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CRUSH Your Money Goals w/ Bernadette Joy #932

Published Jan 15, 2025, 9:00 AM

SMART goals are out, CRUSH money goals are in! We’re joined today by expert money coach Bernadette Joy, who we met for the first time last year at the nerdy personal finance and media conference that we attended. We actually gave a talk, while Bernadette was the host for the entire conference, and there may not be anyone else on earth with as much personal finance enthusiasm as Bernadette. She’s a breath of fresh air to the world of personal finance and is featured monthly in Forbes, CNBC, and CNET. Her new book, Crush Your Money Goals, came out last month and we were stoked to discuss a number of topics like clawing out of $300,000 of debt, scaling side hustles into legit businesses, why Bernadette hates the term “emergency fund”, her $1 Rule, a new take on the Shabbat, and plenty more!

 

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Best friends out!

Welcome to How to Money. I'm Joel, I'm Matt, and today we're talking about Crushing your Money Goals with Bernadette Joy.

Yeah, Joel, So we're joined today by expert money coach Bernadette Joy, who we actually met for the first time last year at this nerdy personal finance and media conference that we often go to. We actually gave a talk while Bernadette was the host for the entire conference, and I've got to admit, I don't know if I've ever met someone who was more enthusiastic about personal finance. So we're pumped to be talking with Bernadette today her new book, Crush Your Money Goals that came out last month, and we're excited to dig into a ton of topics today, like her one dot why she hates the term emergency fund. Of course, we're going to cover her crush strategy for goal setting as well, and hopefully we'll have time to maybe we'll dig into her history as well, because she has an incredible debt payoff story as well. But Bernadette, thank you for taking the time to speak.

With us today.

Oh, thank you so much. You for having me, and that was the best intro I've had in a long time.

Okay, I mean, who's introducing you? Then? Come on, you's got to get better.

In Oh great question.

Right, So the enthusiasm for personal finance is that more of like a you're stepping into the role of being host at a conference or is this like a deep seated desire of yours to spread the personal finance gospel.

I think it was both. I definitely have a deep seated passion of the biggest word that people often use for me is energy, But I think it was probably times ten because at the time that you and I met, we were at the end of the conference. I was like, woaho, we're going to go to a happy hour after.

Yeah, that doesn't motivate anyone, right, Well, the first question we got to ask you, Bernadette, is what do you like to splore? John Matt and I we call it our craft beer equivalent because we spend decent trucks of change on good craft beer. Boy, Hey, it's okay because we're still being smart, saving and investing for our future. What's that thing for you?

So my craft beer equivalent is k pop and it comes in a lot of different forms. It's going to concerts, it's buying merch, it's supporting the artists. It's something I spend a lot of money on that a lot of people may not understand.

All right, So is BTS? Are they still the biggest oh good yeah pop band out there?

So K pop?

Because I feel like they disbanded because some of them had to serve in the South. So I'm half Korean by the way, so I have some familiarity with kpkay and all things k k okay.

So BTS has not disbanded because people get very upset if you tell them that they disbanded. They're just basically on hiatus right now while they serve in the military. They will be back in twenty twenty six, they said, with a new album. In concert tickets, But I follow a lot of different groups in K pop, BTS is my favorite. I've spent a lot of money. I've seen them in concert four times and those tickets are not cheap. And as a K pop fan I mentioned to you earlier, I actually do go to Atlanta quite a bit because K pop never comes to Charlotte. They usually stop in Atlanta. So if you add up all of the money that you have to spend to just get to these concerts. It can add up to a lot. But I can't tell you where else in the world or where else in history have I felt more joy than being at a btsest.

Yeah. I mean when you know that it's worth of poning up the money and yeah, it's not like you're going into debt for it, So it's totally fine. Right.

Would it be so sad if the guys come back in twenty twenty six and it's like so much more serious because of their exposure to the military.

They say the drama album.

Well, it's funny because they're actually they've all done solo albums and there's already been some of that happening. So I think we're a little more prepared for when they all come back.

Okay, man, I know who to go to if I'm looking for some behind the scenes, Right, But did that Let's kind of dig into your your past a little bit what happened back in twenty sixteen, because it sounds like that that was the year that you know, maybe you start taking personal fight and it's a little bit more seriously.

Yeah, So twenty sixteen was the year that I was set to graduate from my master's in business. I went to the Kingdon Flagler School and expensive degree. It was over one hundred and twenty thousand dollars when I looked back on it. I didn't realize it was that much when I signed up for it. And I was in my last semester of my program in January and I had ten weeks left, and I said to myself, I should probably go check out how much I owe in student loans. But it can't be that much because I have been paying for it some along the way. I did get a little bit of a scholarship, so how much could it possibly be? Not realizing it was seventy two thousand dollars, and I essentially had what I called my quarter life crisis, where I literally dropped to the floor and started crying about how I had gotten into so much debt.

Yeah, you're not alone in that, right that. I think that's a common experience for people, and especially hopefully we're more more cognisant of student loan debt on the front end. Now maybe there's a little bit more education around it, but there's still a lot of seventeen eighteen year olds going to college not thinking about the costs, and then four years later, they're like, oh my gosh, what have I done? You had what three hundred thousand dollars in debt overall? And I believe you said your plan was just to work hard, maybe take some of the notes of the grindstone mentality. How did that work out?

It worked for a little while until I got completely burned out and started rethinking all of my life choices. And I'm first generation Filipino American. My father had nine kids. I'm the eighth of the nine kids, and there is just always this mentality that you have to work hard, and that money is scarce, and that it's actually hard to make money. And so I thought that the solution to this was, Okay, after I graduate from this prestigious program, I'm going to get a really great paying job and then just work on paying off the student loans and work off paying all of these other debts, and then everything will be fine. Right. Except when I was planning to graduate, I had no desire to go back to a corporate job, and I was actually thinking about becoming an entrepreneur someday. And that's where I realized that working hard, especially working hard for another employer, might not be the right path for me.

Did any of the fact that you being a Frisian immigrant, I guess how much did that impact maybe how you viewed the world, how you viewed your debt, how you viewed your career, and maybe sort of the path that you might pursue.

It was a huge part of how I viewed not just the world, but finances in general and specifically personal finance. My father was actually an accountant by trade, my mom was a bookkeeper, and then my younger brother ended up becoming an accountant also, and so there's this whole idea that, oh, well, if you're good with money kind of academically, that it should be fine personally. But it turned out that my father was not great with money personally for a lot of different reasons. He had a ton of debt actually throughout his lifetime also, and he was someone who was supposed to be good with money because he did finances for a company. So when I realized specifically that there's also these kind of cultural values in Filipino culture where you don't talk about how much money you have, but you show people by your nice car and your nice house and your nice clothes, but you are never allowed to tell people that you're struggling. I really had a hard time reconciling my cultural values with what was actually happening to me personally.

What did your debt payoff strategy look like? What were you tapping into and what sort of route were you trying to take when you realize, because that could be an overwhelming amount to be like, okay, three hundred thousand dollars in debt racked up, where do I even start? Some people get just completely frazzled, up ended in the beginning and they just kind of go Ostrich effect and buried their head in the sand. What were the practical steps for you when it came to kind of getting rid of that debt going down that path?

Yeah, well, if I'd be totally honest, I did bury my head in the sand for a good forty eight hours for I let myself feel my feelings about what kind of decisions they had to make, and really thinking about what I wanted to do next. But once I got my head out of my butt, I would say I started first looking at just the student loans, which was seventy two thousand dollars of the three hundred thousand dollars, and I went and looked at what that total amount was broken up to, and it was actually broken up into several smaller loans. A couple and we're twenty thousand dollars. A couple of them were ten thousand, a couple of them were five thousand dollars. And I decided to go with a snowball approach because truth be told, back then, all I did was google what was out there, and at the time, the guy with the most advertising dollars was Dave Ramsey, and so I just listened a lot to his podcast, and I tried this snowball method, which felt felt like it resonated with me in the sense of I am the type of person who if I don't see progress in a short amount of time, I will just give up. I will just get home and not keep going.

I think most people know what the snowball method is, but will you just quickly explain what and why you went with that and kind of the thinking behind why that's superior?

Sure, So, the snowball method simply says that, regardless of interest rate, you go for tackling your debts from smallest amount to biggest amount. So in the case of my student loans, I decided to tackle these smaller five thousand dollar loans first before I tried to tackle these twenty thousand dollars loans. And I broke it up into these different segments versus thinking, oh, I have seventy two thousand dollars all together, I don't know where to start with that, But can I figure out how to just pay off this first five thousand dollars to get some momentum. And that was hugely helpful for me to actually see these loans, say closed, have zero balance on them before I moved on to the bigger ones. But I will say that I did that snowball method in the sense of you have to pair that with well, how are you actually going to get money to pay towards the debt? And I did what everyone else did in the beginning. I just I hustled a lot. I got my husband to hustle a lot. I mean we were doing all sorts of stuff. We were extras on TV, we were I mean, he was driving uber, I was selling jewelry. I mean I started I actually started charging people to help review their resumes because back then I was in HR and that eventually turned into my financial education program. I never knew that was going to turn into my next career, but we tried a lot of different things of okay, instead of trying to figure out new skill sets, like what skill sets do we already have and how could we make even a little bit of money towards it better than trying to waste time trying to figure out something new.

So, okay, I'm curious. I want to dig just a little bit on the side hustle. Thing Like driving for Uber is one thing, right, I think that's like the easy button. But it sounds like you were able to find other ways to make money that were more in line with the skill set that you had, that could potentially earn you more than just like the lowest common denominator side hustle. Yeah.

Yeah, I had two side hustles back then. Both of them ended up turning into full time businesses later down the road, and they were completely unrelated. One of them was to help people review their resumes. I would literally either just give them feedback on their resume or I would edit their resumes for them. Obviously, editing them would cost them more money, and I started charging nineteen dollars for that, and then I eventually over time was able to charge four hundred dollars for that. See a pretty big increase, Yeah, pretty big increase. It was little by little, But I actually had a really great client one day who told me he was the nicest person. He told me, you severely undercharged me for this, so you did a really good job. Yeah. I thought that was really nice. I'll always remember that. And then my other side hustle was actually helping women get dressed for special occasions. And so I collected all of these dresses from different women who weren't using it at the time. I said, let me borrow these dresses and lend them to other women and help them get dressed for these events. And that turned into another side hustle that I actually found to be really fun, but also started started helping me think about personal finance because I saw how much women were spending on these dresses that they were only wearing one time.

That's like rent the runway, but on a very individual level.

Yeah, I was. Actually I built it as the local rent runway in Charlotte. I was the only game in town Belk at the time. I used to have people who would come to me and they would say, oh, I went to Belch to go look for address there and they told me to come here, and so that was pretty fun that people did.

That's amazing, And so you eliminated all that debt. And at this point, you know, it seems like you're set to retire like in your forties because of all this hard work and the smart money moves that you've made. But I've heard you say too that you don't have any desire to actually retire early. And maybe that has something to do with the energy that you.

Bring to life.

Why then, have you worked so dang hard and invested in the way that you happen over the past few years.

You know, I'm still unraveling what that might mean for me. I turned forty this year, and I never imagined that I would have enough invested that I could retire if I wanted to. So I spent so much time I'm in the last couple of years, and I think this is some of the downside I think of being very enamored with personal finances that you can get wrapped up in it so much so that you don't really think about what you would do once you actually complete the goal later on. And so I'm unraveling that right now. And I've had really interesting conversations with other financial experts in their fifties and sixties. I had another financial expert who told me, he said, you know what, BS, I bet you you're going to be back in three years if you decided to retire now, because you're not going to be able to sit still. And I said to him, you know what, that might be true three.

Years, more like three months.

I said, that could be true. But you know what, I have never had in an extended period of time in my forty years on Earth where I just did whatever I wanted and I didn't think about money. Yeah, and so I just want to try it. So this year I'm planning to travel a ton more than I have before. My husband and I are actually going to do that whole full time digital nomap. We were kind of part time at this point. And I also decided that I want to just focus on some of the things that I have been interested in but have been scared to do. So I mentioned to you before we got on here that I am taking improv classes and I'm excited for that. I just signed up for swimming lessons. Here's a fun fact I don't know how to swim. I have never carved out the time to go learn how to swim, and it's kind of embarrassing to go look for adult swimming lessons because all of the swimming lessons are for kids. But I found one yesterday and I'm really excited.

Great.

You don't understand full immersion swimming is evidently what it's all about.

Oh really, what does that mean? I think you were talking.

About it like a decade ago, but like basically like there's a natural instinct to keep your face above water, but it's sort of like the exact opposite of the natural inclination and just literally maybe forcing your face into the water because that's how you're able to essentially streamline, and that's how you swim, and not only swim, but swe fast. But aside from that, Oh, you said something about y'all doing like the full nomad thing like you've done sort of like maybe the part time digital no mad life. I think a part of maybe what allows you to do that is the fact that you don't own your own home.

Is that right?

Is that still the case? From what I understand?

You rent?

And is that flexibility a big part of what factored into that for y'all.

Yes, So, my husband and I, part of some of that debt that we had paid off was also a mortgage debt, and we decided one day to sell all of our real estate that we had and we decided to go back to renting, and people around us really thought we were crazy. They were like, I don't understand why you would have a paid off home and then sell it, And my husband and I one day we realized and unfortunately it wasn't a kind of happy scenario. But my father passed away suddenly in twenty twenty one, and it was still when the pandemic wasn't allowing people to have these mass gatherings, and so my husband and I had to fly to Las Vegas, where my mom and my father lived, to help take care of things, and I had to take some time off of work, which I was so grateful by that point that we had saved up enough money that if I needed to take time, an extended period of time off of work, I could do that. But when we came back and we had done the whole airbnb situation, we were like, Okay, well we still need to make money off of this property. Let's try to airb and be it, and I had this airbnb guest who was complaining about she didn't know where to put the soap in the shower, and at the time, I was thinking, Okay, my father just passed away, Like this is really not a problem that I care about right now. And so I thought about, well, if we're going to travel like this for extended periods of time, either we leave the house empty or we're going to rent it out, but have potential scenarios like this where people are reaching out to us for things that we need to do for property management. So we said, you know what, let's see what it looks like to not have real estate. And we also wanted to live closer to where we wanted to be. We had lived out in the suburbs, and there's no shade against the suburbs. I really enjoyed living there, but for us at this moment in our our our lives, we were more interested in being closer to the arts and closer to where my clients were, and so we decided to rent. But now it's afforded us the ability to not only travel more frequently, but I've taken the amount of money that we took from real estate and started practicing other types of investment.

I think you're pointing out something here like this is like a perpetual debate in personal finance. Right is the rent versus buy conundrum? And there are brilliant points on both sides of the equation. There was somebody the other day in our Facebook group who lambassed us for offering any sort of nuanced take about buying versus renting, and he was basically saying buying is always the right decision. Buy now before prices continue to go up. And that's just not taking into account people's different individual situations, their hopes, their dreams, their desires, like their desired level of flexibility, And yeah, I don't know. How do you help people think through whether they should be buyers or renters.

I do this frequently with all of my coaching clients. And one of the first things I do when I take them on as a coaching client is I do this exercise with them. It's called it would be cool if and for five minutes, I just have them do this stream of consciousness, just keep answering this question. It would be cool if X, y Z and almost always travel comes up. It would be cool if I could travel the world. It could be cool if I travel to Europe, or it would be cool if I could, you know, spend more time in these other places. It has never come up on anyone's it would be cool list to say it would be cool if I, you know, had chores and mowed the lawn and had to fix the roof. Like, no one ever says that on there it would be cool if. But they do say it would be cool if I owned a home. But then when I ask them, well, what does it mean to be a homeowner to you? Maybe it's because some of the clients that I work with tend to be kind of older millennials or Gen xers, But their immediate reaction is quite surprised because they've never been questioned on why they even want to own a home in the first place.

It's almost like they've been indoctrinated and that our culture has told them, Hey, when don't you reach a certain age, that's what you're supposed to do. And the essentially the economics, the facts be damned, because it doesn't matter if it's like fifteen hundred dollars a month cheaper to rent and you could massively you know, increase your investments and fast, you know, fast track your financial success and continue to grow your net worth. It's like, well, that's the thing I'm supposed to do, so I guess that's the direction I'm going in.

That's literally what they say, they've said to me. I had one person in particularly, she said, what do you mean? And I said, why do you want to own a home? And she said to me, isn't aren't I supposed to want to? And I said, well, are you? And then she said, oh my god, no one has ever asked me this question before. My whole world is turned upside down. And and so before you decide that you want to buy home. I do think it's important to weigh the pros and cons of owning a home. I was a homeowner, so don't get me wrong. I do there's value in owning a home. But I also think that there's value in owning home homes at certain stages of your life. And I also think that there is always a trade off when you decide to put most of your money or most of your wealth building kind of energy towards real estate versus For me, as a trade off, I decided to take a lot of that money, as I mentioned, and put it towards other investments, particularly looking towards becoming an angel investor for other underrepresented companies, but then also to invest into my own business, which just for me personally, I get a lot more joy out of running this membership that I have writing this book than I ever did on painting my bathroom. And you know, planting every I don't know if you guys have this in Atlanta tube, but in Charlotte, clay is such a thing where it's really hard to plant things. And so I was constantly fighting with my yard, and I finally just decided I don't want to fight with my yard anymore.

Do that.

Let's just go ahead and zero escaping enough but rocks exactly exactly, But no, I think that's so true. It oftentimes folks aren't taking the time necessary to self examine and to figure out and it takes time. You can't just like decide you know what it is that you're drawn to like. It takes some exploration, and oftentimes we are not giving ourselves the space to be able to do that. But Bernadette, we've got more to get to. Of course, we're going to talk about your crush framework to attacking your goals.

We'll get to that and more right after this. All right, we're back. We're still talking with Bernadette Joy. We're talking about crushing your money goals. So much fun information already and great conversation. But let's specifically get to goal setting, Bernadette. And this is the time of year still where people are really thinking about their goals and what they want to accomplish in a new year. And we've all heard of, I think at this point, smart goals. But you say that your crush approach is superior. What is your crush approach to goal setting? And why?

Okay, so I do have a beef with smart goals because I was an HR professional that used to teach smart goals in the corporate.

World and it sounds demoralizing.

Yeah, And actually that's really what my beef with it was was that, you know, one of the things that smart Goals teaches is about being realistic or relevant, which I understand the concept of it in the R but what I found is that people end up making goals that are too small and then really not being able to reach financial freedom. And that's really what I teach versus financial literacy, and so crush is my kind of anecdote to the smart goals where if you want to be more than just financially literate, but you actually want to reach financial independence, you can use this framework that spells out the word crush and it's fun.

By the way, the goal setting inside of a company, you want to make it really easy to attain. That's so that you look good to your boss at the goal review time, Whereas when we're talking about setting goals for your personal life, you can be a lot more ambitious and audacious.

You know, that is a great distinction. I never thought about that until you said it. So thank you that that is so true.

And I mean I remember setting mine back in the day and I was like, I'm not going to make this too hard.

That's exactly right. You want to put stuff that you know you can achieve, so when you come at year end review, you're like, oh, I did all that stuff. And oddly, what I train people to do and it's not for everyone, but I train people to reach financial independence, which is a very lofty goal for the vast majority of us. And so the thought process is to really train more like an Olympian and say all right, I'm going to go for the gold medal. But you know what if I end up only reaching silver or bronze, or not even making the podium, or not even making it to the Olympics, I think I'm going to still be better off if I give.

It a go.

And I really like that mentality for financial freedom, but it takes a lot of rewiring for people because we're so used to, like you said, setting the bar low for ourselves so we can feel like we checked it off a list, versus setting the bar high and even failing, which will be better than where we are now.

I totally get that, but I guess that thinking back to your story, there's something to be said about checking things off your list, right, Like for you, you mentioned the snowball method to paying down your debt, and like when you get those little wins, like that's so encouraging to have that win at your back. But maybe maybe the idea is to be able to transfer that into something bigger, something more audacious. But we want you to unpack this crush approach and the sea stands for curating our accounts? Can you explain that?

Why?

Why is that the first thing you want?

Folks? To do.

Yeah, So to your point, I realized I used to have people start off with a big lofty goal first and then and then people would get really deflated and not do anything. And so the sea stands for getting a quick win fast, which is just to figure out where all your accounts are, get them into one tool that you can see everything that goes in and out of your assets and liabilities, and having a clear picture of what you have. What I found with most people is that they have no idea where all their stuff is. For example, I mean everyone doesn't know where they're for to one k from their old company is sitting. They have no much, they have no idea how much it is, They don't know exactly how much their debt is. And so curating your account simply says to act like a curator and not a hoarder and make sure that every account that you own actually has a very clear purpose and is accounted for. And I like to use the tool of monarch money. It's not something I'm sponsored on or anything. I just really like the tool where I can see every single account that I own in one space, versus just looking at my checking account or my savings account.

One of the one of the accounts that a lot of people have and that a lot of personal finance experts US included. So you're charding on some toes. Over here, Bernadette is having an emergency fund. We talk about that. You don't like that term, so let's battle it out.

So I call it my keep comm fund. What I found I had a specific client. This is why I changed it is she was so excited. She never had an emergency fund before. And so when she finally saved up her emergency fund, two months later, her basement legit flooded and I'm talking about, you know, up to your knees kind of flood. And she ended up putting it back on a credit card, and I when she when she and I met, she said, oh, yeah, my basement flooded, and so now I have to pay off this credit card. And I said, wait, why did you put it on the credit card? Why didn't you use the cash that you had on hand? And she was just like, I thought that was for emergencies. I said, what other emergency.

Is there.

Other than your basement flooding? And so I realized that a lot of people literally think of emergency as life or death and so that framing wasn't working for a lot of my clients. But I also reframed it to say it's a keep calm fund, as in, this is the fund that you can tap into, not even when there's just emergencies, but when you need to stay calm and you need to just get through something versus you know, trying to save every bit of money. So as a prime example, this is, I hope my in laws don't hear this, but sometimes my in laws will just like magically appear, and for some people they're in laws, showing up unexpectedly can be a little bit anxiety into sing. But it's not an emergency, right, So I tried to tell people, here's this fund that you can use for anything that's unexpected, not just in an emergency fund, but for a lot of people it still serves at similar purpose. The other reason that I to kind of straight away from the emergency fund because the age old advice of three to six months, which is a great intent, but the vast majority of people that I worked with were still very riddled with debt and we're oftentimes living paycheck to paycheck, so three to six months felt very overwhelming. So I tell people to start off with a one month's keep calm, fun and just focus on getting that one month first, and then we can figure out three to six months down the road.

I like it.

No, it sounds like your in law showing up is a social emergency. And are you using some of that money to put them up in a hotel or go ahead and order take out because you're not going to cook for him.

It's the latter, order takeout. And then I usually get a massage after.

A little bit of self care phat in there. Well, all right, so let's see talk to us about r which for you, that's reversing into financial independence. Why is why is it important to start with five and then kind of backing into it?

Yes, So going back to what I said earlier, I just I just taught a investing class for women and I asked the group. There's one hundred women on the call, and I asked them, how much money do you need to save up for you to be able to retire? And no one knew the answer. So I said to them, this is not you know, the hard and fast, absolutely correct, but it's a good, you know, back of the napkin kind of math that you can do. And it's the four percent rule, which I'm sure you may have talked about in the past, but essentially it says that if you save twenty five times your annual expenses, if you invest that money, you theoretically would not run out of money. And so immediately a lot of people will go into what about inflation, what about interest rates? What if I put into the wrong investment? And I always have to tell people, hey, let's just have this number first, and then let's just back in to the simple steps you can take today that might get you closer to that number. And so for me, that goes back to some of the story I told you earlier of Okay, once I calculated that number for myself at the time it was nine hundred thousand dollars, then it became very clear to me that I had to pay off my debt versus thinking of debt as just a separate goal. Debt was actually a smaller milestone in this in this quest for financial independence. And I was able to do that because I said, well, if I pay off this these student loans, even though they have low interest rates, I would say, you know, X amount of money, and that can go towards my investments instead, And so I really like this idea of reversing into independence, meaning that you actually calculate that number, and for everyone it's overwhelming because it's likely over a million dollars, especially if you live in the US. But at least now you know, and then you can say, well, am I really going to reach that number or even have a shot at it if I don't make some changes today.

I remember starting off and being so over whelmed at some of the things that people were suggesting, whether it was like max out your four O one K and I was like, who does that? How's that possible? And I get I think especially for younger listeners who are you know, half student loan debt or a car payment on top of a student loan debt, and they haven't progressed very far in their career, those things do seem completely unattainable. And yeah, breaking it down into bite sized pieces that allow you to make small but significant moves over time, like continually in the right direction, it pays off. And then you find yourself ten, twelve, fifteen years later and you're like, wait a second, I'm like I've made a lot of progress towards this thing. It's just one of those slow moving things. I think we're used to get rich quick. It sounds so good on the surface, but then underneath it's pretty rotten to the core. But the opposite is true. It doesn't sound very sexy on the surface, but like deep down, it's pure gold, and that's actually how you get to where you want to go. One of the things you talk about is budgeting with other people. You call it positive peer pressure. And you're not just speaking of married folks, right, You're not even just talking to like people who have a spouse or a long term partner. What are you advocating in terms of budgeting, but doing it with your peers.

So I first advocate for finding two peers specifically just in case one of them is busy. Then you have a backup person and every month at the beginning of the month at least running some ideas by them or things that you are considering for things that you want to potentially accomplish during that month, or just want accountability and say to someone out loud. So I have a client who I just worked with recently. She was like star student client, and one of the biggest challenges that she had was up until this point, she had nobody to talk to about these finances, and so one she was just going around with a lot of preconceived notions that just actually were not materially accurate. But too she always felt like she was worse off than she actually was, And so she came for coaching with me, and in her last session she had all of these updates. There was nothing for us to even talk about in terms of next step. She just said, I just want to share with you all these things that I did. I just paid off this credit card. I actually have my one once worth contingency fund, and I told my parents about what I was doing. They were actually really supportive. I thought they were going to be mad at me. And I say that to anyone who's listening here, is that a lot of what we could tastrophize about our finances is in our heads a lot worse than they actually are. And when I talk about the you and crush, which is understanding your net worth, it is really helpful to have at least one other person other than yourself, whether it be a spouse or a friend or whoever, who actually knows what your net worth is, so that they can make some recommendations that are based off of realistic numbers or the reality of what your situation is versus oh, just max out your four o one K. Well, if my net worth is negative three hundred thousand, that's probably not the first thing I'm doing today.

Yeah.

Yeah, So you just touched on understanding your net worth, like you talk about pretty early on in the book too, just how your self worth combined with your net worth, Like that is what you need. So You've worked with a lot of folks, and you've come across a lot of different just individual scenarios and life stages that folks are in. How debilitating have you seen that this lack of self belief is for most folks? Like, have you found that that led has led to just slower progress with folks? Has that led to just continued poor decisions? Talk to us about that self worth, that self belief aspect of it.

Yeah.

Yeah, So when I talk about understanding your worth, I talk about both your net worth and to your point, your self worth. And I can genuinely say that the everyone that I've worked with as a client, their picture of self worth was not accurate. It just literally was not true. They were, so in doing this exercise of self worth, I forced my clients lovingly to actually calculate what their net worth is. As of today, I have never had a client who actually was accurate about what their net worth was. They always thought it was worse than it actually was, even the ones who both had a lot of money and who didn't have much money at all. The ones who didn't have much money at all, they thought they were, you know, just completely hopeless. And then the ones who had a lot of money just couldn't believe they had that much money and so tying. While I say, you know, your net worth is not your self worth, it should at least be based off of some accuracy of the data. But to your question of you know, how debilitating it is, I have found the area that where it's most abilitating for people is in fact in investing, because I have to consistently convince women in particular that they are already investors, and they always say, oh, I'm not smart enough, or I just don't know enough, or I'm not a math person, I'm not a numbers person, and I have to consistently have these conversations and messages to say, hey, if you had student loan debt. Guess what, You're an investor. If you have ever bought any sort of property, you are already an investor. If you've ever spent any money on something, whether or not you made money or not on it, you are already an investor. And having those conversations combined with the self worth aspect and also the reality of what it requires to become financially independent. You cannot become financially independent if you don't ever invest is really critically important and a lot of it is based off what you said, This stabilitating idea that I'm less than what I actually am.

What do you think it is? It fuels that? Is it that we see other people out there touting maybe faux examples of wealth or we just assume that everyone knows more than we do, and how do we maybe like counteract whatever negative thing is in our brain. I was just thinking that Matt Matt has and I just started running like a year ago, and Matt's always like, you're a runner, and I have not thought on myself as a runner literally until like a week ago. I was like, wait, I think I'm a runner and I don't know why, because I've been doing it long enough and consistently enough. But really I was probably a runner like nine months ago or ten months ago or something like that. Why do we always like think less of ourselves than we actually should? And it does seem like the less inclinent we are to think of ourselves in a positive light, the less in client we are actually like, continue doing the thing and continue rocking it.

Yeah, I mean, we could have an entire other episode about the reasons why we all think that we're less than I mean, the patriarchy, like systematic you know, exclusion of certain groups. Also culture, also just you know, good old fashioned media. But I think in particular, like right now, in this moment, I honestly believe social media is the biggest contributor to this because, just like you, I don't consider myself a dancer, right because in my head, I'm thinking, Oh, a dancer is someone who's a backup dancer for Justin Timberlake, or who's a dancer in music videos, or can actually, you know, memorize a dance after just half an hour. I'm not any of those things, obviously, but I love dancing, and I think the same thing goes with personal finance. Oh I'm not rich. For example, in the US. I find this so fascinating as someone who, again who grew up with immigrant parents. Anyone in the US is by far richer than the vast jority of people in the Philippines, where my parents are from. But social media keeps making it trying to convince us that our life isn't enough and that you need this extra thing in order to then become the dancer or the runner or whatever it is. And so one of the things that I really advocate for is what I call screenless Sundays, where I literally lock up my phone in my glove compartment in my car and then I along with my family members. Of my family members are with me. We are not allowed to look on our phones, we're not allowed to look on television, and we're not allowed to look at laptops, and we just have to talk to each other. I know, it's a wild well concept. We go analog for the day. We play board games, and we listen to records, and we go take walks in the park, and we meal prep, we do all these other things. And just one day of not constantly being hit in the face with you're not enough, you're not good enough, your house is not nice enough, your car is not fancy enough. It actually does a lot for It doesn't completely solve the problem, but at least for me, it helps me RESETX dictations.

I think it's great advice. And I saw I've read that about your screenless Sundays, and it's just it's like this old it's like a version of a sabbath, right, Like there's certain religious practices that institute a sabbath of sorts, and sometimes that is like typically the more conservative that sect is, the more likely they are to make the Sabbath even stricter and including no screens or potentially like no lights or you can flip on the light switch. And we might think of that as antiquated in this day and age, but there are significant benefits in psychological benefits, especially given kind of the society we're in right now, the always connected society, that they can be derived from it. So I think that's really good advice and something that's well worth considering. It's something that I need to consider more for my family. Brendeat, We've got more to get to with you, including we want to talk about the one dollar rule and why you say eating out is good for our budgets. Oh hot take, we'll talk about that right after this.

We are back from the break talking about how we can all crush our money goals this year with Burnanette Joy and you talk about choice overload when it comes to all the different decisions we have to make. Do you have any just practical tips for folks when it comes to simplifying in order to reduce all of the decisions that we have to make on a not even just a daily basis, but like I don't on the hour kind of.

Basic Yes, yes, I am not an advocate for tracking at all, and so when people hear that the S and crush stands for spend intentionally, their automatic assumption is that I have to track every single penny that goes out of my budget. And what I actually advocate for people is not to track, but to spend more time planning at the beginning of the month and using what I call the dollar rule, which I absolutely love. I get questions about it all the time, where it's very simple. It basically is just a slight twist on the cost per use idea, and it just says that if you are going to buy something, and this works with material goods, so clothes and accessories and tech gadgets and furniture. If you're going to buy something and it comes out to a dollar per use, just go ahead and buy it. Don't make it a big deal, don't make it a thing. You're going to get a good use out of it, and it's going to actually be worth it. And what I found is that helps a lot of people actually feel relieved about not feeling so guilty about spending things that they don't quote unquote need, and also not spending all of this time trying to find the best deal ever if it's going to be an inordinate amount of time. I will give you a prime example. One of my best friends, he has hated his couch for years, and it's because he just keeps saying, well, I can't spend more than this amount of money on a couch. But I said to him the other day, this was literally over Thanksgiving. I said, hey, had you just employed the dollar roll back, then it would have paid off by now for a couch that you actually really liked and so rad So your.

Budding it once a day because you said it all the time.

So yeah, and he's a big college football fan, so he's been. He's in there all day long, right, and suffering and suffering, And so I really like the dollar rule to remove some of that back and forth and over analysis for decisions that are in the grand scheme of things not going to be that detrimental to your budget.

All right, we've gone through CRUs. What's the H?

So the H is my most underrated topic and I don't think we talk about it enough in personal finance. It's what we call healing your money wounds. And specifically I wrote about this because I noticed that a lot of people who do not do well with money, or so they think, they think it's because they don't know enough, or because they're not smart, or they're just bad with money. But what I found is that usually I can pinpoint almost an exact incident that caused them to be afraid of making money choices. I will give you a prime example for myself. I am turning forty. Like I mentioned earlier, So in my first job in two thousand and seven, I was an HR professional in financial services, and then in two thousand and eight I was in New York City laying people off. In two thousand and eight and occupy Wall Street was literally outside my tour and I remember realizing, Wow, you know, you can do exactly what everyone tells you you're supposed to do, but still end up basically out on the street, like people were literally getting walked out if you remember that, people were getting walked out with their boxes that day. And that also led me to realize how many people were on that other side of the table from me. I remember, this Guy'll never forget. There was this one guy who I was handing in his severance papers and he said, I've been working at this company longer than you've been alive. Why do you have a job And I don't. And I have encountered so many clients, for example, who were laid off at some point in their career, or maybe they saw their parents finding about money, or maybe they made a bad investment choice one time and now they're afraid to make other investment choices, and that's actually what holding what's holding them back, not lack of knowledge.

Like what's the balance I guess between because you want to address those wounds, some of the events that happened in your past and your history, but at the same time, man, you don't want to dwell too much on some of those things that happened in the past, Like, how do you recommend to your clients to address those things without having them like totally consume their thoughts and everything about them.

M hmm. Well, one thing is therapy, of course, and I don't bill myself at all as a therapist, so I actually require most of my clients to also have a therapist on hand while they are working with me, because sometimes we uncover things and they're like, wow, I didn't realize that was hurting me as bad as I thought, And I said, okay, great, now go talk to your therapists and come back to me, come back to you later.

Oh that's true.

But I also the reason I say healing your money wounds is because I really do think of it as a wound. If you think about a wound on your body, if you keep scratching it, then it'll just keep staying open, it'll keep stinging, and it'll never heal. But if you acknowledge that it's a wound, and you actually you know true it as in, you try to talk about it, You try to have conversations with people, you try to find some you try to in my case, find some other people who have overcome it and get some ideas on how you might be able to heal from it. Then it might not ever go away, and you still might have a scar, but at least you're not scratching it open every single time you make a money choice.

All Right. One of the pieces, one of the things you suggest in your book is that eating out is good for your budget, which never heard that one before, Bernadette, That's usually it's the opposite. So like cooking home to save money. You know, you can do it for like two to three dollars per person per meal, right, whereas you go out to eat, and it's that adds up quickly, especially given what's happened over the past few years and how expensive it is to eat out. So I don't know, can you explain that one for me?

Yes, So one of my clients, who's Latina, she said, when I told her this, I said, hey, you can actually go eat out, she said, Bernadette in Spanish, we say, you know, I komita and casa, right, there's food at home. You're not You're literally not supposed to do that. And so she was just baffled as to why I was saying that she could eat out, And I said to her in particular, I think it'd be good for you to go eat out once a week because all you do is work and you don't talk to any of your friends, and I don't, and I think you should go out to eat if you're going to go hang out with what are your friends? Because I think you're a little lonely right now, and I and I think that's where we've gotten so far away with personal finance advice to say at all costs, we should save every penny at the sacrifice of cultural experiences, community and actually having some healthier, uh healthier choices at times. Now. I know most times, especially again in the US, that the food that you're eating out isn't going to be that healthy. But at least where I live in Charlotte and I know where you guys are, that there are definitely places that you can go and get relatively affordable choices for if you if you're smart about it. So what I say in the book is one, we know that American American portions are out of out of control. They're usually two and a half times the size of what you should be eating. So if you can take that same meal and split it up into two or three meals. You're saving money there.

Just stay my leftover Chinese food for lunch parnadette and.

There you go. You see, you're making good choices on that. And for me in particular, food is very much part of how I experience other cultures. And so no, do I think that eating uber outs and eating McDonald's every day is a good use of your food food budget or your health choices?

No?

But do I think, For example, yesterday I went to an Asian festival in Charlotte. And when I tell you there's very few Asian festivals in Charlotte, I was you sure bet I was going to go there, and I was going to support every business owner there and make sure that they know that, you know, they're appreciated. And so I got so much joy out of going there. And of course, you know you're not going to go and spend, you know, frivolous amounts of money on eating out. But when I think you're doing it intentional for the sake of culture and community and connection, then I think it's worth spending the money.

I love it.

No, I you know, this kind of takes me back to the second letter in your acronym the R, which is reversing into financial independence. Like then the way you get there right, you start with the end in mind. Essentially you look at the number that you need and so in a similar way, we sacrifice the kind of life that we want to lead. We don't envision what we want that end result to look like, but I think we can think about, like you said, the community, the kind of culture that we want to be a part of, and then essentially back into it from there, like you start their plan backwards, and then that can inform the decision that we're making today, even if they're not the most financially optimized. And I love that you've got that built into your framework as well, But we really appreciate you sharing your thoughts just how you approach personal finance, especially with your clients and all that note, Actually, how can folks learn about this the coaching community that you've put together, and where can folks also learn.

About your book?

Yes, well you can learn about both of them at Crush Yourmoney Goals dot com. You can find how you can buy the book as well as the audiobook, and then we host regular monthly masterclasses if people just want to check it out. And what's really lovely is that once a month we open up our membership to anyone who's interested in joining, so you can see what it's actually like to be part of our community. And if you're just interested in hanging out on social media for now, you can check me out at Bernardette Joy, primarily on Instagram and on YouTube. And then I also write a ton of articles for places like Forbes and CNBC and c net, So if you just google my name, you can find articles where we talk about these different topics as well.

Cool. Just do not try to connect with Burnet on social media on a Sunday. She won't respond.

I will not respond to you at all.

Bernadett, thanks so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me all right.

Kind of feels like we're chatting with an old friend, even though we've all hung out with Bernadette once or twice. Now, do you consider virtual hangs as like real hanks or friends. That's a good question, Probably not, because I'm not. Typically I'm never virtual hanging with my friends.

That I have in real life, I guess. But texting this sets something up, irl, That's that's how I roll. Yeah.

Yeah, But that being said, I'm not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth. And this felt like a treat being able to sit down and chat with with Bernadette. But did you have a big takeaway from our conversation with heard today? I did.

It came really early on in the conversation when she was talking about her side hustles and how she turned multiple side hustles into legit businesses that were profitable.

And this is why we talk.

About starting your own business even if it's small and making very little money in the beginning, Like you can't instantly turn it on and start making money like you can driving for uber or something like that. But the possibilities are much larger, right What it can become is is much more grand. So learn from Bernadette. Realize that there are all sorts of little things that you can do to start a business where you live, based on your interest and based on the needs you see in your community. Starting that business could be far more lucrative than just kind of going with the tried and true side hustle that's going to be essentially training time for money without the ability to build something larger and more scalable. That's true.

That's a big vote for entrepreneurship. My big takeaway is gonna come from when she was talking about this exercise that she does with her clients as they're sort of looking off into the future and envisioning what life could look like. She called it the it would be cool if I love that exercise and it's just okay, write down all the things like brainstorm, it would be cool if I could fill in the blank. And I really really like that, But at the same time, there's something about.

It that it doesn't worry me.

But I would hate for folks to conflate that which is cool with that which is rewarding. And I think a lot of times your mind, like if I think through, oh, it would be cool if my mind immediately goes to like things that are easy, things that are like in the moment, super fun, but like there's a difference between that versus something that is hard that takes a whole lot of work, where there's a lot of sacrifice on the front end, but then at the end of that or even like part way through that, you're able to look back at at something and say to yourself, man, that is cool, right, and like I think about just the it's not easy to start to start a family and like raise kids, but that is something where the older I get, like and the more I'm able to look at the years I've had with him in particular, I'm like, that is cool, and it just makes me want to do more and more cool things with them. And it's not something I would have said, well, it'd be cool if I could do that, like on the front end. And so I think there's just a slight delineation between those two things.

Basically when you're saying, wouldn't it be cool if don't just think about going skydiving, although like that could be on your list, nothing wrong with that, but like maybe think about the bigger, more meaningful things that take a lot more effort.

Yeah, yeah, And I think that just the thinking through just some of the fun things could be a great way just to spark some creative thought and to cause you to really buckle down and do some of these things that you've never thought would have been possible. A lot of oftentimes it is travel. But if you only focus on what feels like these like sugar rushes, like these quick hits of things that might fill the bucket immediately. I think over the long term, that could potentially leave somebody feeling hot over the course of years and decades.

Yeah, I mean, I think some of those pursuits, if taken to the extreme, can be incredibly self centered, right, and so we want to say, like, no, push yourself to think about the things are going to be ultimately gratifying over the years and decades too. So I think that's a good one. All right, Well, Matt, let's get back to the beer we had on this episode. This is Asahi. It is a Japanese super dry beer. Although made in Italy. There's product of Italy, so I don't know what that's about. I have no idea. We aren't they brewing that Japan.

I mean, I thought it was a Japanese brew. No, I think it is originally, yeah, because it says here that it's brewed under the supervision of Japanese brewery.

They flew one dude over to Italy.

He's like hanging out, living the life and wherever they're Lalan, wherever they're Oh, I'm supervising, all right, But I will say I did enjoy this. It was just an easy drinking, light and dry lagger.

Yeah, really dry, like it almost evaporates off your tongue. I haven't had many beers that are this dry. There's only like one of the beer I remember it was like a serra bought a collab that it like hit your tongue and it flew right off of it. It was crazy, and and that was like I think, more of a sour and there were yeasts in it.

But it's hard to explain the lightness.

Yeah, it really is. It's hard to explain how it's a butterfly.

It just barely lands before flittering off.

Which is just kind of it's a It's an interesting sensory technique, so I like this one. It's it's probably something especially probably more of a summer beer in my Oh yeah, or if you're just really thirsty in the winter, I guess, although your ear doesn't say siate your thirst. But still I could see why it's wet, Joel, isn't it It might feel like it? No, in fact, it's dry.

But yeah, this is a style that we don't typically have, and it's kind of fun to have some of these more foreign ish on the show.

But hey, Italy still foreign.

I know exactly it's like, well it is technically foreign, but yeah, glad you and I got to enjoy it. We will make sure to link to Bernadette Joy's site where it did. You can buy her book The Mastermind Group that she has all that up on the website at how tomoney dot com. But buddy, that's going to be it for this episode. So until next time, best Friends Out, Best Friends Out,