transaction through your Mint.com “All Transactions”, I want you to take a look at each line and ask yourself:

Is this an absolute necessity for my family?
Is it keeping us warm and fed and healthy?
Is it doing something important which would cause my life to be significantly diminished without it?
Is it something that helps me make money in some way?
Does it support my job, or my business?
Is it a tool that I use?” and then the last criteria I want you to take is,
Does this spark joy?

Looking at those three basic things (do I need it, does it help earn income and does it spark joy), really if it does any of those, it’s a “yes”. If it doesn’t do any of those, I want you to take a good hard look at it, think about that item. The items that I want you to write down are the ones that don’t fit into any of those three criteria. So if it does not sustain your family in some very significant, real and positive way, if it does not help you to earn income in some way and if it does not spark joy in your life, ask yourself, “Do you really need it?”

If it’s something that recurs and you don’t need it, cut it right now while you’re doing it, just stop, go cancel that subscription, change that thing, get rid of it right now. You’ll feel a new lightness come over you. You just decluttered a financial drain on your system. If it is not a recurring charge, if it’s something you bought once but regret, is it something that you could return to the store and get a credit for it? Is it something that you could sell on eBay or sell in some other way? Is there some way you could get rid of it and recoup some of the cost?

Is It REALLY Worth Your Time to Sell it

This one can be a really tricky one. I did an episode a while ago with Lisa Sharp from the Clear Calm Space and on the episode I brought up this idea of selling things as you declutter them and she said there’s a fine line because sometimes people think that they will be able to recoup some of the money and that makes them hold on to it. They put it in a closet, thinking,

Oh one of these days, I’ll get time to list it on eBay and do all of that

But they never do which means they have a closet of clutter. They’d be better off just getting rid of it. As you do this, if you find any purchases that you regret, ask yourself, “Will I feel better just getting rid of it or do I want to go ahead and try listing it, try selling it, try doing something? Is it worth my time? Will I be able to recoup enough of it to not only be worth some of what I paid for but really just to be worth the time that it’ll take to photograph and list it right now?”

Could you make more than that doing something else? Like if you’re going to sell some books on Amazon, how much do you really get for used books? Are you going to spend 25-30 minutes, taking pictures, writing the description, listing it and then get $3 for the book? That’s not worth it, just give the book away, just take it to Goodwill, take it to a used bookstore. Give it to someone as a present if you think they’d like it.

If it’s something like, say, a handbag and you keep thinking, “I’m going to use it” or a dress that doesn’t quite fit right but it was really expensive. If it’s something that’s brand name enough, do a quick search, look up what people are getting for them, especially if you’ve not worn it much and see is it worth it? Could you get $100 for it? Well $100 is probably worth 15-20 minutes of your time to go and take some photos and list it. If it’s less than what you get paid or pay yourself hourly then really question whether if it’s worth the time. You might feel better just getting rid of it.

Now that you’re doing this, try at least once a month. I recommend doing at least every quarter if you can and if you’re super ambitious, go through a whole year. Even though in some ways it might be depressing to see the things you’ve spent money on that you don’t now think were worth it, it also can be really liberating because you can put that information to work from now on and not spend that money on those things anymore.

The problem is that a lot of times we have those experiences, it’s unpleasant to realise that you made a purchase that you regret. So rather than thinking about it and being intentional about it in the future, we just kind of ignore it, push it aside, try to pretend it never happened, just put it somewhere else. But then I think that makes us susceptible to that same kind of purchase again in the future.

We ALL Do This

Have you ever bought something again that you once regretted for some reason? Anything? Courses, clothes that don’t quite fit, things you’re going to grow into.. You know, I feel like we all have these things, maybe, weight loss programs. I’m thinking of myself here. I have done a lot of things since having babies to lose those last few baby pounds and a lot of them didn’t work.

I kind of wished I hadn’t spent that money and yet I would do it again another time and then another time I’d try something else. I don’t do that anymore. I’m stopping because the results that I’ve gotten have not been worth it and the money that I’ve spent, in the end, you know, I could have put that to better use.

If you have anything like that, maybe it’s online courses. A lot of people do repeatedly buy online courses now because it’s such a huge industry. We all want to be learning things all the time and we can learn a certain amount from books but with the courses, there are these specific things that we want to get from them and the sales pages can be so persuasive, they can have so much influence over you that you get in there and once you’ve bought it, once the purchase is made, the money is spent, you might get distracted.

A lot of the courses have great material but what you’re really buying is the experience of going through it with the other people in it and getting some of that attention from the person leading the course, right? You want to learn directly from them and a lot of them give you lifetime access so you’re like, “Well, you know, some things have come up. I’ve not been able to really keep up with it but I can always go back.” How often do you go back? If you’ve bought courses before and haven’t gone back, stop and go back now. Go back and take stock of them, look at all of them.

Ask yourself how much ROI you got on them, how much return on that investment. Could you get more? Could you go back right now and squeeze more out of that investment by revisiting that course?

Do that before you buy another course. Make sure you get something out of it, enough out of it and I’m just speaking from experience here myself because I’ve had a few times where something’s come up, one of my kids have gotten sick, I haven’t been able to finish something and I think I’ll go back and do it and some of them I’ve never gone back to. So, that’s some of my decluttering that I’m doing right now is I’m going to go through and get rid of the things on my hard drive, things I’ve downloaded.

There’s so much information out there now that there are times when free stuff that just takes up space somewhere isn’t worth it either. It isn’t worth cluttering up your space with something just because it’s free and might someday help you.

Just In Time, Not Just In Case

One thing that I really like from some of the productivity books that I’ve read is this idea of “just in time” instead of “just in case” and it came from looking at the Toyota model for manufacturing where they set up the companies where the parts that were needed and the things that had to happen, these different process used, things would arrive just in time for the next thing to happen.

That way, they wouldn’t keep tons of inventory just in case they needed it and that saved them so much money both on buying the extra inventory and then on the storage for it and then if it was things that perished like rubber pieces, belts and tubes, they wouldn’t lose the money on the items perishing. So it saved a lot of money, it cut out a lot of the waste and bloat in the U.S car manufacturing industry and the U.S car manufacturing industry learned from that, they learned a lot from the Japanese model. Again, that takes us back to this cutting the waste, cutting the bloat, line item veto.

You’ve got the information. If this sounds like something that could help you out, do it, go and do it, do it right now. Sign up for mint.com, print out the PDF or get a legal pad or something with enough pages that you can really go through and write all those things down and ask yourself how much you’re getting out of this. Yes, you’re investing a little time in this but you might make some really good discoveries and take some really good action that can save you a lot of money that will be worth the time of sitting down and going through all of your transactions, one by one.

If you like this episode, if you like any of the episodes, please subscribe to the channel so that you’ll get it every week and I would love for you to come over to our Facebook group. Join the group and join the discussions there. I’d love to hear what happened when you did this, how it went for you, did you discover you’d forgotten about or make some connections you’ve never realised, have an “a-ha”, I would love to hear it. So, join me over on the Facebook group and I will talk to you soon!