Transcription of Financial Fitness, #110
Speaker 1: You’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street Portland, Maine. Download past shows and become a podcast subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle on iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.
Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine, Marci Booth of Booth Maine, Apothecary by Design, Premier Sports Health a division of Black Bear Medical, Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedics Specialists, Sea Bags, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of ReMax Heritage, Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes, and Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial.
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast: show number 110, Financial Fitness, airing for the first time on Sunday, October 20th 2013. Today’s guests include Kate Northrup, author of Money: A Love Story, Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial and Stephanie Cabot, founder, owner and cycling instructor with Reve Cycling Studio.
Financial Fitness has been an important consideration for me for the past several years as I’ve worked through a job transition, a life transition and a few other personal transitions. Back in 2011, I wrote the following about financial fitness and the low-hanging fruit. Tempting it is and probably smart, to pick low-hanging fruit first.
This notion applies to a wide variety of situations both literal and figurative. If one is literally confronted with a fruit laiden in apple tree, it makes no sense to climb over ripe produce hanging from the lower branches in order to reach that which is situated closer to the top. Once the more easily accessed apples are gone, however, by necessity it is the uppermost branches which must be tackled unless there are many other trees from which to gather fruit.
If there is but a single tree, then the choice is clear. Every effort must be made to reach the top no matter how difficult the climbing may be. This is certainly true when it comes to one’s financial situation. The upward climb maybe exhausting and seemingly endless. Each question begets a new question. Each financial layer peeled back reveals another financial layer possibly previously unrealized.
Some of the apples we pick maybe wormy, some rotten, some are sweet. Every single apple is important. Each must be sought out and retrieved. Until someday that final apple on our financial tree will be picked and laid to rest in a basket amongst its lower hanging brethren. Then regrowth will begin.
We hope you enjoy today’s show on Financial Fitness. With Kate Northrup, author of Money: A Love Story, Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial, and Stephanie Cabot of the Reve Cycling Studio. We hope that this will cause you to think about the low-hanging and not so low-hanging financial fruit in your own life and how you might make efforts towards your own financial fitness. Thank you for joining us.
Many of us have, let’s just say, conflicted feelings about money. We don’t always think about money and love in the same sentence. The person who’s here with me today actually does think about money and love in the same sentence and that’s because she wrote this book Money: A Love Story or maybe she wrote this book because she thinks about money and love together.
At any rate, we’re talking with Kate Northrup who is the author of Money: A Love Story: Untangling your financial woes, creating the life you really want and living your purpose. Thank you for coming in and talking with us today.
Kate: Thanks for having me.
Dr. Lisa: It was interesting because I was reading through this book and it came … I’m sure you’re like books always comes at the right time in your life. They show up and you go, “Oh, well this is what I needed today.” Your book came just at the right time. I have a new job that I’m going to be starting. I have kid in college, thinking about lots of financial things. I start reading through your book and I think there’s some very interesting things here about thinking about money in an abundant way versus in a fearful, I don’t have enough kind of way which is important.
Kate: That’s a different perspective than most financial advice or works out there that are really focused on only the knots and bolts, only the dollars and cents. To me, money is a lot more than that. It’s so emotional for people. We don’t want to leave that off the table.
Dr. Lisa: You came to this conclusion that money and love are interwoven. Really it’s not that you have to be in love with money. Its just that it enables you to do the things that you want to do. It’s a currency. That’s what it is. You came to this after having spent quite a long time yourself talking about money with people. I’m not saying anything to disparaging when I say you were acting like the money expert, going around the country lecturing. In the meantime, you had this deep, dark secret.
Kate: What happened is I fell by accident into this role of teaching people about money because I built a successful business in the network marketing industry. I had a team of people that I was working with. Then I started giving workshops. My business was doing well but I was only focused on the making money part and I had completely ignored the part about how much you spend and what you actually do with the money once it comes in.
That’s a really important part of the equation. It’s at least half; if not more. I got myself into over $20,000 worth of credit card debt. As I’ve been going around telling the story and meeting people, I found out that’s actually not that uncommon which is really unfortunate. Behind the scenes, my financial life was fairly chaotic.
I was certainly in avoidance around it while I was out there teaching some concepts around business and cash flow and passive and residual income which was all good stuff. I wasn’t teaching people how to get out of debt luckily. But there was a disconnect. There was that friction. It started to feel inauthentic.
Dr. Lisa: I was surprised and pleased to read about back in your genealogy a bit and talked about your father’s approach to money versus your mother’s approach to money and how this really shaped you because your parents got divorced when you were relatively young. You had a chance to watch both of them become their own individual people and have their own individual approaches.
Talk to me a little bit about that, that honesty that you’re able to actually I guess write about it in the book.
Kate: One of the things that’s really important is when you tell a story in public, I feel like you have to have cleaned it up with the people ahead of time. I did that a lot of work with both of my parents so that I felt like I could share the story from an open hearted place for education and to help other people, not just to tell a juicy story.
My mom’s approach to money versus my dad’s approach to money shaped how I fell somewhere in the middle and watching their different approaches and being … I was 16 when they got divorced; really interacting with them around money individually for the first time. Up until that point it was their shared common interest. I didn’t learn as much about it with them together because both of their money views got watered down by the other one for better or for worse.
Seeing this contrast was cool because I saw two different approaches that really worked in certain ways and didn’t work in other ways. I was able to appreciate and pick and choose some of the perspectives that I wanted to take with me. It’s really important for everybody to look at their money history and their money love story as I call it. I coach people to go through that in the first chapter because we are so shaped by what’s modeled for us growing up, whether it’s our health habits, whether it’s our relationship habits, or our financial habits.
The only way to make positive change is to first become aware of those things and go down that road. You don’t have to spend years of therapy or anything. I mean, maybe you do but I’m not saying you need to do that. Just spend a little time saying, “Oh yeah, that is what my mommy used to say. That is what my daddy used to say. This is what I witnessed. How is that affecting my behavior now?” It’s a really important question to ask.
Dr. Lisa: This is a big part of what you’re asking people to do. It’s not just track your expenses everyday for three months and set up a retirement fund. It’s not just those things, it is really dug deep. It’s to have a money love journal. It’s understand where you’ve been and where you’d like to go and where you are in the process. It’s a different approach than I think a lot of financial consultant sorts have to offer.
Kate: Absolutely. The thing that I found in my own journey of getting myself into and then out of $20,000 worth of debt was that the nuts and bolts of it, the spreadsheets and the planning and the savings and all that stuff, I wasn’t able to actually continue to do them until I figured out the emotional stuff first. I had to rewire myself emotionally and mentally and change some of the perspectives and beliefs I had about money and myself.
Then those strategies for getting out of debt, for building my savings, for increasing my income worked. I actually stuck with them. I can’t even tell you the number of times I tried starting a new financial program. Just kind of like a similar, like a new nutrition program or new exercise program. If you’re just doing the strategies without the inner work, it doesn’t stick and it’s not sustainable.
Then three months later, you’re on a new program. That’s the piece that I wanted to bring to the table, the emotional piece. When we change how we feel about something, then that really rewires our beliefs and rewires our activity as opposed to just starting with the activity. It’s too far down the line and it won’t stick.
Dr. Lisa: Another one of the important things for you was to finally realize your own value. In your description of your relationship with your parents, you’d talked about a partnership you formed, a financial partnership you formed with your mother. You described a series of health issues that kept taking place and kept taking place and kept taking place. You couldn’t figure out what was going on. Then one day you went, “Oh my gosh, I know what’s happening here and it has to do with this financial relationship.”
Dr. Lisa: That’s very complicated.
Kate: Yes. Certainly not something that most people would put together. My mom is Dr. Christiane Northrup. A lot of people listening, I would imagine might be familiar with her. She wrote Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom. As a child growing up, I really learned how our emotional lives affect our physical bodies. Anytime I have anything going on with my body, my immediate reaction is “Okay, what’s going on in my life right now? What is my body trying to tell me?”
I knew this issue I was having was in the second shockra, which is the area that has to do with money, sex and power. It’s around the reproductive organs. I knew that it probably had something to do with it. The thing that’s funny about the body is it will manifest stress. Our stress goes into our body usually when we’re not ready to be aware of it mentally and consciously. That’s why it goes into our body.
Of course, I couldn’t figure it out for a long time because I wasn’t ready to and then I was. What ended up happening is my mom and I worked things out and I realized I was remaining in the business with her because I felt like I wasn’t enough to be out in the world doing things on my own. I felt like she has this existing brand. She had been so successful. It would be so much safer if I just didn’t really have to put myself out there and if I was just behind the scenes in her brand.
What was happening is my body was saying, “That’s not okay.” It wasn’t anything my mom did. It was something I did. After a while, I felt like that relationship business-wise was keeping me small. What I realized is after we had some conversations around it and unraveled things; it was also keeping her smaller than she needed to be. That’s how it is in relationships.
When one of us playing small in a relationship, the other one is too even though the other person may not be aware of it at the time. We’re never serving anybody by staying when it feels constrictive.
Dr. Lisa: You decided to make this radical shift? You worked through this relationship with your mom and it’s taken a while. When I say relationship, I mean financial relationship. It seems as though you were able to largely keep things on a positive level personally. Then you decided to do a 180 and get rid of everything and create your own tour. “Let’s go across country and let’s do something different.” Tell us about that.
Kate: What happened is I was living in New York and I was chipping away at my debt. I was making progress but I wasn’t making progress as fast as I wanted to. I would do the projection. It was like, “At this rate, you’ll pay off your debt in seven years or whatever.” That just felt too long for me. It just felt like, “Uh, I want to do something else.”
What I did is looked at, “Okay. Well, I could move home to Maine and live …” My mom has an apartment attached to her house. I thought, “Great. I’ll go move to Maine. I’ll pay off all my debt really fast because I’ll have no living expenses and I’ll take care of that.” Everytime I thought about that and I started telling people about it, I felt constricted and almost this darkness, sort of emotional darkness started to surround me.
That was my sign that it probably wasn’t a good idea because it didn’t actually feel physically that exciting. All of a sudden, I just got this idea, what if we got rid of this apartment in New York? What if I sold all my stuff? What if I bought a Prius and took off around the country teaching workshops about creating financial freedom as I was doing it myself. I’ll call it the Freedom Tour and it’ll be this great adventure.
That’s what I did. Back to the physical aspect, that felt really expansive. Everytime I talked about it, I felt energized. Everytime I talked about it, I felt really excited. That was my sign that it was the way to go.
Dr. Lisa: It also clearly created some rise in your energy levels and what you were projecting out into the world because somehow you end up finding this guy.
Kate: I did. I had met this guy six months before in Chicago. We had kept in touch a little but nothing in particular. Then all of a sudden when I was leaving on the road trip about two weeks out I thought to myself, “I really probably shouldn’t drive alone from Buffalo to San Diego in the middle of the winter when I’ve just changed my entire life and I’m feeling a little emotionally shaky.” I just got an intuition to invite this guy Mike. I was like, “That’s crazy. You don’t know him.”
I did it anyway. I consulted a few friends. I said, “This is totally nuts. Should I do this?” First, I sent him a really neurotic e-mail which was like, “I’m inviting you on this thing but it’s okay if you can’t come.” I mean, 50 million disclaimers. Luckily, I showed it to a girlfriend of mine. She looked at it and she said, “You cannot send this. This is a crazy girl e-mail.” She deleted it and took my phone and sent him the text, “I had this really fun idea. Do you want to drive across the country with me?” to which he replied, “Yes.” That was two and a half years ago and we’re actually getting married next summer. It worked out.
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Dr. Lisa: Is it not something that you have found over time is that when you start doing things that are more foundationally sound for yourself that the right other things come in to help you be more of who you’re already are.
Kate: That is such a good point. I think whether we’re looking for a relationship or a romantic relationship or financial well being, there is this feeling of like, “Oh, I should go to chase doing the “right things”. I should go on match.com. I should do the right things.” What I found was the more I focus on taking care of my own well being and doing the things that I knew I needed to do, absolutely. I found a great guy. I managed to reorganize my financial life.
I paid off all of my debt really soon after I left for the Freedom Tour. Things got better in my relationship with my mom. All of those things started to work out when I prioritized what needs to happen to take care of you on the foundational level like you said.
Dr. Lisa: You became your own as you said, prince charming.
Kate: Yeah. That’s a concept of Barbara Stanny who’s been one of my mentors. She wrote a great book called Prince Charming Isn’t Coming, which is a somewhat depressing title. However, the concept of the book is really become your own prince charming. I had noticed for myself, I was waiting for somebody else to take care of me. I’m shocked even saying that right now.
I was raised in a household with two doctors. I have an Ivy League education. I’ve had so many things supporting me in being all that I can be. Yet, I was still thinking, “Well maybe some guy is going to come around and take care of it for me,” or “Maybe my mom is just going to do it for me.” I really saw the way I would step back and not take action because I kinda hoped somebody else would do it.
I did become my own prince charming. I took the bull by the horns and said, “You know what? I’m not going to wait for somebody else to do this. I am going off on this trip. I’m doing it by myself.” Ultimately, I ended up not doing it by myself but the intention was to do it by myself. “I’m going to create the life I want right now and not wait for something else to come along.” That was a really powerful choice.
Dr. Lisa: Walk me through some of the other steps that you suggest to people and steps that people can find when they go out and buy your book.
Kate: One of the things that you can do is honesty and telling the truth are just such a key aspects to living a whole-hearted life but also getting your finances together. I was living in financial avoidance as I mentioned. Literally, I wasn’t opening my credit card bills. I avoided doing this for so long. When I finally sat down and added up everything I spent, added up everything I made, added up everything I owed and to whom and by when and the APR rate was.
The energy that I got from doing that exercise and telling the truth was tremendous. I felt like a superhero. I felt like I could do anything. In order to know where we want to go, in order to get the directions for where we want to go like you’re typing it in to a GPS, you have to know your current location first. I was living in Lala Land around on my current location. I have found in talking to people that’s the common scenario.
There’s a lot of vagueness around money. If you cut the vagueness and get honest, then you can set about creating the financial reality that you really want. You can’t do that unless you know where you’re starting from. Tell the truth is really one of the most important steps that I find. Also when you tell the truth, it also diminishes a lot of the shame surrounding money.
Money can be such a source of shame in our lives. One of the best ways to alleviate shame is to talk about it. That immediately lightens the emotional load so telling the truth to yourself. Then also finding somebody you trust, who loves you unconditionally to tell the truth too as well can be incredibly healing.
Dr. Lisa: You also talked about … I don’t think you call it payments but blessings already received which is an interesting way to look at I guess we would call the… Some people would call them debts or invoices but you’re looking at it as … this is money that I’m paying for the chance to have made a lot of texts to people I love last month. I’m going to thank AT&T for that chance. Is it reframing also that is useful as people are going through this process?
Kate: I think it’s hugely useful because money is … we just made up money as humans. It doesn’t exist. It really has this very strong energetic component. Some people would say money is just energy. I like to stray away from that slightly just because it’s a little too woo-woo for some people. Really money is a stand in for what we value.
To use money properly, what we need to do is align it with our values and get into valuing tremendously what it brings us because money is just a tool to create certain experiences, to buy certain things, to invest in certain things, to grow certain things. When it comes to paying your bills every month, I love renaming them invoices for blessings already received. That just changes the whole energy of it.
Yesterday, I was paying some invoices. One of them was for my assistant. One of them was for some food and one of them was for some video editing. I took a moment as I was writing checks to get into a place of how often is it that I now have these five beautifully edited videos that I can put out to the world? Thank you Stuart for that. How great is it that I had two weeks that help from Jessie who helped me out. She’s awesome. How often is it that I have this incredible food from Jenny and a great birthday cake for my fiancé?
Really taking that time as you’re paying those invoices for blessings already received to relive the value of the things that you have gotten instead of saying, “Uh, I have to pay bills again.” That’s an awful way of going through life. You’re going to have to pay bills for the rest of your life. Why not make it a fun, juicy, joyful, grateful experience?
Dr. Lisa: You also approached spending and buying things the same way where you know that … all of us know that we need to “cut our expenses” if we’re going to try and save money and put it towards our debts or put it towards our invoices for blessings already received. You talked about it in a way that makes it more palatable. If I save this money, then it’s more money for me.
Kate: Yeah, there’s this concept of a Money For Me account. You can open it as a free savings account online. You could stash it in a tin coffee candle, whatever you want to do. The idea is when you are spending money to ask yourself, “Would it feel better to spend it and have this thing I’m about to buy or would it feel better to essentially pay myself and put this money in the Money For Me account?”
Everytime you have unexpected income, everytime you ask for a fee to be taken off your credit card or your bank account, everytime you were about to spend money but you decided not to, everytime you have a captured expense like a child who’s in daycare but then is going to kindergarten which is free, take the $800 or whatever and put it in the Money For Me account every month. Otherwise it just gets lost in your family’s expenses.
At the end of the month, you can look at that Money For Me account and see and really feel how good it feels to pay yourself instead of buying stuff. Then you can do what you want with it. You can put it in savings. You can put it towards paying off debt. You can put it in your child’s college fund, whatever it is. What you’ve begun to do is rewire yourself so that saving money and paying yourself begins to feel more abundant than spending money. It’s actually creating a different emotional experience and you’re training yourself like Pavlov’s dog.
Dr. Lisa: How much time do you suggest people spend on I guess understanding their money and setting plans? How long does it usually take before people get into a place where things are looking good again?
Kate: That’s a great question. Studies have shown that it takes 21 days about to form a new habit. Then those new habits have to take hold so that your reality shifts. Actually, I had somebody who’s reading the book right now. I have a Facebook group for people who are reading the book and anybody can join in on that. She just did the first chapter, which is telling her own money love story.
She said that she actually didn’t have the money on her credit card to buy the book and she had to wait a few days to put together the $10 to buy the book. She was in a serious financial pickle. She said within a few days of doing some of the exercises and shifting her energy, she had a $2500 windfall and now is able to pay her overdue electricity bill, pay her mortgage and have a little breathing room this month.
She only did chapter one. She’s just getting started and the shift and energy can be fast and profound. I really invite people to have a quantum shift like that and to say, it is possible to change things fast. It doesn’t have to take years. It doesn’t have to be hard.
Dr. Lisa: That last part is important and in fact you addressed this that even as you’re saving money, you don’t want to throw it all towards your past debts because that can be very disheartening.
Kate: Absolutely. A lot of people will go from getting into debt to getting into deprivation and feeling like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve been bad. Therefore, I need to punish myself by not allowing myself to eat out, by never buying anything that’s not absolutely necessary, by keeping my house freezing cold which would be awful in Maine, things like that.
Then they spend years suffering as a way of “atoning” for their sins of going into debt. The reality is you made the decisions you made in the past. You were a different person then. We all have things that we wish we had not done in our past. Beating ourselves up for it in the present doesn’t actually help us change because beating ourselves up in the present for things we did in the past just makes us feel bad.
When you feel bad, you don’t make great decisions. The idea is allow yourself to enjoy the process today of digging yourself out of debt, of living abundantly no matter what. How can you get that feeling of abundance from not spending very much money. That can be a really fun game. Is it doing an at-home manicure and pedicure with your daughters which would not cost you more than a bottle of nail polish. Is it taking a bubble bath which it turns out is free? All those different things can really create that consciousness of abundance without needing to spend a lot of money.
Dr. Lisa: As a physician and small business owner, I rely on Marci Booth from Booth, Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci.
Marci: The numbers never lie. It’s a phrase we’ve all heard hundreds if not thousands of times. As trite as it may be it really is one of the golden truths of business and personal finance. While it takes discipline to keep your eye on the numbers, to look at what are sometimes difficult truths, when you do it regularly, two things happen. It becomes easier over time and you truly start to understand what the numbers actually mean and how you can make your life better.
I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need: Boothmaine.com.
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Dr. Lisa: Where do people find out more about your book? It sounds like you’ve got some DVDs coming out. I know that you have a very strong online community. What’s the best place for people to go to?
Kate: If you go to katenorthrup.com, you can find all of that. I do a series on Fridays called Financial Freedom Friday and those videos come out over e-mail and there are all sorts of free content on my website including a quiz about what your relationship with money says about you that you can take for free.
Dr. Lisa: What are your favorite things to do when you’re not thinking about your career and the book that you wrote, and you’re not planning your wedding? What do you like to do?
Kate: I love to be on the water in Maine. I just can’t imagine living somewhere not on the water. Paddle boarding, sailing, just sitting on the beach, I love that. I love to dance, whether it’s a classic Casco Bay movers or just heading over to Zumba. Those are my favorite things. Then I practice a lot of yoga as well. I love to practice yoga.
Dr. Lisa: Do you think that the time that you spend with Julia Littlefield in her drama camp in Yarmouth, Maine, do you think that has contributed positively to your life now?
Kate: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s so funny. I’ve spent a lot of time doing theater and performance growing up with Lynn Erkinnen and the playmakers and all these different things and I do. Funny I feel like now some of what I do is a little bit … it’s not a performance because it’s real life but it’s also like you’re standing in front of people speaking or whatever. I’m so glad I had that training to practice.
Dr. Lisa: In some interesting way, everything has led up to the person that you are now and to what you’re doing right now.
Kate: Absolutely, yeah.
Dr. Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Kate Northrup who is the author of Money: A Love Story. She’s also so much more. I really encourage people to go and spend some time on her website and also pick up her book and give it a look. I really appreciate you’re coming in and talking to us today Kate.
Kate: Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun.
Dr. Lisa: From the very beginning of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour, we’ve spoken about the importance of financial fitness in addition to physical fitness and emotional fitness. Also from the beginning, Tom Shepard from Shepard Financial has been one of our biggest supporters. He happens to be one of my biggest personal supporters and someone who helps me with my own financial fitness.
Tom, we’re getting into the end of the year and I know people are thinking about their finances and what things are going to look like as they close out 2013 heading into 2014. What kinds of things do you talk to your clients about?
Tom: That’s funny because now that we’ve reached the fall season and we’re all winding down our summer activities, it’s almost like in Maine, the work season has begun because the play season is over. A lot of times what we’re doing is really trying to check in with people and make sure that they’re on track for their yearend goals.
Checking in with them this time of year, there’s often a lot of stuff that hasn’t been addressed for several months. In some cases maybe several years if it’s somebody who’s new. The first thing that we always try and do is get reconnected to just the fundamentals, the basics, the foundation of what it means to prepare your life financially to grow and develop the way you want it to.
One of the first exercises we’d be doing with people right now is to just try and get it all out of their head. Get it all down on a piece of paper, whether it’s the numbers, the emotions, the goals that you have for yourself, the things that you want to spend money on right now. That’s where we’re really trying to help people get connected to their money and feel like it’s empowering them to power through to the end of the year because we know that come the holiday season along and be focused on other things. Now is a really good time to buckle down and get back to the basics.
Dr. Lisa: You provide some tools to the people that come in to see you?
Tom: We have a great tool called the E-money. It’s an aggregation system. If you got account numbers and user IDs and passwords to other accounts, your credit cards, your brokerage statements, your 401K plan, all that stuff, you can actually get it so that it’s all connected in one place. Then from that, we don’t have to spend time gathering information. We can instead start to look at it. That’s the second thing that we really help people to do is put things into a format so that you can better be able to see what it is that’s in front of you.
If you get it out of your head and then you can actually look at it, it’s often easier to see the big picture, the truth. That’s the second thing that we would recommend that people do this time of year is really try to get connected to how your money fluctuates. It ebbs and flows maybe. Summer was all about spending your money and spending your time. The fall sometimes really needs to be a different season to look at how you spend and to think about how you’d like to do that again next year, which is one of the things we talked about on spot on one of your previous shows.
Dr. Lisa: We get it out of our heads and we get into a system that enables us to look at it differently. Then what do we do with it?
Tom: The biggest thing that we get stuck on is our incomes don’t always align with our expenses. If we’ve had a great month in terms of earnings, maybe a commissions sales person. “Yay, me. I get to go celebrate.” Sometimes we go off the deep ends, spend too much money not realizing that there were three or four big bills coming up that we forgot we were going to have to pay. Then the downtime you end up with less money.
That’s a fluctuating income. We try and encourage people to look and calendar why is it a surprise every year that you spent $160 at the Cumberland Fair. That’s going to happen every single year. We do not escrow our real estate taxes. I know that I have to prepare for that. Christmas happens the same day every year. Yet so many people are surprised.
The next thing we do is really take a look at how do you bridge those gaps? Are you somebody who relies on credit? Do you build your own credit, your own source of income, your own savings to try and get you through those expense periods where you have fluctuation?
Dr. Lisa: You’re talking about really longer term planning. You’re talking about looking at something that could be helpful to somebody in more than a year’s time.
Tom: We’re talking about looking ahead rather than just looking at your current statements. This electronic age, it’s easy to know how much is in your account. You can even maybe program the two checks that you wrote that haven’t processed it. What we’re talking about is take that a step deeper because it’s all just electronic. It’s all sort of invisible. We never handle money anymore. We have to do things to help us get it out on paper, black and white, look at it, see it, understand what that needs to do to alter our behavior so we’re actually prepared for the future.
We need to look ahead. Most people really don’t. Doing that looking ahead, saving that money, leads us to then have money and then what do we do with that money? That’s the next step.
Dr. Lisa: Tell us about that next step.
Tom: If we don’t have enough and we’re not going to use other people’s money, then we need to start looking around to try and identify how we can create value. I was reading Kate Northrup’s book and in it she tells a story about how a friend comes to you and says, “I need to borrow some money to make it to two weeks from now and I’ll pay you back then.”
She talks about your decision about saying yes or no to that. Is there something you could help that person to do that’s not giving them a thousand dollars? Could you help them sit down and look at their resources and figure out how to create the value they need to make it through the next two weeks.
If you teach somebody to fish, they’ll fish for the rest of their life but if you just give them a loan of a thousand dollars then you’re just going to be stressed out about the fact you just loaned a friend a thousand dollars. They’re going to be stressed out about it. It’s all going to be this burden, this chain. That’s what debt has created for people. We like to do that work to try and help them figure out how to get beyond that.
The trick there though is to do that in a way that doesn’t make them feel like getting out of debt has to be sole reason for their existence.
Dr. Lisa: Do you have another tip for us in this area?
Tom: You got to get connected to your money. If you don’t understand why to save, if you don’t understand why you should have some money, if you can’t hold on to money, if you don’t realize that it can have value beyond today or yesterday but what can it do for you tomorrow, then you’re never going to want to have it. You’re never going to want to actually own assets. That’s the biggest thing that we try to do with people is make sure that when they evaluate their expenses and you look at your incomes and you figure out how to actually have some savings, that that savings should do three things for you:
The first thing it should do is protect your budget. If you’re going to invest money, you want to make sure you’re investing in things that are going to do well when your budget is being impacted in a negative sense. If we can get you to a neutral place, then you can look at creating a second income. What’s the second income for? The second income is supposed to help make your life easier. It supposed to help you pay down the credit cards. It supposed to help you make your mortgage payments. It’s supposed to help you do things that make life easier.
If you do those two things, it also interestingly enough will lead you to the opportunities that having money and investing it can create for you, which is the growth that most people are looking for out of their money. Sometimes it can come to you because you’re taking care of your foundation first.
If energy costs were $30 a barrel in 2008, when the crisis happened, now they’re $100. Protecting yourself from that increase through some kind of an investment plan actually created the income maybe to help offset the fact that you’ve put gas in your car and key to your home. It also creates an opportunity for you to have growth and appreciation as well.
Dr. Lisa: Tom, I know that you have a wealth of information to offer to people and that people certainly should give you a call to find out more about what you’ve been discussing with us. We also hope that you’ll come in for future shows and offer us some more of these tips so people who are listening today will want to listen to next week’s show and the show after that and the show after that because you’re going to expand on this for us, aren’t you?
Tom: We try to expand on it every single week. There’s a pattern to the way that we actually go about it. Those patterns are depicted in the pictures that we have on our website. The last piece I will leave is that if you’re going to do this work, you got to celebrate the small victories. You have to be grateful for whatever successes you do have because those are the things that keep you coming back for doing this more and more and more.
Use your money is just as important as saving it but using it in a way that actually empowers you and keeps you wanting to do it more and more and more.
Dr. Lisa: Tom, thank you for helping us be more financially fit here on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast. Also thank you for helping me be more financially fit and for all the things that you’ve taught me over the last few years. I appreciate your being part of my world. I know that the people who are listening appreciate your being part of their world as well.
Tom: If I don’t know that you were my financial coach for two years as well, what goes around comes around and I thank you for that.
Dr. Lisa: Tom, what’s the best way for people to reach you?
Tom: Best way to reach me is just to send me an e-mail at [email protected]. If you want to just get some exposure to the seven steps that people need to go through or be successful with their money and they need to repeat them over and over and over again. You can go to shepardfinancialmaine.com which is our website.
Dr. Lisa: Thanks, Tom.
Tom: Thank you.
Dr. Lisa: The goal of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is to help make connections between the health of the individual and the health of the community. The goal of Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes is to deepen our appreciation for the natural world. Here to speak with us today is Ted Carter.
Ted: One of the things that I’ve found particularly interesting about this season that’s just passing now is that people are dealing with end-of-life issues with their parents and with loved ones in a way that I’ve not seen before in this number. What I’m finding is that people want to create a beautiful space for themselves to reflect, remember, share their life experiences and do some deep introspective work.
We start to realize as we age that we only have so much time left and we want to really enjoy that time in a place that we deem to be sacred and special for us and our family and our loved ones. That’s really what I find myself doing most often, is working with people to try to create these spaces that really start to get them to think deeper about what their calling is in life.
I’m Ted Carter and if you’d like to contact me, I can be reached at tedcarterdesign.com.
Speaker 1: We’ll return to our program after acknowledging the following generous sponsors: Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedics Specialists in Falmouth, Maine. At Orthopedics Specialists, ultrasound technology is taken to the highest degree. With state-of-the-art ultrasound equipment, small areas of tendonitis, muscle and ligament tears, instability, and arthritic conditions can be easily found during examination. For more information, visit orthocareme.com or call 207-781-9077.
Dr. Lisa: We at the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour know that our listeners understand the importance of the health of the mind, body and spirit. Here to talk about the health of the body is Travis Beaulieu of Premier Sports Health, a division of Black Bear Medical.
Travis: At Black Bear Medical, we want to help people who want to stay in their homes but can’t access it due to a mobility deficit. Our home accessibility department has some great solutions that allow people to get everywhere in their home. We have ramps and wheelchair elevators for negotiating entrance fairs and stairway lifts that will help people access upstairs room when climbing the stairs becomes unsafe.
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Dr. Lisa: For those of us who grew up in the television era, we always think about the commercial that goes, “Two great tastes that taste great together, chocolate and peanut butter.” I don’t think that Stephanie Cabot is old enough to really remember this commercial. It’s about a chocolate bar. She’s doing the opposite things. She’s bringing two great things together and this would be yoga and cycling.
Stephanie Cabot is the owner, founder, and a cycling instructor at Reve Cycling Studio which is right here in Portland. I think it’s pretty interesting that you’ve managed to do yoga and cycling both in a short space of time in your brand new studio. I wanted to bring you into talking about this.
Stephanie: Yeah. Reve just opened two months ago. The cycling and yoga component is taking off. What it is is it’s 45 minutes of cycling and a room that’s dimly lit, has energizing music, motivating teachers and then you transition in a span of three to five minutes to give you time to actually take a few breaths, decompose and go right in to the yoga studio where you follow it up with a 30 to hour-long yoga class where you come out feeling like a new person.
Dr. Lisa: You yourself, you went to Bates. You played field hockey and squash. You began cycling as part of your training in the offseason.
Stephanie: I did. I originally get into cycling or spinning going into my sophomore year of college. I used it as a training regimen because I had a stress fracture in my foot. I found I couldn’t run or I couldn’t do any of the training that I’d previously done so I could hop on the bike and do interval work. That’s how I originally fell in love with cycling.
Dr. Lisa: On the other side of it is yoga. We know that in order to be strong and fast, we have to be able to work on our endurance and our strength but then there’s the flexibility piece; the flexibility not only of body but of mind that yoga brings.
Stephanie: The great component about Reve is during the cycling classes, you are in a dark environment that allows you not to be competitive with other people in the room. You focus in on your own performance. The same goes with the yoga component afterwards. You really are internally reflecting on everything you’ve just accomplished as well as in cycling, you’re compressing muscles.
Then in this form of yoga, we’re really working to open up the chest, elongate our leg muscles, everything to make it so that you can stay healthy and keep living a very active lifestyle.
Dr. Lisa: Why do this in Portland, Maine? You’re originally from I believe outside of Boston.
Stephanie: That’s a great question. I came to Portland a little over a year ago after graduating from Bates. I took a little span of traveling time. Since coming back when I originally decided to open up Reve, there wasn’t an indoor cycling studio and especially one with the yoga component. Portland is such a cool city. It has so much going on, so many great activities but there are some cold months.
I personally was looking for a place that I would want to go to exercise and to not make it feel like a regular gym. I wanted to go beyond just the gym environment and create something like a community where people can go and hang out after the class, get to know each other and then really generate this great energy during the class that helps people increase their fitness level.
Dr. Lisa: How’s that working out for you? How’s your community coming along?
Stephanie: It’s going surprisingly well. I am very impressed especially since it’s so young. It’s a new concept but people just keep coming in and it’s fabulous. I get to meet a ton of very interesting people. The Reve community is definitely growing which is great.
Dr. Lisa: Now you’re a relatively recent Bates graduates taking a big chance in opening a new studio in what’s for you a new city, not necessarily a new state but not your home state. This takes some determination and some bravery. How do you keep showing up every day and digging dip so that you can move this forward, something that you really believe in?
Stephanie: I really find that I show up every day to see the people. I know people are depending on me. I know they’re very interested in what we do at the studio, using that inspirational music to motivate people. We’re trying to work together to accomplish a set goal. Just seeing people so excited about coming in and leaving so energized, that keeps me coming back and keeps me energized. Then there’s also my dog who’s always waiting outside who whatever he’s doing, he always brings light to the situation.
Dr. Lisa: You have a background also, I believe in art history, is that right?
Stephanie: I do, yes. I was an art history major.
Dr. Lisa: How has that been brought into the mix as you’re moving forward and the creation of your new business?
Stephanie: That was actually I focused more on architecture, interior design, that type of thing. When I actually built out this space I could put a lot of those tools into the next so that I had a fabulous time designing, working with another Bates graduate, a local contractor in the area. We got to make a very kind of Zen space that you wouldn’t think of as your normal gym space, which was great, which is fabulous. I had a great time doing that.
Dr. Lisa: Have there been any challenges that you’ve encountered along the way?
Stephanie: Definitely marketing. I did not anticipate how difficult it would be. I expected I’ll put up the sign, put up the little blackboard outside and people will just flood in. That’s not the case as a small business there. It boggles my mind how people succeed. You have to be so determined and you just have to get out there. Marketing was definitely something I’m constantly working on every day whether it’s social media, whether it’s print, whether it’s anything. It’s been a big eye opener.
Dr. Lisa: You have this great product and now you need people to know about it really.
Stephanie: Exactly. Exactly. That takes time I think. Word of mouth is big. For right now we’ve got a great core community, a lot of regulars and that’s fabulous.
Dr. Lisa: Do you have a website or Facebook page?
Stephanie: We do have a website and Facebook page, Instagram, Pinterest, we’ve got it all. The website is revecyclingstudio.com. It’s very easy to use, user-friendly. It’s got a great sign-up system where you can reserve a class seven days in advance and cancel up to 12 hours before the class. We want to make it super easy for people to either just walk in and show up or sign-up online if they know their schedule.
Dr. Lisa: Stephanie, I wish you all the best. You have great energy. I know that you’re very enthusiastic about the Reve Cycling Studio. It sounds like a place where people can get many of their needs in that all at the same time, community and some endurance and strength and aerobic workout and also the yoga flexibility and breathing. I encourage people to go to your website or drop in and meet you.
We’ve been speaking with Stephanie Cabot who’s the owner, founder and cycling instructor at Reve Cycling Studio.
Stephanie: Thank you. It was great to be here.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show number 110, Financial Fitness. Our guests today have included Kate Northrup, Tom Shepard, and Stephanie Cabot. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit doctorlisa.org.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter and Pinterest and read my take on health and well being on the Bountiful Blog.
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This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Financial Fitness show. I also hope that you take a moment to think about the low-hanging and maybe not so low-hanging financial fruit in your life. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine, Marci Booth of Booth Maine, Apothecary by Design, Premier Sports Health a division of Black Bear Medical, Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists, Sea Bags, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of Re/Max Heritage, Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes and Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street Portland, Maine. Our Executive Producers are Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Audio Production and original music by John C. McCain. Our assistant producer is Leanne Ouimet. Our online producer is Katie Kelleher. Become a subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle on iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details. Summaries of all our past shows can be found at doctorlisa.org.