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Intentional Financial Planning in the LGBTQIA+ Community with The Debt Free Guys
40 Plays6 months ago
SUMMARY
In this episode of Dirty Money with Bevin and Mike, Mike is hosting solo to bring you a conversation with John and David, the dynamic duo behind The Debt Free Guys. Having spent years in financial services while grappling with their own financial turmoil, John and David know firsthand the struggle of living beyond their means. Despite their professional knowledge, they found themselves $51k in debt. Their journey to financial freedom not only transformed their lives but also ignited a passion to help other Queer individuals achieve the same.
Tune in as Mike, John, and David discuss the unique financial challenges faced by the Queer community. They chat about how traditional financial advice often falls short, emphasizing the importance of addressing both the mathematical and emotional sides of personal finance. From the impacts of community trauma and homelessness to the significance of values-based budgeting, John and David offer practical tips and heartfelt insights.
TOPICS
[01:48] Who are the Debt Free Guys
[16:10] Why Queer Money is Important
[25:10] Queer City Series
[28:35] A Little Intention Goes a Long Way
[40:40] Practical Tips
[54:45] Values Based Budgeting
[62:55] Final Thoughts
RESOURCES & LINKS
Connect with The Debt Free Guys
Instagram: @debtfreeguys
Podcast: queermoneypodcast.com
Website: Living happy, health, and wealthy - Debt Free Guys™
CONTACT INFO
Bevin Morgan:
Instagram: @bevinmorgan & @temple_eanna
Website: www.templeeanna.com & BevinMorgan.com
Mike Poulin:
Instagram: @mjpou56
Dirty Money Podcast:
Instagram: @dirtymoney_podcast
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Dirty Money Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to Dirty Money with Bevin. And Mike. A space to talk about financial topics for folks who don't fit into traditional financial spaces. We believe money is a tool for everyone. Our mission is to provide a literal microphone and platform for queer, BIPOC, polyamorous, and sex-positive individuals. No topic is off the table here.
00:00:31
Speaker
That being said, one tiny little housekeeping note. For those listening who may have others with sensitive ears, the listener discretion is advised because we do not censor ourselves. That's right. You've been warned, but enough from us. Let's get this episode started.
Bevin's Absence & Future Episodes
00:00:52
Speaker
Welcome back to Dirty Money with Bevin and Mike.
00:00:57
Speaker
It's just me today. Uh, Bevan is off doing living her best life today in Costa Rica. I'm sure we'll hear more about it in a later episode. Um,
Guest Introduction: John & David from Queer Money Podcast
00:01:08
Speaker
but today I'm very excited to have John and David, um, from queer money podcast step free guys here. Welcome. Hi there. Hello. We're excited to be here. How are you guys doing? We're amazing. Yeah. We're amazing.
00:01:26
Speaker
Great. So why don't you, I know a lot about you, but why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about where you guys are, who you are, whatever you want to share.
00:01:42
Speaker
Sure. Well, I'm John. I'm David. And if you're watching this on video, easy memory hack is that David is one with a hair, currently wearing a hat, and John is one with a flare. Where we're at right now. Well, we're currently our house hacking investment properties in Toledo, Ohio. We met 20 some years ago in Denver, Colorado on a gay disco dance floor.
00:02:07
Speaker
That was where our journey began. Um, and since then
Financial Journeys: Overcoming Debt
00:02:10
Speaker
we were in Denver for 18 years together. Then we started traveling around the country, then traveling around the world. And then COVID happened and we ended up in Vegas for two years and now we're in Toledo, Ohio. And as you mentioned, John and I are the hosts of the queer money podcast. Uh, we started our personal finance journey, so to speak.
00:02:32
Speaker
in a kind of a slap in the face, come to Jesus, aha moment when we came out to each other about where we were at financially. Just a little backstory, John and I both were working in financial services. And at the time we were kind of living our best life
00:02:55
Speaker
by putting everything on credit cards, living way beyond our means. Even though we were in financial services and we knew all the things and telling everybody what they should be doing, talking to clients about putting money away for retirement, saving for big events in life, us building up an emergency savings. And were we doing any of that? No.
00:03:15
Speaker
And so we kind of had a weekend where we went up to the mountains of Colorado and played fantasy land about buying land and building a vacation home. And on our way back from that vacation, that weekend vacation, somehow we were driving down the highway at 75 miles an hour and somebody said, what can we afford? And that started the whole conversation of,
00:03:39
Speaker
We are financial messes, and we shouldn't even be going up to the mountains for vacation because we have a lot of debt. And that was when we kind of started our own personal finance journey of coming out to each other and getting our financial, you know what, in order. You can say shit.
Inspiration & Launch of Queer Money Podcast
00:03:58
Speaker
It's the Dirty Money Podcast. I feel like I already had my reading. Yeah, so we had our what we like to say, refer to when we're doing our public talks.
00:04:09
Speaker
our O'Shits Creek moment. And it was kind of that realization that we were financial messes. And we went through kind of a process of ourselves of uncovering why it was that we were in the, why we were financial messes. That took us a couple of years. During that time period, we paid off that with $51,000 in credit card debt and became the debt-free guys.
00:04:35
Speaker
We decided that we wanted to help other people. We said we were going to write a book and Oprah was going to have us on her show. And, you know, the whole you get a book, you get a book and we become millionaires and everybody knows who we are and we're sharing our story and blah, blah, blah. We still have not met Oprah. Nine, 10 years later. Although we have still time. We have been featured in her magazine. Yeah. That's why we have that up on the ego wall. Yeah.
00:05:04
Speaker
But during that process of basically becoming the debt-free guys and starting our blog, we also started thinking about
00:05:13
Speaker
The fact that the people that we most resemble and spend our time with are never represented in financial services. We're never seeing any queer folks. We're never seeing same-sex couples. We're not seeing individuals who are outside of the heteronormative world ever represented. And that's when we said, we got to do something about that.
00:05:36
Speaker
That's when the Queer Money Podcast was birthed. How long have you guys been doing the podcast? We are going into our ninth year. It was just this Monday that we crossed our 500th episode. It's weird too because it's an ugly story. We went to FinCon in 2015, which is for those of your listeners who don't know, it's a personal finance conference that a bunch of money nerds and media get together and talk about dorky things like social media and how does
00:06:05
Speaker
encourage our clients and listeners to invest better and save better and all that. But the time we were there, there were 900 attendees and we were the only out gay couple at the conference that year. We recognized this and several people recognized this and said, you know, nobody's talking to your community. We've got military bloggers, we've got mommy bloggers, we've got Christian bloggers, all the black in personal finance are just rocking it and there's nobody doing anything for your community. You should do that.
Challenges & Growth in Podcasting
00:06:35
Speaker
We went home after that conference and we're like, okay, what do we do? We thought we're going to do a little video series called Queer Money on a now defunct platform called Blab. It was kind of like, it's almost like Zoom, but people could drop into your room and watch the conversation. Not everyone can talk, but you can watch.
00:06:55
Speaker
So we did a kind of a week series of that. And it was a clusterfuck of technology. Like it just was a miserable experience. The conversations were great. We enjoyed connecting with people and having the discussions and learning, but the technology was just miserable. That's probably why it's a defunct. But then right after, right when we were going to like wrap things up,
00:07:15
Speaker
Huff Post reached out and said, hey, we've noticed what you're doing. We love what you're doing. If you continue, we'll do features on the queer voices vertical of Huffington Post. It was still Huffington Post at the time. So we're like, OK, well, the universe is saying continue. So we continued. And that didn't materialize the way either party wanted it to. It was OK, but it didn't really produce the results either of us wanted. So we were thinking about dialing it back again just because it was a lot of work. And then that's when we had a brand partner reach out saying, hey,
00:07:44
Speaker
We love what you're doing. Can we sponsor your podcast, like give you money for it? We're like, okay. So the universe is to continue it. So we, with that money, we got a little bit better technology, got a better set up and eight and a half years later, almost nine years later, here we are still podcasting.
00:08:02
Speaker
Yes. I love that. That is the dream, the sponsorship. That's the dream. We've been very fortunate because if it wasn't for our sponsors, we would obviously not still be here doing this, which I think we've done some rudimentary research using Wikipedia, which is how reliable that is, and my own diving into Apple Podcasts. But we think that we're
00:08:26
Speaker
at least one of the top five oldest LGBT podcasts for LGBT people by LGBT people. There are LGBT podcast hosts who've been around a lot longer, but their platform isn't for the queer community necessarily. It becomes gay sometimes because they're gay, but we think we're probably the three or fourth oldest LGBT podcast out there.
00:08:47
Speaker
And then probably the oldest queer finance podcast. Yeah, that's for sure. It's interesting in doing a little bit of research for a partner, we found that something like 90% of podcasts have three episodes or less. There's just a massive number of people who start podcasts and they never get past that third episode.
00:09:13
Speaker
And unfortunately, we've seen that happen with some other podcasts that are, um, personal finance for LGBT people or personal finance adjacent, right? Business or investing or something like that. And we've seen this happen where they get started and then they stop. And you know, there's all sorts of reasons why somebody may start and stop and I had no judgment there, but it's just, you know, we like to say we jokingly, and we said this on our 500th episode, we're,
00:09:43
Speaker
We're not the biggest podcast out there, but boy, do we have staying power. So if that matters to you anywhere in your life, come listen to us. Yeah.
Podcast Production & Community Building
00:09:53
Speaker
We'll put that stuff in the show notes. I, that makes me feel really good. The fact that we're on, Oh God, what episode will this be?
00:10:03
Speaker
Well, it's our third season. So, and we do 12 episodes a season. So we're at, we're over 24 at this point. So, yeah, what was the other stat? There was, um, was it 50? The average podcast has 50 episodes. Yeah. So once you cross 50, you're breaking the average above average. Great. Love it. Shoot for the A. Yeah. I think, you know, if I really, honestly,
00:10:31
Speaker
one of the things, at least for me and, and Bevin, you know, I'm just not here. So I'm not going to necessarily speak for her, but the, in the conversations that her and I've had, I think part of what made this such a passion project for us was our time at the financial gym, because we were just hosts on the show. We weren't necessarily doing all the behind the scenes stuff. It was like, okay, I know how to.
00:10:57
Speaker
like engage and have a conversation. So it was just the like, all right, let's figure out what the other side of things are, where if you've never been on a podcast or like hosted a podcast, it's like doing both of those things is a lot. So I think we definitely, and then the things that I like to do, she doesn't like to do and vice versa. So it works out pretty well of like, I'm going to take care of these things. You're going to take care of these things. And then we'll, and then, yeah, just having really, I think,
00:11:28
Speaker
We've had a lot of feedback with, you know, you guys just allow your guests to kind of just talk and we really enjoy that and you give them a platform. I was like, it's coming across great. Totally, totally. You know, it's like when you put stuff out there, you like, you hope it gets received in a certain way. And so far, so good. Now we just need the, we need the sponsorship part because as much as, as, as
00:11:56
Speaker
a deal as Zencaster is at $20 a month. I would like to stop paying it myself. It is interesting, John and I, and I don't, this is not necessarily a podcast about podcasting or episode about podcasting, but John and I,
00:12:12
Speaker
Today, we spend roughly about $25,000 to $30,000 a year in creating the podcasts, right? Between the video production, the audio production, having a virtual assistant that helps us with scheduling and taking care of guests and that kind of stuff.
00:12:31
Speaker
That doesn't include paying ourselves a penny, right? And we spent, we spend that kind of money. And you know, a lot of times I think people think about a podcast. Well, it's just so easy. You just sit down and you talk for 45 minutes. That's all it is. Right. And John and I figure we probably spend, depending on the episode and the guests and whether we're reading a book for the episode or what kind of research we have to do, we're usually spending anywhere between five and 10 hours each a week.
00:12:59
Speaker
in preparing for the podcast, in promoting the podcast, doing the social media stuff, all that kind of stuff. And I think for a lot of people, we do this with lots of people's jobs, right? We think, oh, well, they're, they're just like, I'm just going to pick on Kristen Wiig at Target. She's just a cashier, right? She's just a cashier at Target. But we all know that there's so much things, so much goes on in her life. But we all, we have all sorts of other stuff that people don't necessarily see that allows us to create content.
00:13:29
Speaker
Well, we are a money podcast, so talking about the realities of podcasting is totally on
Queer Financial Challenges & Historical Context
00:13:39
Speaker
brand, which is fine. I spent a total of $240 on this podcast last year.
00:13:48
Speaker
Hopefully it doesn't seem that way. But you know, you're spending time, right? You're spending time doing the production. Yeah. Do you quantify how many hours you're doing and how much you should get paid for those hours that you're not currently getting? Right. Yeah. Well, and it's like, and if I think about, you know, we're very fortunate. We, the person that kind of
00:14:13
Speaker
planted the seed for the podcast. We actually had her on last season.
00:14:21
Speaker
Kristen, she is a incredible human. We call her our show note fairy. She writes, I send over the audio. She listens to the podcast. She creates all the show notes and she does it all for free. She's just like, I love doing this. I'm like, great. Because the one thing I was not looking forward to was writing show notes.
00:14:48
Speaker
very, very, you know, very appreciative to have her in our corner. And she's been such a huge support for, for the podcast. So she's actually the one that was like, Hey, cause she does the show notes for the gym too. And so she was like, Hey, I miss you on the podcast. How have you been blah, blah, blah. You should start your own. I was like, well, you know, another white veteran with a podcast, you know,
00:15:15
Speaker
A lot of you out there. Oh, yes. Very much. Yes. A veteran, a veteran podcast. Yes. They're a dime a dozen. It's like I got out. What am I going to do? I'm going to talk about my time. You know, like it's a it's a whole thing. Yeah. I don't know how to check that out. Maybe. I do want to circle back.
00:15:43
Speaker
about your story because I think that it's such a, not to say your story isn't unique, but I think it is a shared experience for a lot of people in our community. So I do want to dive into kind of, and I know this is a topic near and dear to both of your hearts. So kind of just the financial state of the queer community.
00:16:12
Speaker
and your thoughts, your feelings, and we'll kind of go from there.
00:16:16
Speaker
Yeah, we have lots of thoughts and feelings. It's our entire brand. Well, I'll just say one of the things John and I do public speaking and one of the things that we, one of the talks that we do is called Why Queer Money? And the reason why we do that and why people actually pay us to come and speak to groups of people about this is because of the fact that there are unique differences for LGBT people when it comes to
00:16:47
Speaker
how we relate to money, what we do with money, whether it's earning it, spending it, saving it, it's very different for us. And I'll let John take over here. I know he has a bunch of data in his head.
00:17:04
Speaker
Yeah, we both have a bunch of data in our head. But David and I like to say that you got the personal side of personal finance, you have the finance side of personal finance. And the personal side is about 80%. I'm sorry, the finance side is about 80%. And it makes up like the dollar works for you the same as it does for me. We both swipe our credit cards the same way. Credit scores are calculated the same way for all of us. And that's
00:17:27
Speaker
regardless of your background, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, creed, whatever, it's the same for everybody. But there's that 20% that makes it personal. And it's that 20% where it is based on your background, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, creed, religion, country of origin, all that other stuff that makes you as a human. And like the Pareto principle, that 20% has an overshadowing effect on the entire 100%.
00:17:53
Speaker
So while yes, a dollar works the same for me as a dollar works for you, my money story could be completely different than your money story and so we'll use that dollar differently and then we'll get different results and that could be beneficial or could be negative or could be neutral. But that's how when people push back and say,
00:18:11
Speaker
just because you're gay doesn't make money different. Well, it actually does. We know that just like there's a gender pay gap, there's a sexual orientation and gender identity wage gap. We're less likely to be included into the boys club and going to the golf matches and going to the bar with our colleagues and peers. So we don't get that camaraderie with our boss or the people who might become our boss someday.
00:18:36
Speaker
40% of us still, even today, according to the Williams Institute, our youth are homeless. And so we're starting out from life behind the eight ball. So very often we either don't go to college and then we're sort of stuck in that particular demographic of the income. But very often when we do go to college,
00:18:54
Speaker
we're assuming most, if not all of that debt ourselves, we're not necessarily getting support from mom and dad to help us subsidize that. So that when we graduate from college, as student loan hero found a couple of years ago, we have much more student loan debt. And then those people who have more student, the more student loan that you have, the more credit card debt you also tend to have. So we
Impact & Complexity of Financial Goals in Queer Communities
00:19:16
Speaker
started careers out a little bit behind the eight ball, trying to,
00:19:20
Speaker
climb the corporate ladder is a little bit more challenging. And that's just a couple of the numbers that I can think of. Right. And that doesn't even include the whole side of just what our community has gone through over the last few decades with the AIDS crisis and things like that, where it's like people weren't thinking about retirement.
00:19:44
Speaker
they were thinking, they were just trying to survive. And so when you add in that trauma and that like actual what's happening in my life, it's hard, like, cause yeah, you can tell anyone to save for retirement, but like so many in our community don't feel like they're going to make it to retirement. So it's like, why am I, why am I going to save for something that I may not, you know, achieve?
00:20:12
Speaker
And I still think that it's actually becoming, that's becoming more common across the queer or not, because it's just the state of the world right now. I feel like a lot of people are like, why am I gonna save? The earth's gonna die. Like, you know, like, that's kind of becoming a slight joke, but people are kind of feeling that with how things are going with, you know,
00:20:40
Speaker
the, we keep getting these once in a lifetime weather events and they keep happening. How many times are they going to happen? So yeah, I think it's, it's important to, to bring that to like two with, with just how our community trauma affects our.
00:21:00
Speaker
personal finance story. And it's so intertwined, but we don't always talk about it. Yeah. David and I have been saying for years that there's, especially for gay men, there's this hangover effect from the HIV AIDS crisis. Because there was a period of 10 to 20 years
00:21:19
Speaker
where gay men were almost certain that they were going to die in their 20s and 30s and 40s. In that regard, it really made no sense to save for retirement because you're not going to be there until 67 or certainly 80 years old.
00:21:34
Speaker
Couple that with the idea that okay. Well, if I want to live here for a short time, I'm gonna make the most of it So I'm gonna spend the money that I have I'm gonna take out whatever money I can for my insurance Travel the world have the amazing clothing like have just amazing experiences for the short duration that I'm here and we've now since had a
00:21:54
Speaker
a lot of advancements in healthcare, and now a lot of gay men who swore they were gonna die in the 80s and 90s are still alive today. And now they're struggling because they don't have money in retirement, they don't have places, they're not living the amazing life that they, I guess, would have otherwise hoped if they knew they were going to be living longer. And we just interviewed intuitive healer Scott Clover, who's gonna be on our podcast in a couple weeks, and he kind of affirmed this is exactly the,
00:22:21
Speaker
the ethos that the community adopted. And then you add that on top of media, especially LGBT media, there's an archetype of a successful gay man. We've all got washboard abs and amazing arms, and we wear fitted suits, and we have this high-powered corporate career, and we always live in New York City or LA, and we have this amazing life.
00:22:45
Speaker
For those who don't aspire to that or can't attain that, there's almost like this constant dig, like, I'm just not a good enough gay. And we've been doing this series on the podcast, a bonus series every Thursday we published called the Queer City Series, where we analyze the most affordable LGBTQ plus friendly cities in each state. And
00:23:06
Speaker
I don't want to say it's vitriol, but the negative comments that come from those who live in the coasts whenever we cover anything in the middle of the country. And there are huge percentages of LGBT people who live in what many of us refer to as flyover states.
00:23:23
Speaker
those of us who don't live in New York or LA, constantly getting this message from media that unless we're in one of those two coastal cities, then we're less than, but we're kind of getting evidence that the community, or at least a percentage of us, actually believes that. Yeah, that's tough. I will say as someone who grew up in a rural town,
00:23:51
Speaker
Uh, even in a blue state, I would say where I grew up was probably more purple. You know, the one, the one gay bar has since closed. So it's like the sense of community is hard sometimes, I think in, in when you're not.
00:24:13
Speaker
when you don't have the high concentration of queer people to support things like a bar or community center or whatever. There's not a whole lot of
Systemic Disparities & Empowerment Strategies
00:24:26
Speaker
places for us to go, I feel like. And that's where sometimes probably those feelings are rooted from people that are casting judgment on places that aren't their hub.
00:24:43
Speaker
So I think, yeah, but it's like, how do you, that brings up a point of like, well, how do we build those spaces and community so that people hopefully don't have that kind of feeling towards non-cities? Right. It was really interesting. I think that
00:25:07
Speaker
John and I have had a couple of experiences personally, but as well as doing this series. For example, when we posted on TikTok about the state of West Virginia and the judgy gaze, the bitchy gaze came out. And what was so funny is then all of a sudden, all these people from West Virginia, these queer people from West Virginia were on there saying, Charleston's a great city. Morgantown's a great city.
00:25:33
Speaker
Uh, you know, and they started listing all these places and things to do in the community. And I was like, we, I think what happens is like you said is if there isn't the, the, the seven different gay bars that I can go to Monday through Sunday, then all of a sudden it's not a worthy gay city. Right. But the reality is one of the things that we are finding is that in some of these locations, there's a stronger.
00:25:59
Speaker
gay or queer community in these locations. And I hear we actually know somebody who moved from Idaho to Los Angeles, a queer black man moved from Idaho to Los Angeles.
00:26:17
Speaker
And decided to move back to Idaho because he felt like the community in Idaho was more accepting and loving towards him. Right. And I think that that's one of the things that we forget is that we are a community. We're not a bar. We're not a location. We're not a monolith. Right. We're a community and.
00:26:35
Speaker
for that reason, we need to think about and be engaged with each other. But I think one of the other things kind of turning it back to the financial side is that as a community, we need to understand that there's a spectrum there as well when it comes to our financial capabilities, our financial privilege, and our actual knowledge of what to do when it comes to the personal side of money.
00:27:01
Speaker
And I think about people who are living in some of these locations, they may have chosen to live there to stay in some of these locations. One, because they want to be that visible person for that queer kid who does not have a supportive family. Or maybe they are the people who are working on trying to get a center in that location.
00:27:23
Speaker
or they're supporting the local LGBT organizations when they're, because there isn't a lot, there aren't a lot of people there who are supporting them. Or you may be, you know, I think about a college kid whose family doesn't have the money to send them out of state for school. We know going out of state for school is very expensive. Yeah. Would we all like to go to UCLA or USC or NYU? Of course we would. You know, these, these, these schools that are surprised you said UCLA in there. What?
00:27:52
Speaker
I'm surprised UCLA in there. Well, UCLA is a very, very welcoming school to the, uh, to, to the LGBT community. Colorado buffs. What's that? You're a ZU bus fan. Who I, I'm not talking about sports, but I think that, you know, there are a lot of different reasons. And when we, when we myopically say, well, I could never live in that location because it doesn't have enough gay bars or gay coffee shops or whatever that may be, we're really discounting the reasons why someone may choose or have to live in those places.
00:28:22
Speaker
Yeah. And it's funny that you bring up the spectrum of, of finances, cause I'm, I'm kind of seeing that this weekend here in DC. So I was out and about last night after my shift and I know this is going to be produced later, but this weekend here in DC is project glow, which is like a big three day outdoor festival.
00:28:51
Speaker
And so people are coming from all over the country to come here.
00:28:58
Speaker
It's almost like an EDM thing going on. And everyone last night kept asking me, did you buy tickets? Did you buy tickets? And I was like, no, the weekend pass was almost $300. I've already planned my summer trips and travel, and I've budgeted what I've budgeted, and that's it. And they're like, oh, well, you know.
00:29:24
Speaker
Nope. Just put it on a credit card, Mike. No! Paying twice as much for it over the time period that you have to pay it off.
00:29:35
Speaker
But it's just, you know, it's that just seeing it kind of like really kind of in play right now this weekend because of what's going on when, when these big events and big festivals and things happen, people are like, where are you going? And then it's like next weekend's purple in Texas. And like, people are like, are you going to that? I'm like, Nope, I've already planned out what I'm doing. I'm going to do what I'm going to do.
00:30:00
Speaker
We just, I think that brings up a good point. It's like a lot of times I think that our community and we know where this is rooted, but I think a lot of times our community has a hard time saying no.
00:30:15
Speaker
We never want the party to stop, right? We're like the little kid whose parent is trying to pry away the iPad from them so that they will eat their mac and cheese and chicken nuggets, right? I mean, we have so many great options of other things to do out there that are enjoyable.
00:30:38
Speaker
that allow us to to commune with people who are like us but we oftentimes feel like we must attend these events we must be seen at these events right and for for some of us we put ourselves in financial peril because of it.
00:30:54
Speaker
Because it's not just getting the ticket, right? Because God forbid somebody sees you in the same outfit at this event that they saw you in a weekend or two ago. And of course, you need three outfits because it's three days, right? And then it's all the alcohol that you have on top of that and the traveler do that. And hey, we're going to probably be messes. Why don't we get a stay at a hotel close by so we can just walk home instead of drive or get an Uber? It's never just the ticket price. But it's not to say you can't do that.
00:31:20
Speaker
We're
Community-Driven Financial Education & Overcoming Stereotypes
00:31:21
Speaker
certainly not telling people they can't go to the festivals and enjoy that, but it's having a little bit of sense of what is it you want your life to look like, not just today, but out in the future. The most common question we still get today is from older gay men in their 50s and 60s who have not done anything to save for retirement saying, what are my options?
00:31:40
Speaker
You have options, but quite honestly, they're limited, especially relative to what somebody in their 20s and 30s could do. And there's this hyperbolic discounting, right? We put more emphasis on today than thinking 30 or 40 or 60 years out. YOLO. YOLO, exactly.
00:31:59
Speaker
So it's hard, right? It's really antithesis to the way that our brain is structured to say, okay, I'm going to put more emphasis on what my life is going to be when I'm 60 years old than it is when I'm 21 years old, and I just got my permit to be able to start drinking in public.
00:32:14
Speaker
Right. But we can't, we have to, that's the very reason why we started the podcast and why we're always receptive to being on other people's podcasts, because we have to start having this conversation that maybe just somebody's like, okay, all right, I should start, maybe after GLOW, I'll start to put $10 into my Acorns count every month.
00:32:33
Speaker
Or whatever it is you need to do, whatever your goal is to try to move yourself a little bit further. And if you can start that when you're in your 20s or even 30s, your life will look monumentally different. 30 years down the road when you want to retire and you won't be asking, hopefully we're not still podcasting in 30 years, but you won't be asking us. Talk about stale mail and bail.
00:32:58
Speaker
We'll have to steal part down. We won't be still, we'll have been gay. We'll have been gay as a sponsor. No pun intended. You can shift, you can probably, by that time you can probably shift what you're podcasting about.
00:33:14
Speaker
You know, you shift, you just shift topics and then you're still relevant, you know? Let's talk about our gout and my arthritis. No, but I, you know, it's, and it's funny that you bring that up about how people can still do that. Like I, just to give our listeners like a concrete example with planning out. So, you know, even with it last year, I was unemployed for six months. I went through most of my savings.
00:33:45
Speaker
I'm rebuilding my savings while also working through a separation, but I'm still able to find, put away money for travel because I am figuring out what I want and
00:34:01
Speaker
what I can do and I've actually used this separation, I'm saving more now single than I was when I was married because we just, I mean, we weren't not saving, but we got to a point where we kind of hit our savings and then we kind of shifted our, shifted priorities and like, we're like, okay, we're good, we're fine.
00:34:29
Speaker
And then we were just making sure that we weren't incurring any more debt, but we weren't actually like actively saving for anything. Cause we could just, when we wanted to do something, we could do something and we had that freedom. But then with my.
00:34:45
Speaker
job loss, we had to shift and then been rebuilding. And so like planning out my summer was like, okay, I have, let's look at my credit card points. Haven't used those in a minute. Yep.
00:35:01
Speaker
And then there's things, so like I'm in the Stonewall Kickball League here in DC, and that's a great sense of community that isn't necessarily at the bar, even though we tend to end up at the bar after the games. We've done Kickball before. No, we're not, no, usually never before. Never before.
00:35:21
Speaker
Yeah. Well, usually the bars aren't open before the games. Have you ever heard of a tailgate? And they actually, they're very clear about using substances during the game. So typically, yeah, people are pretty respectful of that, which is good.
00:35:42
Speaker
But no, it's a really great time and nationals is actually gonna be in Minneapolis in July. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna travel for the weekend and I use points for both the hotel and the flight. And then my partner and I, my partner is also very, we have a travel spreadsheet
00:36:11
Speaker
Wow. So we have tabs for every trip that we do together. So my partner is married. So he has his own trips. He has his trips that he does with his husband. And then we have our trips that we plan together.
00:36:31
Speaker
And so he's a very independent person and we have, um, we're going to market days in Chicago. Um, it's the first time that I've been, um, but that was like, okay, this is going to be my big trip for the summer. Like I'm going to go.
00:36:46
Speaker
going to do all the things. But yeah, so it's not just the hotel and the flights, right? It's also all the different events and festivals and things, because there's all different things that we can do and tickets for this and VIP for this. And so we have a spreadsheet of like, okay, well, I paid for the flights with points for both of us. What does that point value
00:37:11
Speaker
in turn per dollar and then what has he purchased? And so we have a whole spreadsheet of like who paid what and who owes who at the end of the trip. But it's really, you know, I know not a lot of people do that where it's like, you know, we're going to plan this out and we're going to make sure that it's even or as even as it can be in terms of fair and who's going to pay for what. And I feel like if
00:37:42
Speaker
people put just a little bit more, more planning into doing these, these things. I think they would, you know, it doesn't take a lot of effort necessarily. It just takes a little bit more pre-planning, but it's hard when you've never done that. Right. So the starting of like, how do I plan out these things and festivals and trips and cruises and things that I want to do?
00:38:08
Speaker
But do it in a way that I'm not getting the credit card debt. I'm not finding myself at the end of the year being like, oh, well, you know, especially if you work in like the service industry or something where you're like, oh, well, now I need to pick up a bunch more shifts because I need to pay off all this debt. Right. Get in the what I call the hamster wheel of debt. Right. It's interesting. I'm going to kind of relate this. What you're doing is is awesome. Right. And I kind of relate this to
00:38:37
Speaker
a skin routine, you know, when you see one of those people who is in there, the gays who are in there, you know, I'm just going to pick on the gays, but there are plenty of lesbians and other other people who do this. But there are people who are in their late fifties, sixties or seventies and you look at them and they have never had any work done on their face, but they have they they have this glow. They look they look really, really, really good. And you ask them, well, you know, what did you do?
00:39:04
Speaker
They're not the people who smoke to pack a cigarettes a day. They're not the people who drank a six pack on the weekend or two martinis every night. They're not the people who spent their time out in the sun without wearing sunscreen. They're the people who put lotion on or moisturizer on themselves on a regular basis. They had a routine and they're rewarded for that routine by all of us saying, God, your skin looks great. I hope my skin will look like that someday too.
00:39:32
Speaker
Well, the same thing actually happens with our finances, right? We just figure out these little things, little tweaks that we make to our routine, our money routine, and we end up with this amazing, healthy glow to our life because of being able to go and take that trip or being able to
00:39:52
Speaker
buy brunch with cash or being able to do these various things that you're then able to do because you actually decided this is what I want my life to look like. I want my life to not be the haggard old gay at 45 who looks like he's 70, right? I'm the fresh, young-looking gay who's 70 and everybody thinks he's 50. Yeah, I do appreciate that when I'm out and people are like, oh, are you 28?
00:40:22
Speaker
Thank you. You either have cataracts or you're kind. Which one is it? How much have you had to drink tonight? I was like, I'll take it. No, I mean, that's it's so true. And it's actually funny that you bring up one of the I'm going to call this a queer money hack. If any, any of the listeners are
00:40:48
Speaker
And I know this kind of comes from a little bit
Financial Education & Intentional Spending for Success
00:40:51
Speaker
of a place of privilege, but my American Express card has this amazing
00:40:59
Speaker
feature on it now with like you can split certain transactions or any of your transactions and it can connect with Venmo and if you so like if you're out with a bunch of people and the really amazing thing here in DC is because tax is 10%
00:41:23
Speaker
you just multiply whatever you got by 1.3 to add in gratuity and and tax which is it's great uh it's very easy after you've had you know however many mimosas the math is always the same yeah exactly
00:41:38
Speaker
And so a lot of times, as I talked about with Stonewalls, the team will go out for brunch. And I see that as an opportunity to get points. Totally. Because I'm going to pay. And then so I'm recently sober, too. So I take care of the table. And then I make sure everyone at the table sends me their Venmo.
00:42:04
Speaker
But I can write in the, my American Express app, if I'm using that card, I can request their amount and it goes right onto the balance of the card rather than like going to my Venmo and then have to transfer from my Venmo to my bank account and not my bank account to pay off my credit card because that's so many steps that you can forget.
00:42:27
Speaker
Right. And then you're like, why is my credit card bill so high? Oh, I paid for brunch and I already used that money in my Venmo. So if anyone's listening, American Express has a great feature now with that. Not sponsored by American Express, but just I'll throw this. John and I did something similar when we, when we decided to get married.
00:42:51
Speaker
We were, well, I asked John the first time in 2006 and then things went to hell in a hand basket in California and we weren't able to go out and get married. And so we waited for a long time. But the nice thing about waiting for a long time is John and I set aside money for it. When we decided to get married, we opened up four credit cards.
00:43:17
Speaker
before we, the probably about six months before we got married and we put different amounts of different things on every single one of those four credit cards. We got two flights to Ireland for free and we got seven nights in hotels in Ireland for free. So that portion of our honeymoon was basically paid for because we decided to save up the money and use, use that cash to pay off those credit cards rather than just charging the trip and paying it off when we got back.
00:43:46
Speaker
which literally probably saved us.
00:43:49
Speaker
somewhere in the range of six to $8,000 because we decided to do that. But then we also used United Miles and when you, what's the rule? As long as we pick another place within the same region, we can get another stop somewhere else and stay as long as we want another stop for no additional charge, then it would cost us to go to Ireland. And so we ended up going to Spain. That flight was essentially free. So we did have to pay for our hotel in Spain, but I mean, at that point,
00:44:19
Speaker
There's only a week. Yeah, we got an Airbnb for I think 11 days or something like that.
00:44:26
Speaker
So it's just, it's really just about being intentional. And back to my point earlier, David said, uh, you know, we got out of, uh, we had to do some soul searching. What we realized when we had $51,000 in credit card debt was that part of what we were doing is we were constantly buying things, constantly buying new clothing, constantly going on vacations, going to all the happy hours, the bars, the clubs, all the gala's and everything. And when we looked at our David itemized, itemized all of our expenses for an entire year. And when we looked at where all of our money was going,
00:44:57
Speaker
We're like, some of this stuff is not making us as happy as you would think with as miserable as we are with our finances. We were paying $10,000 a year in credit card interest payments. We're like doing all this brunch and all these happy hours. It's actually not that rewarding. So what do we have to change to align our spending with our values so that the spending that we do do provides us more satisfaction so we don't have to keep chasing on that hedonic treadmill and keep chasing after more and more purchases.
00:45:26
Speaker
just because either there's this expectation from our community or because we just don't know how to stop chasing that dopamine rush. I'm so glad that you brought that up because that is. I think that is at the core of, you know, intentional spending, value based spending is so simple, but it is also goes against everything
00:45:56
Speaker
that our society wants us to do. Absolutely. Consumption, consumption, consumption. Exactly. Capitalism doesn't want you to think about your money. Capitalism just wants you to spend it. And I think that that is at the core of what I do as a coach is really help people understand the power that they have in
00:46:24
Speaker
understanding what's important to them. And I can't tell you how many times when I sit down with a new client and I, you know, I asked them, you know, so, you know, the first part of the conversation, we don't even talk about money. I just want to know who they are, what they do for work, what, what do they do in their free time? What do they, how do they spend their time? And it's always really interesting
00:46:53
Speaker
to then talking to them 20, 30 minutes, right, about their life, about what's important to them. And then I asked them what their financial goals are. And it's sometimes they're like, oh, well, you know, I want to do the normal things. Like I want to buy a house. I want to, I want to have, we want to have kids. We want to do this, do that. And I'm like, I stopped them and I'm like,
00:47:20
Speaker
Cause are, are those actually your goals? Because we just spent 30 minutes talking about how much you love to travel or you would like to travel or like you like to spend time with your family or you do these events or like, like, so what, what is important to you? And this is just like.
00:47:44
Speaker
Huh. And I feel like a lot of times as a, as a coach, a financial coach, so many people don't actually know what's important to them because they're just being fed, you know, what should be important to them, even if it doesn't align with who they are. And that even comes from, I think sometimes it's not just like media and advertising, you know, there's,
00:48:13
Speaker
There's a reason there's so much money put into advertising, right? But even expectations from family, spouses, friends. And then I think it's even, as we know it, I think it's even heightened in the queer community with expectations of community, like what is expected as you know, we've already touched on that. So the intentional spending I think is such a core importance of figuring out
00:48:44
Speaker
your financial freedom. And I use financial freedom as in using your money in the way that you want to, right? And being intentional and being okay, when you're more intentional with your money, you're less, you don't feel guilty for using it, right?
00:49:01
Speaker
Like you're spending your money on the things that are important to you. And that's often what I tell people, yes, there are pillars of financial health, right? Like we need to save, we need to save a certain percentage, but what are those going towards? That's specific towards your journey. And whether retirement, savings goals, emergency fund, whatever that may be,
00:49:24
Speaker
But if you're living your life the way that you want, to me, that's financial success. Financial success isn't, oh, I have millions of dollars, because if you're unhappy as a millionaire, is that really being successful? Right.
00:49:43
Speaker
Often I tell people, I try to empower people regardless of what your salary is or your situation. If we can focus on what's important to you, we can figure out what financial success looks like for you. John
Reality of Queer Finances & Future Plans
00:49:59
Speaker
and I have a practice that we do with our clients where we ask them to what we call give a return on happiness to their spending.
00:50:11
Speaker
And when you look at, you know, when you break out, you do your spending analysis, let's say for six months or a year, and you look at all these buckets and I'm spending X percentage on dining out and X percentage on travel and X percentage on groceries, and you have all these different buckets, we say rate how you feel about that spending.
00:50:29
Speaker
Give it a one to five. A one, you don't like it at all. Like, for example, when we were paying $10,000 a year in credit card interest, we didn't like that at all, right? And then the other end is fives, where you actually see yourself using your money to actually do what it is that you want your life to do.
00:50:50
Speaker
And example of that was after we paid off our debt, John and I started putting money into our 401ks and we were building up financial strength for ourselves in the moment, but we were also starting to see the fabulous future that we were going to have. And so many of us get stuck in this.
00:51:06
Speaker
this trap of chasing that dopamine rush of spending and buying and buying and buying, and we forget about the purpose of money. The purpose of money is a tool for you to be able to get the life that you want.
00:51:21
Speaker
going to give you happiness, just having the money. It's how you use that money that can actually help you get a level of happiness. And so many of us spend our money on the ones twos and threes in our life thinking that that's what's going to get us happiness.
00:51:38
Speaker
When if we just shifted to spending more of our money on the fours and fives, the things that truly bring us happiness, the reality is the vast majority of us would actually naturally start spending less money because we no longer need to spend money on the ones and twos that don't really bring us happiness because we are getting a fulfilling, we have a fulfilling life, we're getting fulfillment out of the money that we are spending.
00:52:03
Speaker
And that then allows you to get closer to your goals, especially because more often than not those fours and fives are putting money towards those things that are in both in the present and in the future. Right. Or you're, like I said, you're, you're, even if they're not necessarily, if they're more for immediate, but you're, you are at peace with where that money's going. Right. So.
00:52:33
Speaker
I think, I really love that practice. I think an interesting thing that I've seen with something similar is that sometimes people have this guilt of like, these things are giving, oh my goodness. These things are, they, to me, they feel like a four and five.
00:52:59
Speaker
but I'm gonna rate them as a one because I shouldn't be spending my money on that. And I'm like, hold up. Exactly, exactly. And so the conversation around, once again, it goes back to what's important to you, not what, you know, the financial gurus say you should be, you know, the whole like shaming people like, well, if you have debt, the only reason you should be in a restaurant is because you're working there.
00:53:25
Speaker
Oh, shut the fuck up.
00:53:32
Speaker
And it's just, it's the conversation that needs to be about taking that time sitting at, I can't, I often tell my clients, I'm like, I can't tell you what's important to you. I can show you through your spending, what's potentially important to you, right? Because how we spend our money is showing us what our values are. And if you,
00:54:01
Speaker
If that's not aligning with what you think your values are, that's where we need to start. What is happening here? What's the disconnect, right? And if there are things that you truly are unhappy about what you're spending your money on, well, let's dig in. Why is that? What's the why behind the numbers? Because the numbers don't lie, but the numbers also don't tell the whole story. Numbers are like hips.
00:54:28
Speaker
What? They don't like it. I got it. Shakira. She should pay her taxes. I'm just kidding. I don't know how that case ended. She could have been right. It's interesting you bring that up because there's a kind of a life coach motivational kind of person who's written a whole number of books. His name's Dr. Demartini. And he said this a number of years ago. He said,
00:54:58
Speaker
Show me where you spend your money and then I'll show you what you value in your life. And what's interesting is that a lot of times we will spend money on something that we think we value.
00:55:12
Speaker
but we don't really know the underlying real value there, right? So for example, I spend $100 every weekend on buying brunch, right? Let's just use that as a scenario. Well, is it that what you're truly looking for is an incredible, amazing meal that you're willing to drop $100 on or is it something else that you really want?
00:55:36
Speaker
Because more often than not, well, you're going to brunch because you want to be around a group of people. What you're really valuing there is not the meal and the $10, $15, $20 mimosas. What you're really valuing are spending time with people that are important to you.
00:55:54
Speaker
You can get that without having to drop $100 every weekend on lunch. Is it fun to do brunch? Absolutely. Can you do brunch? Absolutely. But remember what it is that you're truly valuing. I remember when John and I were paying off our debt, we're social people.
00:56:13
Speaker
And we wanted to still be around our friends. One of the things that we did was we found that there was going to be a free day at the museum and we hooked up with a group of friends and we said, we're going to the museum for two hours. And then after that, we're going to Cheeseman Park. Everybody bring a sandwich and a bottle of wine.
00:56:31
Speaker
And so every person spent maybe $15 and $20 at most. And we had a day where it was like five hours of everybody having a great time. And that was it, right? We didn't need to spend all of that extra money, right? And there are, we call this the,
00:56:50
Speaker
The not so expensive, not so expensive. Right. There are always alternatives to what you want to do that are cheaper, but get you the same value. Right. You still get that same value of what it is underlying value to you as a person aligns with your values. There's always those cheaper options. Take advantage of those options and use that other money to get yourself something you really want. Maybe it's right. Maybe it's that bag. Maybe it's that trip. Maybe it's that.
00:57:20
Speaker
hitting that certain number in your retirement account. Yeah. Go for it. No, I think, and that's, that's often, I get that a lot with my clients when we start looking, when we start implementing the budget, they're like, well, how like, you know, okay, so what I'm saving for these things and paying down this debt,
00:57:43
Speaker
So I typically use goal-based savings, you know, we do our fixed expenses, we do the savings, and then what's left over for the month, I divide by four, and that's what we have to spend for the week. And, you know, a lot of times they're like, well, how do I make this work? And I'm like, this is the hard part. This is the work.
00:58:05
Speaker
You know, and it's like, the reason I don't line item what I call spending is because every week's going to be different, right? Every week there's, you know, maybe families in town. Maybe you have this work function. Maybe you have, you know, sometimes you have to go and do a Costco run, but you don't have to go Costco every week.
00:58:23
Speaker
You don't have to grocery shop. That is new to me. News flash. Our puppies would be mad. So are you also saying you don't have to go multiple times a week? No. Crazy. No, but you know, and it's like, so that is where, you know, I've, this is the, the, the, the
00:58:44
Speaker
the work that comes in with the intentional spending, right? Is when you are thinking about, okay, this is what I have to spend for the week. What do I have? It's, I call it like, um, to kind of relate it to like fitness and meal prepping. It's like, this is my, I'm going to take 15, 20 minutes on a Sunday just to be like, okay, what do I have coming up this week? Right? Oh, you know,
00:59:13
Speaker
my good Judy's coming in on Friday from LA. So I know they're going to want to go out. So I need to kind of put a number of what I think I'm going to spend and already subtract that from what I have so that it's like, I'm just being intentional of like, Hey, you know, personally, I love getting Starbucks.
00:59:36
Speaker
but I try to do it now once a week. Like that's, that's my, it's not that I don't get to enjoy it. It's just that I'm more intentional about it. And, you know, so maybe, you know, if you have that week, it's like, Hey, maybe I don't,
00:59:53
Speaker
get lunch out at work every day. Maybe I need to, you know, I already bought my food for the week. I need to be a little bit more intentional about, you know, hey, or hey, it's the end of the month. I'm getting close to, maybe I'm over for the week, time for, you know, what can I cook from the pantry, right? All those little like things that you can do of just being more intentional, more aware of how you're using your money is those little tiny habits.
01:00:24
Speaker
The thing I wanted to bring this back is when they're like, well, I still want to hang out with my friends. Like you don't have to spend money to hang out with your friends, right? A lot of times we feel like we do. We're told that, you know, you, we have to go to brunch or we have to go out or we have to go to this dinner. But a lot of times if you were, if.
01:00:45
Speaker
What you said with the whole like, what is the core, right? Is this the time spent? And if you are the friend that brings up, hey, I'm like, you don't have to tell them you're on a budget. You don't have to say, oh, I can't afford that. You can just say, hey, I didn't plan for this week to do this thing. However, I still want to spend time with you.
01:01:07
Speaker
What if we do, or one of the examples I use is like, Hey, I have this food that I have to cook. Otherwise it's gonna go bad. Why don't you come over? I'll cook. We'll do game night here. You know, two birds with one stone, wasting less food.
01:01:25
Speaker
actually using the money, not wasting the money on the food that I bought, and I'm not spending more money by going out. Totally. And still getting that time with friends and community. Exactly. And that's a very... Your community, whoever your friends are, you specifically or those who are listening,
01:01:45
Speaker
Everyone is dying for someone to say, can we please stop spending so much money? When we realized how much debt we had, for us, we wanted to get out of debt as quickly as possible. So we had estimated it would take us about three years. And so we confessed to our friends like, hey, we're financial fuckups. We have all this debt. We want to pay it off as fast as possible. But like you, we still want to hang out with our friends and still stay connected with them.
01:02:10
Speaker
You know, so we said can we start to rain in our spending and some people were like, I should pay off some debt too. Some people were like, we're trying to save for a house that would help us if we didn't go spend out so much money. I just got knocked up. I'm going to have a baby coming. We need to start saving for that thing.
01:02:26
Speaker
Everybody has a goal that would be much more easily achieved if they stop spending so much money. But nobody wants to be the one to say, Hey, can we pull Susie Orman and not spend as much money this weekend? Like nobody wants to be that person. But everybody's waiting for somebody to step up to the plate. So have the balls to say it and do it yourself. Yeah, I think it's just
01:02:50
Speaker
Well, I totally lost my train of thought there, but that's okay. I had something up there with that. Because of my beauty, did it confuse you? David talked about my supple skin. I'll just tack on to what John was just saying.
01:03:05
Speaker
This is, this is an opportunity for you to lead your group of friends, right? John and I jokingly used to call ourselves the Julie Cruz director. And I don't, if you don't know, if you don't know what the love boat is from the seventies, you don't get, you haven't lived, you don't get this reference, but Julie, Julie was the woman who walked around and had the, the.
01:03:26
Speaker
clipboard and would organize all the events for everybody. Well, that's kind of what we became for our group of friends for a while there. We literally have a calendar that we block off and say, this is a free event. Let's go do this. This is a cheap event. Let's go do this. When you fill your calendar up,
01:03:45
Speaker
with things like that, not only does it help you to be able to say to your friends, hey, I'm doing this, do you want to go with, but also to your friends who make a lot of money and can spend on whatever the fuck they want to spend on. It's a great way to be able to say to them,
01:03:59
Speaker
I would love to do that with you, but you know what? I already have this plant." Instead of saying, I can't afford that or feeling bad, it helps remove that scarcity mindset from your thinking when you're thinking about your money, of not having enough money to be able to do it. What you're really saying is, I've got something just as fun to do.
01:04:21
Speaker
Maybe your rich friends or who you think your rich friends are may enjoy doing something where they don't have to spend money as well because they're actually doing something different than just spending money. Yeah.
01:04:34
Speaker
the thought came back while we were. It's all coming back. It's all coming back to me now. Someone's just waiting for someone to say it, right? It's so funny because it's so true. It's so true. And I know that you guys know this statistic. I forget who
01:04:59
Speaker
I've even done it as the social experiment, but it's like 70% or higher of people would rather tell a stranger their favorite sex position than what's in their bank account. And to me, that's wild. Why are we okay with talking about sex more openly than we are about money?
01:05:21
Speaker
And all it is is creating more problems. It's all part of the capitalism guilt. That's what I'm calling it. It's because we equate our career, our income, our net worth with our value as a person.
01:05:38
Speaker
somehow the two that has all become intertwined. And so I'm happy talking about sex life because that doesn't necessarily put unless you're really good at sex and or really bad at sex. It doesn't really, you know, nobody can really grade you, right? And say, okay, you're good at sex. You're not worthy as a person, right? But I have so many thoughts right now. But it's they have an E rating, not an X rating.
01:06:02
Speaker
But we tie our value to our income, our net worth, and we have to disconnect the two. The two are just not synonymous until we separate the two. I think it is the consumer culture. It is this neo-capitalism plutocracy that we live in that's influencing that. So that's likely not going to change, at least not change anytime soon and not change without a lot of bloodshed.
01:06:29
Speaker
So what are you going to do yourself today to take responsibility for your situation for the next 40 or 60 years that you're here on this earth? You start
Upcoming Queer Money Live Tour & Closing Thoughts
01:06:39
Speaker
to do the work to separate yourself from that, letting your community, society in general, tie your value to your net worth or to your income.
01:06:49
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, well, I do want to be respectful of time, not only of y'alls, but of our listeners. We try to keep these about an hour. So, and I feel like we still have so many things to unpack, but that's okay. Before we wrap up, is there anything that you guys would like to plug or, or put out there for our listeners?
01:07:15
Speaker
Yeah. So John and I are doing another Queer Money Live tour this year. So we will be doing live events in May and Los Angeles. Santa Barbara, LA, Denver, Detroit, Cincinnati, and Columbus, Ohio. Yeah. So those are the locations. Right now. But if you want to join us live somewhere, then... Winooski, Vermont. Yeah.
01:07:44
Speaker
We're close to signing that contract. Yeah. So well, I'm just going to put out there. It's going to happen. Um, yeah. So if you can, uh, if you can join us for one of those events, or if you would like us to come to your town, let us know. You have a location and a sponsor. We're happy to make that happen. Otherwise check us out on the criminal podcast, wherever you've listened to podcasts or watch YouTube. And I know you guys do.
01:08:08
Speaker
Are you guys doing, you do a, like a credit card cohort thing? Are you guys still doing that? No, we had our credit card pay off course and then we had several iterations of that, but we, um, we retired that. We do, however, they'll have the best of that material, um, in our, what we call the queer money foundation. So if you go to queermoneypodcast.com, download the, our, uh, our, um, our initial offer is a Kickstarter, but you can go purchase the foundation if you'd like to.
01:08:38
Speaker
I get access to that return on happiness calculator that David talked about. Love that. That'll all be in the show notes. Thank you, Kristin. And then finally, any last pieces of advice or also is there anything outside of the tour that you guys want to put out there in the universe for you? What's next?
01:09:07
Speaker
I would just say, our community, I'll leave people with this. Our community likes to talk about how we are not a monolith, but I don't think we necessarily actually put that into practice in our everyday lives every day. So similar to what we talked about, figure out what your values are, start aligning your spending with your values, not the community's, not someone else's, not mom and dad, whomever. Start living according to your values. And I think, as David alluded to,
01:09:34
Speaker
your spending will start aligning accordingly and you'll start to find money that you didn't know you had or have a little bit more flexibility than you thought you could. I'll add, give yourself some grace. We live in a world where almost every single one of us, yes, even these straight white people, have dealt with some level of trauma in their lives, whether it's from our parents, whether it's from the community, our politicians, wherever we're dealing with that trauma.
01:10:02
Speaker
And that trauma can raise its ugly head in our spending habits. Give yourself some grace. Remember that taking care of your finances is a form of self-care, that it will have repercussions and other aspects of your life to help reduce your stress or your anxiety, but nobody is perfect. None of us here are perfect when it comes to our finances. It's okay if you make a mistake from time to time, just learn from it. Everything financial is fixable.
01:10:31
Speaker
Oh, I like that. It's great. I got that from Shannon. That was the I cannot that have to give credit to her. That has been a mind shift for me in terms of.
01:10:48
Speaker
you know, and also understanding that even though it's fixable, I may not like the answer of how it's fixable, but everything is still fixable. Well, thank you so much, John and David. It was great to have you on here. Thank you for our listeners.
01:11:07
Speaker
for making it through, if you made it through this whole episode. I know we went on for a little bit, but I think it was all in good fun. So thank you so much. Until next time, I'm Mike. Obviously, Bevan is not here, but she will be back. And thank you so much, John and David. Thanks for having us. Bye.
01:11:38
Speaker
If you've enjoyed today's episode, please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. That's the easiest way to support our show. We hope you took away a new nugget of information or perspective today, and we're grateful you took the time to listen to us. Until next time, bye. Bye.