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00:00:01
Coach Hill: How Pro Athletes Train Their Money
13 Plays1 day ago
In this episode, Eric talks with Coach Hill, founder of Financial Footwork and author of Train Your Money, about the hidden beliefs and behavioral patterns that shape our financial lives.
Coach Hill approaches money the way a coach approaches movement: most problems are not about information, they are about habits. Drawing from her work as a financial coach, she explains why budgeting apps and spreadsheets rarely solve the deeper issue, and why sustainable change begins with how we think, feel, and act around money.
The conversation explores how early narratives about scarcity, success, and security quietly influence adult financial decisions. They discuss why people often know what they “should” do but still struggle to do it, and how small, consistent behavioral shifts can compound into lasting financial confidence.
Rather than framing money as a math problem, Coach Hill reframes it as a training process. Like any skill, it improves with awareness, repetition, and intentional practice.
This is a grounded conversation for anyone who wants to feel more capable and less reactive when it comes to money.
Topics Covered
- Why financial problems are often behavioral, not mathematical
- The difference between information and transformation
- How early money narratives shape adult decisions
- Why “just budget better” rarely works
- Training money like a skill instead of treating it like a crisis
- The emotional side of spending, saving, and investing
- Building confidence through small, repeatable actions
- Creating financial systems that reduce decision fatigue
Episode Links
- Get her book Train Your Money: https://trainyourmoney.com/
- Financial Footwork: https://financialfootwork.com
- Financial Footwork on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/financialfootwork/
- Coach Hill on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FINANCIALFOOTWORK
For more episodes: https://unfoldingthought.com
Questions or guest ideas: eric@inboundandagile.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Coach Hill's Background
00:00:03
Speaker
Coach Hill, thank you for joining me. Where does today's recording find you? It finds my feet on the ground, which is a rarity because I spend about 200 plus days on a plane and I'm actually at home in Boise, Idaho. So I'm a 10 out of 10 today. you got You got me in a really good place.
00:00:20
Speaker
Would you mind telling me a little bit about yourself? And I suppose I will say for the sake of the conversation, I have read your book. I know we'll talk a little bit about that. It will relate to your work, of course. So I know a little about you, but the people are complex. So do you mind telling me about yourself?
00:00:38
Speaker
I'm an entrepreneur by trade. I'm a master gardener as a hobby. I'm a dog mom and I'm a family oriented human being. i I love my family. I spend the majority of my time with them, ah but I'm probably most well known for my work with the NFL and the NBA.
Understanding Financial Footwork's Origins
00:00:55
Speaker
You, okay, you have this book, Train Your Money, which I read. i enjoyed it. I, and I really do mean that. I liked your book. I think it's the perfect length for what you're communicating. And it gave me a feeling for your voice and ah how I imagine you present when you're speaking or working with clients.
00:01:18
Speaker
So i know a bit about your work, but can you describe I guess, what your business is, who you work with and all that. Yeah, I started a company called Financial Footwork in 2017. And the company was designed all around helping people handle money. And the people I was helping were NFL players. And that was by complete and utter accident. If you would have asked me in college if I would be working with pro sports teams, the answer would have probably been, huh? Just kind of what? What are you talking about? um And my journey through life up until I was about 28 when I founded my company really was, yeah trials and tribulations with family illnesses and money battles and all of that combined. And while that was happening, I was in the finance industry. And so I was learning all about money from a lot of different angles. And I used that to help some of my friends who were making a pretty nice sum of money on an annual basis do something with it um rather than just spend it, blow it, and have to restart when they were done in the league. um And that led me to
00:02:21
Speaker
creating my alter ego coach hill who is my speaking ah my speaking voice i guess you could say when i'm on stage so i do a lot of presentations i do a lot of seminars and keynotes and my job is to convey personal finance in an easy to understand way so my book should i'm really glad that you got that from my book because it should convey finance is not something to be scared of it's something you can ease into and it's something you can learn no matter where you are in life And that has always been my mission. And that's our mission at Financial Footwork is to make personal finance approachable, something that you can do on a regular basis and build positive habits that lead to financial success. So that's why i wrote the book was to complement all the work that we're doing in the pro athlete university and corporate space to really help people understand that you don't have to have a master's in finance to take control of where your money's at, where you want it to go in the lifestyle you want to live.
Collaborations and Trust in Financial Coaching
00:03:14
Speaker
How was it that you came upon or fell into working with professional athletes? Because you said something to the effect of that was not planned, but it did it start with one person or did it open up with a team working with you?
00:03:32
Speaker
It started with a guy by the name of Caleb Thornhill. I will praise this man's name for the rest of my life. He's become a very dear friend and someone I work with very closely. I had a former NFL player who played in the league for quite a long time.
00:03:46
Speaker
One of his passions was helping people in the league. The younger guys below him really pull them up by the bootstraps and make sure that they weren't failing. And one of the things that he noticed was that finance was a problem with NFL players. And it wasn't that they they wanted to spend all their money. It was lack of education or lack of literacy. And his name is Spencer Pasinger. He played at University of Oregon. I went to Oregon State and we had a lot of mutual friends. And I was helping some friends from Oregon State that were in the league. So this kind of goes full circle. But they were making comments about how I should be helping more teams or more guys. And then Spencer said, hey, I want you to meet Caleb.
00:04:25
Speaker
And Caleb just so happened to be the director of player engagement for the Miami Dolphins, which is the one job in each team or at each team that helps the players on and off the field. So his job is to facilitate programming, make sure that the families are taken care of, the players transition from team to team properly, the rookies come in and they get what they need.
00:04:44
Speaker
And I learned all of this through Just osmosis. ah But he asked me to fly to Florida and he said, hey, we we never Zoomed. we I didn't even know what he looked like. um He called me up. He said, I want to do this. We had a bunch of back and forth phone calls because this was prior to Zoom being a really big thing.
00:05:01
Speaker
um And he said, can you fly to Florida? We're going to do a test pilot. I want to see what you can do. And I said, great, let's do it. So he had two former players. We did a week-long program and passed those guys through this program. They got a certificate when they were done through the University of Miami.
00:05:17
Speaker
um And I was part of that integral process. And as we were doing that, I didn't know where it was going to lead. I didn't know that it was going to lead to the Dolphins. had no idea. And he called me up that following Monday and said, hey,
00:05:31
Speaker
how do you feel about working with the Miami Dolphins? And I was i was like, sure, what do you want me to do? He's like, I want you to work with the team, ah the players directly. And I said, awesome, let's do it. And we spent a year building curriculum together, trial, error, all of the things, and put together a really comprehensive rookie program that then the Browns and the Packers picked up um within six months. And then it was a domino effect. After that, I got to meet everybody. I know most of the directors now and They're all wonderful people to work with. It's pretty easy. We just we talk through what are the guys in your locker room experiencing, feeling, talking about. and then we bring the education to back what they're interested in. And so I do that now 12 NFL teams
00:06:11
Speaker
as you talk about it it, sounds to me like given a little bit that I know about, you know, how you have people who are, that come from a situation of not necessarily having a lot of money. And now all of a sudden they have sort of feast or famine situations or NFL players are paid when they play and then they're injured and they're not paid very often, depending on contracts. So I i hope that it is it feels as consequential or as important in reality as it certainly sounds.
00:06:45
Speaker
Oh, definitely. um These guys become my little brothers. They become my friends. Their family becomes my family. um i work in a people business. And when you are helping someone overcome fear with money or abundance with money, and maybe there's a little too much excess, you are helping them understand how they think about money.
00:07:05
Speaker
there is There is a very intense trust bond that is built in doing that. And money really is about trust and trusting the right people and hopefully not making too many mistakes on the way so that you're not damaging your financial picture.
00:07:18
Speaker
And for pro athletes, what's different than from someone like me and you, an entrepreneur or someone working a nine to five, they come into money early in life. And their mistakes are much larger, which means they can lose more and they have more at stake at that younger age. And if it's not handled properly and they build trust with the wrong people, they either lose it all, get taken advantage of, or they have to rebuild at some point. And as a coach, the nice thing is, is I'm never in their money.
00:07:45
Speaker
I'm just there as a second set of eyes to help them make strategic, smart decisions, help them check the people around them. ah And there aren't very many people like me that do what I do. um which is, i guess, good and bad. ah Good because it keeps me very busy. and Bad because there's still more help to be needed. And it's not just at the pro level. I think one of the reasons that so many people gravitate towards pro-athletic money is because everybody wants to understand money in some capacity and everybody wants to grow their pot.
00:08:17
Speaker
So, of course, when you look at an athlete who's making millions, you want to want to be that athlete. Why wouldn't you? um What are they doing? How are they doing it? Why do they fail? I hear these questions all the time. When someone figures out what I do, oh, I'm so glad that you're there because so many of them fail.
00:08:32
Speaker
It's actually a common misconception. um Now, with the way things are moving, far less failures occur than people think. There are still guys that make really public bad decisions. Yes, that's always going to happen. um It's just we all make bad decisions. Unfortunately, theirs are a little more public than ours. ah But the majority of these guys are making really strategic decisions, and they're using their money in a way that will propel their success.
00:08:55
Speaker
families and their children to build generational wealth. So it's a very fun process to be a part of. And I'm also very blessed. The guys I work with are phenomenal. I could not ask for a better clientele.
00:09:07
Speaker
The NBA and the NFL are slightly different, but I really love the dynamics of both groups.
Educational Stages in Financial Coaching for Athletes
00:09:12
Speaker
Are there common things you're training them on or teaching them? Are there different things depending on where people are at in their career or their life?
00:09:22
Speaker
Yes, yes, and yes. So, um yes, each group of NFL players is categorized based on how long they've been in the league. And that's actually something that's done at the the team level. We've got our incoming rookies, we've got our second and third year players, and then we've got our veterans. So there's three categories at any NFL team.
00:09:40
Speaker
And depending on who I am working with, what we are talking about changes. There are core fundamentals that we take every rookie through. And i talk about a lot of these in my book. Cash flow management is is the main one. You can't determine your lifestyle. You can't build wealth. You can't invest. You can't buy real estate if you can't master cash flow. So really understanding how cash flow works is a crucial moment for us when they are rookies. And it's not just about money in, money out.
00:10:07
Speaker
It's how do taxes work? Who do you have to pay? How much do they cost? Financial advisors, CPAs, agents, NFLPA dues. There's a lot that goes into understanding where the the money is going and how much is actually left.
00:10:21
Speaker
And then when you have your pot, what's left? How do you strategically divvy that up? What is your money map? Where is that money going to go and how is it going to work? And so we spend a lot of time developing that financial foundation because if your financial house doesn't have a good foundation, it's going to crumble when you get to the higher levels.
00:10:38
Speaker
So we make sure that that's a very strong component. And with cash flow comes credit. So we spend a lot of time with our rookies teaching them fundamentals of cash flow and credit and getting them into a really good place.
00:10:49
Speaker
Once that's done, and we've talked about taxes and we've talked about financial teams, by the time they're in their second and third year, we get to do the fun stuff. We get to simulate stock markets and we get to buy real estate and we get to talk about starting a business and registering an LLC versus an S-corp. And we start really getting into...
00:11:07
Speaker
how you develop wealth in different ways. We talk about the periodic table of assets and how different asset classes do different things. So we spend a lot of time developing the foundation as rookies, building on that foundation second and third year, giving them a taste of different things that they can do. And then when they get to the veteran status, they can explore certain avenues and they can come and ask me questions. I can put them in touch with people. The team has resources that they can use.
00:11:33
Speaker
So we're building a program that really does compound on itself. It's not just a one-off. We don't just go in and say, okay, this is how you build a budget and hope it sticks. and We go in and say, here's the numbers. Let's get into the weeds. And we really do that with them.
00:11:48
Speaker
An average rookie class is 10 to 20 guys maximum. So it is a much smaller group and they're all very well acquainted with each other by the time we're getting into these things, into these topics. So it's a comfortable place to have hard money conversations and If it was a room of 100 people, we couldn't. So being able to break them into their respective groups and give them a lot more of a focused group effort versus 200 people in a room, 300 people in a room, it does make a big difference. So we do have curriculum. We do it by grouping. And then that curriculum does shift by team based on what we know about each locker room, because every locker room is
00:12:29
Speaker
immensely different. I can look at each locker room by the time we're halfway through a season and tell you which ones still need fundamentals and which ones are absolutely ready to jump to the next thing and be able to pivot in different avenues for those guys because we don't want to keep reiterating things that they don't need to hear. But if they need to keep hearing something, we want to make sure we hit that so it's not missed.
00:12:51
Speaker
It's truly financial coaching and education all wrapped into one. you said something along the lines of things have changed. and I forget exactly what the statement was at the time, but it sounded to me like maybe there are some changes in the athlete's preparation or or mental state or their education about money or something of that nature before they come in. Or maybe you're finding that people are are succeeding in one way or another more. I'm curious, I guess, if I back up, what has changed over time as you've been doing this work?
NIL Impact on Sports Finance
00:13:31
Speaker
When I first started doing this, and n NIL didn't exist. So NIL is Name, Image, and Likeness in College Sports. And that means that athletes who are playing in college can now get paid through multiple different revenue streams on their college athletic career. It can be brand deals. It can be social media posts. They can get paid to post on TikTok if they've got a big enough following. ah They can receive rev share from the university that they play for, which is a big one. Rev share is very, very big, especially when you've got top 30 universities whose rev share bucket is 22 million spread across their teams. 75% of it goes to football. The other 15% goes to the other revenue generating sports. If you're not in a revenue generating sport, most of the time you're not going to get paid.
00:14:12
Speaker
But if you are the star of a non-revenue generating sport and you've got a bunch of brand deals, you're still making a ton of money. So NIL has really changed the pro sports mindset. community, the world the world we live in. um And it is a small bubble. Mind you, there's only 2,200 NFL players at any given time in the league. So it's a very small brotherhood of men. And they are in a league of their own, is maybe a good way to put that. So when they do come into the league and they are all coming in with different educational prowess, background and knowledge, some of them are coming in making more money in and n NIL than they did on their NFL contract or that they will on their NFL contract.
00:14:51
Speaker
but they're paid differently. So we're now actually having to educate these young men on how NIL differs from being an employee of an NFL team, how the pay structure is going to be different, and then what you can and cannot do with that pay from a tax perspective. So we are now combating bad habits coming into the NFL that maybe would not have been there prior to 2021.
00:15:14
Speaker
And when I say bad habits, just everything that comes in goes out. And as a As an 18-year-old, I would have done the same thing. If I didn't have anything and I wanted all the things I could possibly have and I don't need to worry about money, absolutely i'm going to spend it. But that creates bad habits very, very young.
00:15:34
Speaker
And then they come into the league and those bad habits translate into something else. And so I, as an educator and some of the other educators I work with, we've seen a migration from almost no knowledge and no practice with money in 2017 to 2021 to now coming in with money, understanding money a little bit, having it focus as if you're a business owner and then having to pivot and understand how a business is run when you're an employee and how the money is going to show up. ah So it's not that things are bad and or good. It's just the the market has completely shifted because NIL has completely changed the game.
00:16:12
Speaker
And that's what we're facing now in the personal finance space at the pro level, which is also why i now work with multiple um college teams and specifically football. And then some universities, I work with all of the college students um within that university footprint because they are earning. I mean, we have we have student athletes earning more than their parents in a revenue share salary.
00:16:36
Speaker
on an annual basis right now. So the parents don't even know what to do because one, they've never run a business. They have no idea how self-employment tax works. They don't know how to structure an LLC. They don't know how to do any of this. It's a completely new world.
00:16:49
Speaker
And if you don't do it right, year one, you might not walk away with any money. So it's It's a very unique world that we live in and one that we're trying to get ahead of.
00:17:01
Speaker
But every time we get a a step ahead, some of the rules change and we take a step back. So it's been a little bit of an uphill battle. But I will say guys are coming in with a bit more knowledge, maybe just some bad habits, too.
00:17:14
Speaker
It's interesting. If you had asked me before this conversation, i guess, you know, Eric, do you imagine that the average NFL, NBA, whatever it is, player coming in, rookie player, that their intelligence about money or money management or finances would be higher, lower, the same as maybe 10 years ago?
00:17:42
Speaker
I think I would have said, i imagine that it's at least slightly higher. And I think I would have said that because some of these athletes are getting reps in earlier in their life.
00:17:56
Speaker
But now as you're talking, I'm thinking is. I wonder, and maybe you can help me understand this. I wonder if there's sort of a rich get richer, poor get poorer sort of thing. But in terms of rich or poor as support, you know, like, do you find Coach Hill that all things being equal, that someone that has strong family support or has someone in their life that is willing to talk to them about money or really has their best interests in mind or something of that nature.
00:18:31
Speaker
Do you find that those players coming from NIL into NFL, NBA, whatever, that they're leaps and bounds ahead of the other players who maybe got their reps in, but it was more bad reps, maybe?
00:18:47
Speaker
I would say yes. I think that your financial system as a young adult, especially in college, can make or break you financially. And I don't say that lightly because i think support is almost always given with good intention. Now, there are people that give support with bad intention, and we know this. But I think parents supporting children, there's a ah genuinely good intention behind that. But without the knowledge to understand how to support your child and let them become the adult they need to be and let them learn a little bit at a time, if we don't have the right support, we end up seeing a lot of these young athletes, females and males. I see a lot of the female athletes that come into Money because they are making
00:19:31
Speaker
buku bucks off of their brands, off of the way that they present themselves to the public, off of the brand endorsements that they get, off of the social media following that they have. These women are outperforming the men in some cases, which is lovely to see. And and it's it's part of sports, right? um And we can use a couple of Case studies when Sports Illustrated came out with the top 10 NIL earning athletes, the top two were Angel Reese and Libby Dunn, and they both played for LSU. I had the pleasure of working with both of them. I don't know them well, but they were honest to God, lovely to work with when I was in the building with them.
00:20:06
Speaker
And both of them were at the top of the Sports Illustrated and n NIL earnings list, and there was no rev share at that time. It was just off of their earnings. And if you looked at their support systems and what who was around them, those people were consistently lifting them up and trying to help them make good decisions. So does the support system make or break you?
00:20:26
Speaker
Definitely. We just don't see the money lost. on the young men and women that are earning NIL that maybe get out of college. We don't hear about their stories yet because this is the first year we're graduating them.
00:20:39
Speaker
So 2026 is the first year we're graduating a full four years of NIL. Which is an, to say that is one wild because this started, I remember where I was sitting when NIL went live. I was actually in St. Louis, Missouri going to the airport. Ironically enough, in a rental car and I so and i got the notification on my phone and it just kept ringing and ringing and I went,
00:21:00
Speaker
oh, this is going to be crazy. um And that was in 2021. And we are now fast forward in the 2026 school year. We're graduating out that first wave of NIL babies, like full four years first wave. There have been graduates already.
00:21:14
Speaker
But this is we we don't have any stats. We don't know what that support system has actually done. So do I think that the guys are leaps and bounds ahead with the support? Yes, because I can see it in the guys that come into my NFL locker room. But you have to consider that as a very small number in comparison to the total number of student athletes earning n NIL. Because we we draft in 500 rookies a year.
00:21:35
Speaker
Not even draft. We draft in 200 and some. And then free agent the rest of them. It is such a small pool of the total n NIL pool that we don't have stats on any of it. um i will I will pause and say...
00:21:51
Speaker
The football side of it is an interesting is an interesting world to be in because I really do see the parents wanting to support. And it's not that they don't want to. It's lack of resources leading up to this point.
00:22:03
Speaker
So now we've got younger men getting money faster without the habits and responsibility and onus to be able to say, can we pause? Because they don't know how. They don't know who to talk to. um So we're we're setting them up for a little bit of failure without giving them the education. And that's where universities are stepping up. And they're saying,
00:22:21
Speaker
we have to give, if we're going to pay this much money, we have a responsibility to give them some education. i will shout out LSU from the rooftops for years and years. They brought me in in 2021 knowing that this was going to be a thing.
00:22:35
Speaker
And we developed an entire program for their whole student athlete body because they want these young kids to be able to take ownership of their money and then do something with it. And it was such a pleasure to watch them say, like, we actually care about the the student.
00:22:51
Speaker
not the athlete. Like we're here for the student, the person, the athlete comes second. But because athletics is paying them, we want to make sure they have the tools. And I think support doesn't just come from parents. I think support or family. I think it comes from institutions like colleges that are paying this to you or you see it in corporate benefits spaces all the time. Employers provide resources to their employees constantly because they want that success. So support, I think, is a fundamental baseline that a lot of us are missing in our financial life.
Mindset and Financial Success
00:23:22
Speaker
It seems to me, it seemed to me as I was reading your book that one of the things that is important, not just with money, but with lots of things in life is that when you encounter a setback to have the, not just the mindset or the opportunity to learn from that challenge or setback,
00:23:46
Speaker
but also to have the, I guess I should separate, to have the mindset, you know, the support to learn from something rather than to just move on and potentially repeat mistakes, but then also to have the opportunity to recover. And so an example with an athlete might be easier for people to imagine than, you know, maybe you or I as 20 or 22 year olds, an athlete that is making whatever, they're making a million dollars a year.
00:24:20
Speaker
They have some sort of setback or they make a mistake with their money and they lose a million dollars. Well, if they're lucky enough to make a million dollars next year,
00:24:30
Speaker
then they need to be able mentally, you know, to learn from that. They need to have the support to learn from that if it's a coach or whatever it is. But they also have to have that next round of money coming in.
00:24:44
Speaker
Whereas if that rookie comes in and they're getting a million dollars or whatever it is, and they make a mistake, and the next year they're not making a million dollars, then yes, you can become a better person and you know you can you can learn how to manage the $50,000 you make in year two when you're out of the league.
00:25:04
Speaker
But it certainly seems harder to learn those lessons and also recover at the same time. And that was, I think, a little bit of what was underneath my imagined response to, you know, is their money management abilities, ah ability better or worse? I was thinking, oh, they get more reps in, but to your story, you know, to your book, and I think some of what you're saying, it seems to me like you have to have that psychology, you have to have that mental state, but also the chance to learn, the chance to recover from it.
00:25:40
Speaker
Yes, math math or money. And let's talk about money and math for a second, because you said mindset. And one of the things I always say is money is 99% mindset and 1% math.
00:25:53
Speaker
And it's not because money isn't math, because it is. Everything that we do with money is an exchange of currency, which is adding, subtracting, dividing, compounding, you name it. However, you can't get to the math if you don't have the mindset right, because the numbers will not follow. If your mindset is I can spend it all and I can do whatever I want, it doesn't matter, chances are money ain't going to be there. But if you look at it as a plan, a blueprint, you're playing chestnut checkers.
00:26:22
Speaker
What moves do you have to make mindset wise? What things do you have to Give up as an opportunity cost. What types of things do you have to pull back on? What things can you be really loose and abundant on? And be able to make those decisions. And we're asking 18 to 22-year-old children who have never had to make hard decisions in their life to make decisions about something that their environment has curated, their emotions do not know how to control, and they don't have the education to back up.
00:26:49
Speaker
I call them the three E's of money. One of my keynotes is the three E's of money. Environment, emotions, and education. They learn about money before they learn how to, weep and this is a we thing. This isn't even just athletes. This is applies to everybody.
00:27:03
Speaker
You learn about money when you grow up. You are exposed to it in ways that other people are not. um All of us have a story with, oh, I remember XYZ about money.
00:27:14
Speaker
And mine is, I remember my mom writing checks at the grocery store. And I just assumed, now thank you, this was 35 years ago. a long time ago. um I just assumed that that checkbook was a magical money calculator and I could just write a check and the money was there.
00:27:28
Speaker
Because I was experiencing what she was doing without understanding the repercussions of it. And then we get emotionally tied to money quickly based on our environment and what we're learning.
00:27:40
Speaker
And only after we've developed and learned about money in very possibly not great ways do we get education so then we have to unwind all of the bad stuff and we have to relearn it and that's where money is 99 mindset because you have to reframe all of the things that you've learned in your younger life which are your formative years to be able to control your emotion emotions around money to build something better And this is where I don't care if you're an athlete making a million dollars or you are 18 and you just entered the trades and you're making $14 an hour as an intern for your journey lineman and you're in your internship program. Great.
00:28:21
Speaker
You still have to have the fundamentals. You still have to reframe all the bad lessons that you've learned. Because if you carry those forward, they are going to destroy your financial picture. So in my book, In Train Your Money, when I'm talking about habit building and I'm talking about understanding where your money mindset is and using tools like cash flow managers or money maps or even just knowing what your credit score is,
00:28:44
Speaker
While it sounds boring, it is the catalyst to wealth and it helps drive habits. If you know what you're doing and you can start to change one habit a month or one habit a week, that's very that's very hard to do. um But one habit a month, you can build better habits. if You're getting better reps. The better the rep,
00:29:03
Speaker
The more muscle you build with money, the more muscle you have, the easier it is to conquer the next uphill battle. And that is where why I say train your money. Money is not a one-time hit. It's not a one-time thing.
00:29:14
Speaker
You have to focus on it at least once a week for 15 minutes, just like you would train anything in the gym. Give it that respect and that time because you need that in order to move to the next level. And that is where...
00:29:27
Speaker
I think people are afraid of money or they just they're like, oh, it's just going to be there. So they there's no awareness to it. And our mindset takes us to a place that doesn't actually give us success.
00:29:37
Speaker
And that that is why I say train your money like a pro athlete trains for success, because it's a regiment. It happens every day. You know what you have to do and you know what success looks like. We just don't treat money that way. We treat money as money.
00:29:50
Speaker
a fear and we push it aside or it's always just going to be there. I'm not going to worry about it. And you keep it pushing. um That's where we get lost. That's that's where the secret sauce comes into play of do you actually know how to train your money?
00:30:02
Speaker
You said that most of us are not the athlete making potentially millions of dollars. And yet I'm curious about what are some of the commonalities, whether it's strengths or weaknesses around money or common mistakes or anything that what do you see that is common regardless of someone's level of income?
00:30:28
Speaker
I think there's three main things. The first one is credit. Surprisingly enough, whether you're an athlete, you're not an athlete, you come from a family with money, you come from a family without money. Credit is stigmatized for whatever reason. um There has been this wall of fear built up around credit and how it works for probably the last 20 years. Don't get into credit card debt. Don't use credit cards. Don't do this. Don't do that.
00:30:53
Speaker
And across every person I talk to between the ages of 18 and 40, I hear the same thing. I'm afraid of credit. I am afraid of credit. And that's mind-blowing to me because credit is actually one of the best financial tools in your tool belt if you know how to use it. So I would say that's the first thing that is a common commonality between any group I talk to is credit's scary. I'm scared of it. I don't need it.
00:31:19
Speaker
I would disagree with you. you all You will need credit in every aspect of your life. And again, this is something we don't learn in school. So we're we're combating a stigma and we're also trying to teach a true fundamental tool that will be useful for life.
00:31:32
Speaker
So credit's one. The second thing that I think is very common is people rely on bad information. And I don't mean to bash the influencer culture because I think there's a lot to say about having information at your fingertips. I think it's a beautiful thing.
00:31:49
Speaker
There are a lot of pseudo-financial coaches out there who have zero certifications, who just go online and talk about money. And the amount of bad information that I hear, I could make i could probably make a killing on TikTok by debunking all of the bad financial information that's out there. ah I don't have the time or space for that. but But what that means to me as a coach who is hearing the bad information as I'm walking into buildings, whether it's a corporate um workshop event or it is an NFL facility or I'm walking into... the baseball room at LSU, i am always hearing, oh, I heard this on TikTok. Is it real?
00:32:25
Speaker
i I've only seen one or two posts where they showed me and I'm like, oh, yeah, that's actually really valid. Yes. and The rest of it, I'm like, absolutely not. You can't do that. i said, you're going to get audited and you're going to have to pay taxes on it on the back end. So why do things that are going to hurt you financially or could potentially pose a threat to your financial life?
00:32:43
Speaker
Don't do it. So influencer culture has made information more available, readily available. That doesn't mean the information is actually real or true or factual. um So that's the second common misconception across everybody that the internet is truth. It's just not.
Credit Misconceptions and Psychological Influences
00:33:00
Speaker
um And then the third, the third commonality, and and this is, this goes a little bit deeper into psychology, is that I see one of two types with everybody that I talk to, two types of people. And these are very broad, generalized categories.
00:33:20
Speaker
I see the fearful, avoidant money person. not We're not talking relationship attachments. I'm talking about fearful avoidance with money, which is a very real categorization. um i know that, again, influencer culture, fearful avoidant stuff pops up all the time. I'm talking about a completely different psychological side of money where someone is so afraid to lose the resources that they've accumulated that, but at the same time, they avoid dealing with money.
00:33:46
Speaker
So they're fearful and avoidant simultaneously. That's, you know, one big, broad category. And then the other category I see, and this is, again, a generalization show loops a bunch of people in, um is the, ah it'll come, it'll be final, figure it out next month.
00:34:01
Speaker
And that is the kind of carefree money is always going to be their abundance thought process. And I see those two no matter how much people make. I have people that are fearful and avoidant that make millions. And I have people that make they are hanging on by a thread and they are so it'll be fine. I'll just deal with it next month.
00:34:21
Speaker
And I think that that stems from environment, emotions, and education. It all comes back to the three E's of money that I discuss constantly in all my keynotes and workshops. And that is, it is so common in every person that I meet that I can almost tell you money personality-wise which category they'll fall into within two questions.
00:34:43
Speaker
And i I believe that drives a lot of the lack of education because when you're an avoidant, you don't want to deal with it at all. You don't want to hear it. It's scary. i don't want to look at my bank account. So we avoid the education that's going to help us. And if you talk about the carefree abundance lifestyle mindset, and some people with abundance are restrictive. They do well.
00:35:06
Speaker
ah But when you're just carefree and you don't care, you're not going to go look for ways to improve because you don't care. And I i would say that the majority of Americans fall into one of those two. and Anytime i I meet with someone and even my family, I'm like, oh, and I know where you're at this week. And it it's not something that is a tried and true every single moment.
00:35:26
Speaker
There are days where someone who's super fearful of money might just have a wild hair and they go off and they do something crazy with money. And then they come back and they have regret for the next eight months.
00:35:38
Speaker
We see that too. Or we have someone who is carefree and they get a credit card bill for five grand and the, the ocean moment happens. Oh my God, what am I going to do now? And they, they fall into fearful or they fall into avoidant. I'm just not going to look at it.
00:35:51
Speaker
So we, we see this commonality in everyone we talk to and it's not, it's, it's not segregated or looped by what you play in college or how you grew up. It's, it is a full,
00:36:08
Speaker
melding of every experience you've ever had that causes people to think this way about money. So when we are talking about, hey, we've got people in all of these different places and that they're making so much money or they're not, i really think it comes down to way too many people telling bad money advice. I think credit has become such a stigma that people can't use it to actually build wealth, which is hindering.
00:36:31
Speaker
And then we have this money mindset that's always um playing on a loop in the back of our head. And depending on how we've grown up with money, It changes how we move with it. And those are our big commonalities across all boards.
00:36:43
Speaker
When you talk about credit, are there, it seems to me that sort of the the typical situations that you would see or perhaps mindsets are things like Someone is fearful or avoidant of credit because they think that it's going to be too easy to get into debt or that they have heard stories or maybe even experienced in their childhood that, you know, the collections has come calling or something like that.
00:37:21
Speaker
And, and so they're just staying away from credit because there's, you know, fear of I might get in debt if I can shorten it to that.
00:37:32
Speaker
And then maybe on the flip side, or just as an alternative to that, I'm thinking is somebody who feels like Well, I'm going to get paid.
00:37:44
Speaker
And so I can afford to put the charge on my credit card or I can afford the home loan or whatever it is. And they're willing to use credit, but not willing to think critically or willing to forecast.
00:38:00
Speaker
Is that future obligation realistic? You're right on both fronts. And again, it comes back to that emotions, environment, education, right? When you're fearful with credit and fearful of collections and debt because you've seen it in your past or it's happened to you or it happened to your parent or your brother or your sister or grandpa, insert person here, ah you are going to be hesitant and cautious.
00:38:26
Speaker
Rightly so. The problem with that mentality when it comes to something like credit, credit is infused in everything we do on a daily basis. Getting a cell phone bill, getting an apartment, setting up your utilities. There are companies that will not hire you if you don't have a good credit score. It allows you to leverage and buy things when you need to. there's It's very much a tool if used responsibly. So that fear that hinders people from learning the proper way to use it and harnessing that tool, those people are missing out.
00:38:56
Speaker
Now, counter to that, because you had also mentioned to the flip side, which is that abundance of getting paid. up I got it. It's fine. Just put it on a credit card. That is a very dangerous mindset that leads to the collections, the racking up massive interest charges on a credit card that you don't need to be paying to a bank.
00:39:14
Speaker
It teaches really bad spending habits. And you're spending before you have that money readily available, which is a massive problem. And so we're looking at both sides of a a very wide spectrum.
00:39:25
Speaker
And what I tell anybody in both of those situations is very simple. Credit is a tool. If used properly, and there is an actual easy right way to use credit, you can not only leverage it to improve your financial life, but anytime you do have to borrow money, buy a car, buy a house, you want to buy a business, um you need to finance something. Let's let's be very real.
00:39:50
Speaker
I think it's what, 45% of Americans finance their engagement rings? Right. We're talking about an engagement ring to get married and you're financing it on a private loan at 25 percent. who No, sir.
00:40:02
Speaker
Let's have let's let's roll it back because you're paying so much money to finance that without understanding if you would have used credit properly, built a proper score, maybe you had access to a cheaper line of credit. You're not paying the bank as much money.
00:40:17
Speaker
Now, counter to that, people that just go, oh, throw it on my credit card and I have a 33% interest rate and it's no big deal. Well, if you're running a $5,000 a month balance and you're not paying it off, you're paying that creditor $3,000 to $4,000 a year just in interest. So you're actually borrowing more than $5,000. You're doubling it.
00:40:36
Speaker
And that, again, lessens. You don't know what you don't know. And so both of those mindsets can hinder, but they would send you in different directions. One of them is going to limit your ability to borrow money at a cheap rate or potentially leverage something in your life at a cheap rate. And the other one is going to drive you into a really bad spot. And as a like credit is my favorite topic and all my NFL players know that I'm like okay guys we're gonna talk about credit and they're like oh god not this again um because I love it as a tool of leverage and a way for people to improve their financial life without actually ever paying a cent of interest to the banks and it's possible it's doable I have a whole course on it because it's so easy
00:41:19
Speaker
Now, when I say it's easy, you're laughing at me, Eric, and I know it's not easy because here's where people get stuck, right? It's not the blueprint. It's not, hey, spend less than 30% on your credit card. Make sure you have a rewards card that's giving you points or cash back based on your preference, right All the good Flynn stuff. No, it's not that. Uh-uh.
00:41:36
Speaker
It's when people can't control their spending, when their lifestyle inflates more than what they can afford. That's where credit's dangerous no matter what part of the spectrum you fall on.
00:41:47
Speaker
And if we're not aware of how we spend, credit can be a death trap for us. But if we can master cash flow and we can master how our lifestyle should look, credit is a beautiful complementary tool that will allow you to do more as time goes on.
00:42:05
Speaker
And that's the piece I think people miss because no one openly talks about it because it's taboo. No one wants, I have a great credit score. Oh, I don't. I don't want to talk about it. Right. We don't talk about it enough and we don't talk about it in an educational way.
00:42:18
Speaker
So it becomes a problem quickly. You at one point said credit score, and I think that also underlies a fair amount of what you're saying there. And you talk about credit score in your book. So I want to come back to that. But before that, when you were talking about influencer culture and ah believe it was avoidant and abundant mindsets,
00:42:41
Speaker
I'm going to ask you to predict the future and you you don't have to, you can, you can ah avoid this question if you wish to, but I'll tell you my opinion on not just sort of money topics that we're dealing with here, but my position on culture change.
00:43:01
Speaker
Generally, maybe I'm just a cynic, Coach Hill, but I think that it's becoming easier and easier over time to fall into confirmation bias because there, maybe I do see the TikTok and I don't know enough to know whether or not something's a good or bad idea.
00:43:23
Speaker
And I have legitimate curiosity about, oh, could that work? Or it could be food. It could be finances. It could be anything. And so my curiosity is real.
00:43:35
Speaker
But then when I act upon this information, Or when I go to someone like you and I say, is this something really that I can do with my money?
00:43:46
Speaker
And so I either act on it and I get negative results or i ask you and I get a negative response, perhaps if I can put it in brief. it's is I think it's easier to fall into avoidance of that data and you know avoid empiricism. It's easier to fall into confirmation bias that, well, everyone is saying this because in part, not only do we have filter bubbles and you know we can talk about all that stuff, but also it really is just so much easier
00:44:21
Speaker
to flip, ah to move away from a potential hard lesson and to move on to something that feels good, not because I'm a bad person or sorry, not I, that that someone who does this is lazy or a bad person or doesn't want to be better. I think most of us as human beings do want to improve and feel productive and succeed in number of ways, whether it's as a parent or as a master gardener or whatever.
00:44:53
Speaker
But if you as a master gardener have to accept that you made a mistake and that is what is causing your weeds this year to be so much worse, or you could just till everything up and you could replant, or you can just, I'll just avoid the garden this year.
00:45:13
Speaker
then I think that's kind of the equivalent of just flipping to the next TikTok, Instagram, real streaming show. And that's where I think confirmation bias comes in. So, okay, coming back around to predicting the future.
00:45:26
Speaker
You don't have to if you don't want to. But to me, I feel like until such time as we have some major culture or society change, that this is a bit like what I was responding to or how I was responding to the NIL question and getting more good or bad reps in, that it seems like if you are one of those people that has the right support,
00:45:54
Speaker
and or you are willing to look at those weeds growing and realize I did that, then you are likely to continue progressing and maybe progress and get better, improve even faster while everyone else is actually moving in the opposite direction. I feel like that's just getting worse over time in a lot of areas.
Critical Thinking in Financial Decisions
00:46:18
Speaker
I'm going to agree with a lot of that, um but I'll add one more layer to it. We're talking about confirmation bias. We're talking about influencer culture. We're talking about how that impacts finances. I'm going to add one more piece to this. um And this kind of goes with good and bad ah negative responses versus positive responses and confirmation bias simultaneously.
00:46:40
Speaker
When we get on our social media platforms, and let's be very clear, everyone in America lives on that at least an hour a week, if not more. And in an hour might be very gracious. It's probably a lot more than that.
00:46:53
Speaker
We are reinforcing through the algorithm. It is reinforcing the things that we interact and like. So if and that provides backing to confirmation bias, right? It is saying, oh, I like this. Feed me more of that. Give me more of what I like or what makes me feel good. I don't want to hear what makes me angry or frustrated or X, Y, Z. Insert bad emotion here.
00:47:17
Speaker
Because social media is driven to keep you engaged and going, they feed confirmation bias through instant gratification. And that means that you're getting fed a line that maybe isn't actually good for you and may actually result in bad decisions because of how the algorithms work.
00:47:36
Speaker
And it in I'm not putting any blame on any one social platform. They're designed to engage you. So if you're interacting with content, of course, they're going to show you more content like that. That is what they are designed to do. So when we're talking about finance, you said, well, when those athletes come to you and they say, is this real? And I kind of meet it with a negative, ooh, we're not going to do that.
00:47:56
Speaker
A good financial coach will always provide a positive spin. And what I mean by that, and this is what I do with everyone I work with. If someone comes to me and says, should I do a LERP? Should I do a life insurance policy that is overfunded? I only made $30,000 this year.
00:48:13
Speaker
And I said, oh, where did you see that? And they show me the post. And I say, OK, that is specific to X, Y, and Z person who has all of these boxes checked. However, I see what you're trying to do here. I want you to go research.
00:48:25
Speaker
I'm just going to say ETFs and index funds, totally different insurance projects or products, investment and insurance products. But the idea is you don't discourage the education.
00:48:36
Speaker
You discourage the outcome and you show that there's other education that will have a positive outcome. ah Because if you use that tool, here's what could go wrong. But if you go and research these things and start learning about them, they're actually where you are right now. These are going to be really good for you to learn. Now, my job isn't to say, go invest in this or go do this. It's to say, here's eight different ways you can go.
00:48:58
Speaker
Pick the road you like and then go down it. And that's where I think the world has... Because of confirmation bias and instant gratification, we don't pause long enough to find a secondary resolution, which then causes people to just say, i'm I'm not going to weed the garden. I'm going to till that thing up. I'm going destroy it and I'll worry about it next year. We're not willing to look at the thing and say, i'm going to pick the weeds.
00:49:23
Speaker
I'm going to put a different fertilizer on this. I'm going to make sure the nitrates in my soil are balanced and we're not going to have this happen again. It's harder to do that than it is to blow something up and start over. And we're not trying to blow the house up and start over. That is not the goal. And that's, as a financial coach, I never want someone to have to hit reset.
00:49:41
Speaker
I want them to be able to say, I'm here now. What do I do to grow? Not... I'm here now and I made this horrible decision and I have to start over. I'd rather catch it before that happens. So with where society is going, I agree. Without some sort of shift, we are going to continue to see confirmation bias reaffirmed through the platforms that we're using on a daily basis. And now with AI...
00:50:03
Speaker
You do get confirmation bias if you're chatting with GPT or Claude or Perplexity or Google Gemini because you're asking it a question. And unless you tell it to play devil's advocate and combat you and give you options, it's going to give you what you want to hear because that's what it's designed to do. And that is going to drive, I think...
00:50:22
Speaker
Less critical thinking skills because you're relying on something to just confirm what you already know and not give you some critical feedback. But it's also going to stop us from taking the next step of learning or reflecting on the issue and then saying, how do I change this?
00:50:37
Speaker
You say in your book, it's something like you have this goal to have a credit score of 800 or a quote unquote perfect credit score, something along those lines. And then i think you do a good job of examining the realities of what what really is a credit score and you know what's the highest realistic credit score that someone can have and how much is that really worth and how to go about improving your credit score and a number of things.
00:51:09
Speaker
And as I said, i think that credit score underlies some of the discussion about credit and debt. And so I was curious, would you,
00:51:23
Speaker
would you remind me about what credit score is and then also how you think about credit score in relation to taking on credit, you know, using credit to build someone's wealth or to make investments and and what I guess the average person should know or think about the credits their credit score?
00:51:47
Speaker
Absolutely. Credit is actually very simple. It's simply your ref reputation with money when using a credit source, a credit card, an auto loan, or a mortgage. And all a credit score represents is your ability to repay the money that you borrow. So when you're getting your score and it says 500, 600, 700, or 800, depending on where you fall on that spectrum, all it's telling a potential lender is how likely you are to repay that loan you borrow and how fast you're going to repay it, a.k.a. will it be on time? Will it be late? Will it never be repaid?
00:52:19
Speaker
So it is your reputation with banks on how you borrow money and if you pay it back. That's all credit is. I like to explain it this way to my athletes, and I do this a little bit in Train Your Money as well in my book.
00:52:31
Speaker
Your credit report, there's three reporting agencies, Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian. Those three credit reporting agencies give you a credit report, and they're all slightly different. And the reason we have three is if one has an error and the other two don't, we as consumers have some protection to get that fixed. So it's important that we have three.
00:52:51
Speaker
They will all give you a slightly different score. That's normal and healthy. Don't panic. But those reports tell a lender your entire credit history. It goes all the way back to the first time you opened a credit card. And it tells that lender how consistent you've been in using credit.
00:53:07
Speaker
Do you use it every month? Do you only use it once a year? How do you use it? And then do you pay things back on time? It's like your stat sheet. So I use Michael Jordan as my example because I love me some MJ. I grew up watching him. I mean, that's you can I watched his championships. OK, that's how old am. um And I watched him play. And one of the beautiful things about MJ and I'll go to bat for this all day because I think he's the GOAT and he's greater than LeBron.
00:53:31
Speaker
We can argue about it, Eric. We can argue. His stat sheet was flawless. And when I say his stat sheet was flawless, I don't mean he was a perfect player. I mean the level of consistency in play that he had over the seven years that they went to championship finals or even look at earlier in his career and later in his career.
00:53:50
Speaker
He was so consistent. You could look at him and know, Even if he has a bad game, he's still going to be elite. Your credit report is your stat sheet. It's going to tell a lender, how long have you been doing this? Because if you've only been doing it for a year,
00:54:07
Speaker
It's going to be a little iffy. They're going to be that the lender is going to go. ah Are they really going to pay it back? But if you've got seven championship belts under your or seven championship rings under your belt, they're going to look at you and say, oh, yeah, this person's they're going to pay their money back. They're not a risk to us. We can lend them money cheaper.
00:54:24
Speaker
We know we're going to get paid back. There's no risk there. Keep it pushing. And so your stat sheet tells a lender everything about how you move with money. And credit really only consists of three things.
00:54:36
Speaker
Do you pay your bills on time? 35% of your credit score. Do you use credit properly? And there's two pieces to that. That's 30% of your credit score. And then the last piece is going to be time, how many credit accounts you have, and how often you open those credit accounts. And that's a much smaller piece of pie.
00:54:54
Speaker
But they're still important. And that length of credit history is 15% of your score. So that stat sheet needs time to build. So your job is to continue to build it and get in those good reps. And the way you do it is number two, using credit correctly.
00:55:08
Speaker
Take your credit card, look at the limit, never use more than 30% ever. So if you have a $1,000 limit, you should not use more than 300 bucks. If you want to be elite and you want a faster build, never use more than 10% of your limit. So $100 a month, put your Netflix subscription on it and keep it moving.
00:55:26
Speaker
You don't have to use the max, but you should at least be doing something. And the second part of using credit correctly is consistency. Like MJ, you got to show up every month and do it every month. You can't pause and stop using credit.
00:55:38
Speaker
You can't shred your credit cards and close them. The moment you close them, you lose your credit history. So you have to be really strategic. And that is get a credit card, use it consistently every month, put one subscription on it so you can learn how it works, pay it off.
00:55:53
Speaker
And within a year, you're going to watch your credit score completely change in a very, very good way. But it requires consistency You can't let lifestyle creep come into your world and you have to manage your cash flow. If you know you can't do that, credit is not for you right now because it will push you in a bad position.
00:56:10
Speaker
But that is what credit is. And just in a nutshell, a very fast version of how it works. In my book, I show you how I went from zero credit to an 800 credit score in three years from 18 to 22.
00:56:21
Speaker
And I never paid a dime in interest to a bank. Not once. So just it goes to show you can build credit and you never have to pay anything to do so. When you say, you know, somewhere around 10 to 30% as the threshold of my credit card or whatever else that I'm using, this is just the way that my mind works, Coach Hill. But I'm thinking, okay, well, I just, get what do I need to do to get a bigger credit limit?
00:56:50
Speaker
And then that way I'm going to use less. And I'm guessing it's more complex than that. So you can't get a huge credit limit unless you've got some credit history. You need that staff sheet to to look pretty fat. It's got look nice. um Credit limits are built over time.
00:57:06
Speaker
I actually talk about this as well in Train Your Money. I talk about how I started at a $500 credit limit. That's all the bank would give me. My income did not support more than that when I was a college student. And as I showed positive credit usage, they kept upping my line.
00:57:21
Speaker
And I didn't ever ask for it. I didn't apply for it. It naturally came about because I was doing things the right way. Now, when I left college, my income went from $1. peanuts to a little higher. Nothing you know great. I worked for Enterprise, run a car making $30,000 a year. Let's just be really clear. I was not making a solid living. It was 2009.
00:57:42
Speaker
it was not ah It was coming out of the height of the recession. It was not a good time to be even looking for a job. But because I went from nothing to $30,000, they upped my credit limit again because now I have the ability to sustain a higher limit. So limits don't just come so your credit usage can be XYZ.
00:57:58
Speaker
They come based on how you use credit, how long you've had it established, and your income. Then you can start getting higher credit ah credit utilization limits. That's why I tell people, pause, take it it, literally take it a step at a time. You don't have to spend all your money on credit right away.
00:58:16
Speaker
Ideally, we would like you to pay your bills on credit at some point. So you're racking up the travel points and the cash back. You get nothing for paying with a debit card. You get nothing for paying with a check. You get nothing for paying with Zelle.
00:58:28
Speaker
If you pay with a credit card and it has reward points, you are getting something on the back end, whether it's a free vacation, cash back in your bank account every month. There is absolutely benefits to that.
00:58:41
Speaker
if done properly. If you can't control yourself, credit's not the tool you should be using on a daily. As you're talking about this, I'm thinking about people who maybe have, I don't know if addiction is the right word, or maybe self-control issues, which you kind of talked about a little bit, but In your work, have you encountered enough people that as soon as they get that credit card or whatever it is, they just can't control their spending? You know, it's a, it's part of their psychology. It's the way that they're built sort of thing. Have you encountered enough that as someone listening to you, I need to think, well, it's, it's really hard for a large portion of people
00:59:29
Speaker
Or is it such a small percentage that really 99% of us can do it? We just have to commit to that kind of self-control or that plan.
00:59:40
Speaker
I'd say about 1 in 20 have zero self-control. 1 in 20 people just can't can't do it. It is not for them. or The big limit is not for them, but it doesn't mean they can't build credit. So if you're that person listening and you think, man, if I had a thousand dollar credit limit, I'd be in trouble.
00:59:59
Speaker
How you do this, how you build credit, is you get a secured credit card, which is you putting $100 to a bank or giving $100 bank, and they give you a credit card for $100. It's called a secured credit card. You can go look this up. There's a couple really good ones out there. The two that come to mind are Capital One and Wells Fargo.
01:00:20
Speaker
I know they both have great secured credit card programs. Basically, that means you put up $100, they give you $100. You control the limit. You control the limit. And because it's only $100, if you spend $100, you can usually manage that. if you really If you really blow the bank, you're not going over $100 on this bad boy.
01:00:37
Speaker
But you're not using it for the purposes of spending. You're using it for the purposes of building credit. So your JOB in this case, your job in this case, is to find one thing that costs you $10 a month or $15 a month, put it on autopay, and pay that one bill and just let your credit build.
01:00:55
Speaker
Because you take out... the need to control at that point, you've set up boundaries where it's going to pay this bill. It's only this limit. I'm controlling everything. Secured credit cards will never increase your limit unless you put more money down.
01:01:08
Speaker
And at that point, we would say go get a traditional credit card with a small limit to see how you handle that. But if you really have that impulse, no control, you need limits and you need boundaries.
01:01:20
Speaker
I call it bumper plates like in bowling when I was a kid and they threw the bumper plates up and it's like, here's your lane, stay in it. That's how I view a secured credit card because no one knows it's secured, by the way. No one's going to know your card is secured or not. Not a single person. If you were to pull it out at a restaurant, no one would know the difference.
01:01:36
Speaker
That is between you and your bank only. But it allows you to set boundaries, whereas a traditional credit card, the bank is setting those limits and boundaries for you. So when we talk about, Eric, these people that...
01:01:48
Speaker
and And I used to be one. I used to be one of those people that just didn't care and spent whatever I had and it was fine. And that was before I went through a very traumatic financial experience, which I talk about in my book. um That changed how I thought about money. But up until that point, I would have needed boundaries.
01:02:04
Speaker
I would have needed someone to say, you can't spend more than this, period. here's here We put the limits on there. You can't go over them. So I'm not even able to push those because they're set in stone. And that's where I would say for somebody who's really not good at controlling that,
01:02:18
Speaker
instant gratification bug that bites us, that's going to be the card for you guys because it still builds credit. It's still giving you a history. It's fantastic. It does exactly what a traditional credit card does.
01:02:30
Speaker
Limits your ability to spend. I will, I'll share one thing about myself. And I thought about this reading your book and as you're talking, and thankfully my wife and i were, we acknowledged this in, in these various decisions that we've made, but we have no debts and, you know, the house that we live in, for example, we paid that off.
01:02:56
Speaker
And, but we knew that our mortgage rate was much lower than we would have made on average in the market. And, you know, we could have put that money to use in other places as well, but just to make it very simplistic, you put it, your money into an S and 500 mutual fund or ETF or whatever it is.
01:03:17
Speaker
And so we knew 10, 20, 50 years from now, we, fifty years from now we would have ended up more than likely with a lot more money if we had used those funds for something else.
01:03:33
Speaker
But it was important to us psychologically, you know, to just not have any debts. And you could call that a dumb financial decision, but...
01:03:45
Speaker
yeah And no one ever has, at least not to my face when we've talked about it. But, you know, for us, we felt like we just really don't want to carry any debt. We're not afraid of it. We have credit cards. We use our credit cards. We pay them off.
01:03:59
Speaker
But it was really like if we just, you know, if at some point in my life I was to lose my job, get run over by a car, we have whatever, some massive need for money.
01:04:12
Speaker
It would lower our stress level to know that, yeah, five, 10 years ago, we used all of this money to pay off a low interest rate mortgage.
01:04:23
Speaker
So we don't have that money now. But that's one bill we don't have to deal with anymore. And so as I was reading the book and as you're talking, I'm thinking about, I am really thankful that we thought about what we were giving up when we made that decision, but also what we were gaining.
01:04:42
Speaker
will opportunity cost? You guys sat down as a team and said, here's our concerns. Here's what's weighing on our hearts. Here's what we want our lifestyle to look like.
01:04:54
Speaker
What's the path? And I think this is where people, I love that you brought this up. Because you're going to have half of the people say, oh, that was a dumb decision because your interest rate was low. I'm going to counter them and say it probably was one of the best decisions not only for your financial health, but also your marital health for two reasons. One, your financial health being...
01:05:13
Speaker
You guys knew what your goal was, what your lifestyle was. You were projecting what could potentially happen in the future and how to protect each other, but also your marital health. You made a financial choice together that was a unified choice. And i think people forget that money is not it doesn't always have to be the math.
01:05:34
Speaker
Like I said, mindset, right? It doesn't always have to be the math. It doesn't always have to be, oh, I could have made $100,000 extra dollars in retirement. But how's your quality of life up to retirement? Because we got we got a 65-year period leading up to that. So walk me through that. a A financial advisor will always fight me on this because I'm looking at, as a coach, and it's fine because my brother's a financial advisor and we talk about this stuff all the time. And he'll say things like, that's an emotional decision.
01:06:01
Speaker
Here's a strategic decision. And we talk through it. It doesn't mean you have to go with one or the other. It just means you need to know what your comfort level is. And money is more emotional than it is anything else.
01:06:14
Speaker
You have a relationship with money, truly a relationship with it. You and your wife have discussed yours, but anyone listening, you have a relationship with money and that relationship can be healthy. It can be toxic. It can be somewhere in between. And depending on how you're choosing to use it,
01:06:30
Speaker
It may look really weird to someone on the outside. That doesn't matter because the two of you made a decision together or this could be a solo choice. In my case, all of my financial decisions go through my dad and my brother because after my mom passed as a team, we kind of united our finances. And anytime we make a big strategic financial decision, everybody's in on the conversation.
01:06:49
Speaker
Everyone gives their two cents. Similar to you and your wife. Because it matters how the people that are closest to you are going to be impacted. And it also matters what their quality of life is.
01:07:02
Speaker
And a lot of financial decisions are made at spur of the moment. They're not thought out, which is OK. We're trying to get away from that. It does happen. But if you're looking at making good financial choices, making big purchases, spending big chunks of money, there has to be some thought.
01:07:18
Speaker
And the fact that you guys sat down and said, this is good for us. This is how we want our lifestyle to go. Okay, so we miss out on some gains. I'm comfortable for the next 30 years. I mean, that's more that while it might be an opportunity cost in the market, it's not an opportunity cost on your lifestyle. And I think people forget that that is part of the conversation.
01:07:38
Speaker
I've talked about it in um chapter eight of my book, how to have conversations with people about money. They're in your circle to identify if they should even be in your circle one. But then it's not easy to sit sit down and for you and your wife, Eric, hey, we we got to talk about this. Like, that's a hard thing to just even ask your partner Can we talk about money? it's Maybe it's stressful for her. It's not for you or it's stressful for you. And she's like, oh, sure, whatever.
01:08:04
Speaker
Meeting that person where they are and then making a strategic decision. Hardest thing you can do in money, but it's also the most beneficial.
Financial Preparedness and Family Conversations
01:08:11
Speaker
You're reminding me of I interviewed a woman, Anna Lee Kruger, on the podcast. She wrote a book called The Invisible Patient, if I recall correctly. She does aging planning. And one of the things that she talks about in her book is the very common situation of, you know, dad always managed the finances or something like that. And mom doesn't know where anything is. And dad has gone
01:08:41
Speaker
senile or had a heart attack or whatever, you know, very common things that happen. And now maybe we need to get dad into some sort of care and they, we know they have the money.
01:08:53
Speaker
We don't know where it is. Or now dad is gone and mom doesn't know if she's going to be able to take care of for herself or whatever it is. And you're reminding me of one of the things that she said is I spend 80% or something of my week in these family mediation meetings because people didn't prepare.
01:09:15
Speaker
They didn't want to talk about it. Dad didn't want to open up or whatever it is. I'm generalizing, of course. And or if they talked about it, no one could agree. You know, they had different values or priorities. Yes. And it's interesting how, like, it it really is true in a lot of different ways when you say a relationship with money and that mindset is important. It's really interesting to me how it can show up in so many different areas because you might think of that as a healthcare thing or an aging thing.
01:09:46
Speaker
Yep. But the money becomes very important and talking to people about it, or it becomes very important 10 years, 20 years before you get to that point.
01:09:58
Speaker
It's probably the most important conversation I've ever had in my life. When my mom got sick the first time, I was 19, and I talk about this in my book, and it is ah it's still, she she passed away 13 going on 14 years ago, and it's still very hard for me to talk about.
01:10:14
Speaker
I'm sorry, 12 years going on 13. Apologies. I have my dates all wrong. It feels like it was yesterday, but it's been quite quite a long time. Um, when my mom got sick, I was 19 and we were by no means a wealthy family. We were middle class America. Um, we had what we needed. My college fund was there, but we didn't have everything. Right. Um, and my dad was a very good saver. My dad was very much a resource gatherer. he wanted to make sure the family was healthy and happy.
01:10:44
Speaker
And I knew nothing about my family's financial situation when I was 19. So we're talking about talk to your parents, have open dialogue. My dad sat down and taught me financial principles and made sure I understood how credit worked and how banking worked. And he was in a banking background. So I was one of the blessed ones that got a lot of that education just through osmosis and asking questions and him telling me to do certain things.
01:11:07
Speaker
But when my mom got sick, it changed the conversation. to something I wasn't quite prepared for at 19, but I'm glad I went through it. My dad sat my brother and I down. He was, mind you, only 17 at the time. And he said, here's everything.
01:11:21
Speaker
Here's our life insurance policies. Here's our bank accounts. Here's our retirement accounts. Here's everything. To this day, my dad swears we never had that conversation. And my brother and I are both like, yes, we did. We we vividly remember this conversation um because we didn't know how much money my dad made. We had no idea how much money my mom made. They didn't. That was not an open dialogue in our household. We talked about everything else with money.
01:11:43
Speaker
But I didn't know their personal financial picture. And let me tell you, going through seven years of an autoimmune battle with my mom, there were good months. There were really bad months. There was medical bills that just showed It felt like every day I opened the mailbox and I'm like, what are we going to get hit with today on a medical bill? Right.
01:11:59
Speaker
And my dad was forced to restart at 54 years old after my mom died. i'm Fifty five. I'm sorry. um Fifty five years old. She was 54 when she passed. And to watch someone who built built in his higher life with this person and then lose it all to then have to restart at 55 is the most gut-wrenching, horrible, guilt-ridden feeling I've ever had to watch my dad go through that. And my brother and I promised each other no matter what we did, we were going to make sure my dad retired. But we also knew at that point where he was starting from 55.
01:12:29
Speaker
at fifty five Because we had this open dialogue and we had hard conversations and we had real conversations. What do we have to get rid of? What do we have to sell?
01:12:41
Speaker
Are we going to be able to keep the house? Like those were very real things for us. And when my mom passed, The medical bills didn't stop right away, right? They never do. They kept kept kept coming for about six months. So we were digging ourselves out of that hole and trying to rebuild.
01:12:56
Speaker
And had my dad not been open with us about what was really happening, my brother and I wouldn't have been able to chip in. But it also would have made end-of-life conversations much harder. And all of us pretend like we're never going to die. Yeah. because we don't want to think about it.
01:13:13
Speaker
But the the reality is every single person, there's 100% chance you're not going to be here at some point. And the conversations leading up to that, asking that person's wishes, understanding where their financials are, we didn't know where any of it was for my mom. We knew where all my dad and mom's joint stuff was, but my mom had her own business. She had her own business accounts, her own credit cards.
01:13:33
Speaker
Trying to uncover all of that without any information on top of having to bury our mother. Worst thing on the planet. And I talk about this in my book, not because want anyone to feel bad for me. This happens to people every day. If we know what's going to happen...
01:13:50
Speaker
Let's set up an estate plan or a will or at least just give someone in your family a list of all your bank accounts and how to get into them so that at some point when the time does come, you can help or they can receive help or you can get help from them, whatever the case may be.
01:14:07
Speaker
But it's so hard to talk about what do i what are we doing if I die? What are we doing if you die? These are real hard conversations. And the reason I talk about it in Train Your Money is because it is actually one of the biggest causes of financial strife in family members with elderly parents. The infighting, the lack of knowledge, um it can be a lot of different factors. Some people could be getting along great and just not know where anything is. So you can't pay for burial costs or you can't pay for cremation services.
01:14:37
Speaker
And another common misconception that I've heard in the United States is that the state pays for you to bury your family member. No, other countries do. In the United States, you're responsible for those fees. So if you don't have 10 to 20 grand set aside for that purpose, you are now going to be running into a financial deficit to take care of your family member that's passed.
01:14:58
Speaker
I don't think we spend a lot of time on this. It is a hard topic, but we don't talk about it. And i think it's a necessary one because it's all of us are going to experience a family member passing. And at some point we are going to go.
01:15:11
Speaker
We've got to talk about the financial implications. You talk about in your book and you just referenced that your dad or or both of your parents talk to you and your brother about money growing up, at least, you know, how to manage it or how to understand it or some things like that.
01:15:29
Speaker
And, you know, talking to your' your children, even when you're an adult, about you know, whatever age I am, this this woman, Anna Lee Kruger, she talks about, she was, I forget the age, but I think it was maybe 40 or something like that when she was hit by a school bus.
01:15:49
Speaker
And, you know, you don't plan that, you know, i I got all of my paperwork together yesterday because I knew I was going to get hit by a school bus today or have that heart attack or whatever.
Teen Work Experience and Financial Education
01:16:02
Speaker
So you just, you know, the time to plant that tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is today.
01:16:08
Speaker
And as you know, the the idea or reference to kids reminds me of something that I had wanted to ask you, which is about children getting the experience with money. And so I have some notes here. So I, I made some notes on the law in my state.
01:16:33
Speaker
So my oldest child is 12 and in in, the state of Illinois, If you want to get a job before, and I know for certain that it's before the age of 16, but I think it might be up to the age of 18.
01:16:51
Speaker
You have to get a job offer. ah You have to have a job offer in hand and you have to get it approved by your school district. And then there are things like you can only work from 7 a.m. m to 7 p.m.
01:17:10
Speaker
during this school year while school is in session. And then I think it's 7 a.m. m to 9 p.m. I believe when school is out, you can never have more than a combined eight hours or an eight hours of combined school and work in a 24-hour period.
01:17:27
Speaker
And there are other things. You can't work in a lot of places like I'm not going to get this exactly correct, but essentially if there is any alcohol served, you can't work there.
01:17:39
Speaker
And then you can't work in places where there's some form of danger. So like, again, I'm not going to get this exactly correct, but it's something like you can't work at for and an auto mechanic basically because there, there are fumes around there, some danger, physical danger, whatever else. Again, i I don't have it perfect on those last few things. But when I became aware of some of this, it's not like I'm trying to send my 12-year-old daughter off to work in a machine shop or whatever, or to serve beer at a bar, yeah you know.
01:18:13
Speaker
But when I became aware of this, I thought, That's good for some things, but at least as it relates to your book and some of the things you talk about, I was curious about your perspective on, you know, while net maybe it's positive, that it seems to me not not being able to or making it harder for a kid to have a summer job to be like me. I was a lifeguard when I was in high school and I worked year round because I was a swimmer.
01:18:45
Speaker
So I was at the pool all the time, but I also worked maintenance at the pool. I was there until midnight on school nights. And then I was there again at 5 a.m. m some mornings, not all, because I was lifeguarding for the people who'd come in and swim laps before work.
01:19:01
Speaker
Not everybody needs to have ah childhood that I had. It's not like it was necessarily better or worse. But I was earning money and, you know, with relatively low stakes, you know, I always had my parents to go home to, so to speak, or to to to bail me out.
01:19:18
Speaker
I was still getting the opportunity to learn how to earn and how to manage money. And so I don't know, do you have a perspective on when's the right time for kids to get a job, learn to manage money, how we handle that in today's environment or anything around this topic?
01:19:39
Speaker
Yes, I but my perspective on this, because I don't work with a lot of kids, is coming from my own personal experience, which late leads me to three avenues. So I did work in and in a restaurant starting at 14 and Oregon, where I grew up, did have specific um requirements. It was a family run restaurant. So I was basically family member for.
01:20:00
Speaker
close enough. It was, you know, not my actual blood family, but I grew up with all these people. So the rule was I couldn't work past 9 p.m. And I could only work um five hour shifts on weekdays and I could work a 10 hour shift on the weekends if I chose to. um So our our labor laws were a lot less crazy. And then at 16, there is no there are no rules like at 16. You can work whatever hours you want. So I probably work there 30 hours a week at 16. I have my car. I did my things.
01:20:29
Speaker
I chose, I was given the option by my parents. Again, this is very, um and this is a ah lucky situation. I was not lucky, but I'm grateful for it. I was told you can play three sports and we will pay for your car and insurance and you will learn how to do that. So I would have had to sit down, write the check for the insurance payment, understand how the car, well, the car was gifted. It was a very cheap car. Yeah. We weren't getting nice things. um it was It was a nice car. Don't get me wrong. My dad did a very good job for us, ah but it wasn't an expensive car by any means. So there was no note on it, but he was showing us how that worked. Or so I could do that and I could get my stuff paid for and and learn on that front, or I could go get a job.
01:21:09
Speaker
And I didn't want to play sports. And I really just wanted a car. And this was I grew up in Fast and Furious moment. Like it came out my freshman year of high school. And that was a very big thing for us. I know that sounds so corny now, but like in 2021, that or that was big deal i live my life a quarter mile at a time Nothing else matters. and we all wanted the fast and the furiest car so i didn't want to place fors i wanted a car now that had always been my nature so um
01:21:39
Speaker
the rule was i had to maintain a certain gpa and i had to pay all my car insurance all my gas and then i had to say fifty percent of whatever i earned and then my parents said the rest of it you can do what you want with And the first month of getting a paycheck, I blew through everything and didn't save 50%. So my parents took the next month of paychecks and put it all in my savings account. I learned very, very much the hard way how this stuff worked.
01:22:03
Speaker
So it gave me this insight. But my brother went the sports route. He was a tri-sport athlete. And so he didn't learn money the same way I did. He learned money online. Basically through osmosis and and in the household. And I will say with him, that was one of the things he said going into college was, I wish I would have learned more how this worked, whether I was actually working or it was a class of some kind. But he also took finance classes and accounting classes while we were in high school because
01:22:35
Speaker
He went on to have multiple college credits before he ever went to college. So he actually understood it. He's like, but I never had it in practice. And I wish we would have had it in practice. I do think there is absolute validity in your formative high school years to working some sort of job, whether it's a five hour a week summer job, something you work part time while you're in school, because it teaches you how the system works in real time. not theoretical. It's not theoretical.
01:23:02
Speaker
It's practical hands-on. This is happening to you. This is how this works. And a lot of us do not learn theoretically. We have to learn in practice. So for Illinois, I understand maybe why they have those policies.
01:23:15
Speaker
And I don't think people should be maybe working at 12, 14. Great. 14 to 18. You're in high school. You are at a point where you're in your teens. You've got a little bit of common sense. You can kind of make it make the jobs like I was a hostess. I worked in a restaurant and bar.
01:23:32
Speaker
But i was I wasn't allowed in the bar side. Cool. Great. I worked on the restaurant side and I was a hostess. I learned so much about the logistics of a restaurant working in it for four years. It's not just the paycheck.
01:23:44
Speaker
It's the work ethic, the discipline, how the business is run. There's so much you... just innately absorb at that age that you maybe don't realize you're absorbing in real time. I think there's some value to that. And I think when we take it off the table, we actually hinder financial growth for teens because they're not getting that exposure. Not every teen is going to get it.
01:24:06
Speaker
Athletes probably won't. They're going to learn discipline in different ways. But I do think it needs to be something that is at least on the table for 14 to 18 year olds I agree with you. And it it sounds to me like you're thinking of some of those other things that, you know, there there are benefits of, you know, kids who maybe their parents aren't watching out for them paying attention to school or any number of things. It's it's not like it's, ah I don't want to portray it like me thinking that it's all downside. And I don't think you're taking it like that, Coach Hill, but just to state that.
01:24:42
Speaker
i but I, it sounds to me like you're also thinking of other things like, you know, learning how to be, how to work with other people. You know, I was not a naturally responsible person really. You know, I just kind of followed whatever passion I had that day.
01:24:59
Speaker
yeah it took me until I was about 30, probably, to learn discipline and the value of hard work and all this. And I was lucky that I was reasonably intelligent and I found some things that I was gifted at.
01:25:14
Speaker
And some people are willing to pay for those things. But had I not had a job that I had to show up to at certain times, and it was not a difficult job, you know, I was not, I didn't have emotional strain on me. I didn't really have physical strain.
01:25:31
Speaker
i wasn't, it wasn't really taxing mentally, but the fact that I had to communicate with people and show up and I had to be proactive if I wasn't going to be there or whatever.
01:25:42
Speaker
You learn things that are not just finance, that is how to be a good person in the world in many different ways. And so it's really seems unfortunate to me. And I know that, you know, you're, you're coaching around finances. And so that was part of my question, but I was really curious to get your perspective.
01:26:05
Speaker
I genuinely agree with what you're saying, because there are so many skills that you learn and grow with when you are in the workforce, no matter what job you're doing. And it doesn't have to be a stressful job to learn skill. And ah the accountability piece is, I think, what we're lacking um within anything that we do now. So you were talking about I had to show up and I had to be proactive if I wasn't going to be there.
01:26:29
Speaker
We are so far removed from accountability now because we live and work on our phones. We don't do this enough. We don't do this interpersonal skill exchange. We're not in teams. We're not collaborating as much as we used to. And if we are,
01:26:43
Speaker
it's in It's once you're out of college or once you're in the workforce at 18 and then you're thrust into something and you're like, I don't know how to do this. I don't have the interpersonal communication skills to do that job. I've never been told I have to show up on time. Yeah, I went to school, but I'd show up 30 minutes late and there was no punishment for it. Or I would bail out early and nobody said anything.
01:27:02
Speaker
You can't do that in the workforce. You lose your job. And that was something that even for me, i I've, I'm, this my personality type. I hate being late. I want to be 10 minutes early to everything.
01:27:14
Speaker
But I worked with someone in the restaurant and I'll never forget, we grew up together. Like this, this guy and I, same age, we drove up the same stinking car, the whole nine. Our parents went to high school together, very small community I grew up in. Um, and he would, it never failed. No matter how hard he tried, he could never get to work on time. He was always 20 minutes late.
01:27:34
Speaker
And we knew that. So the shift ah director actually moved his time up 30 minutes without actually telling, like she said, okay, you need to be here at four, but she scheduled him for four 30.
01:27:46
Speaker
He would innately show up 10 minutes before 4.30 every single time. So they just worked around him because they knew that. Most companies are not going to be that nice. They're going to fire you after a week two. um So i I found it interesting that even the nuances, even the nuances at 14, 15, and 16 of watching how a company, and any company, doesn't matter who you work for, how they move, how they operate, what they allow and what they don't allow, because some companies are very flexible, some are not.
01:28:12
Speaker
You can't learn that in school. And that's where that direct, that's why internships can be so powerful because you're thrust into something new and you're having to learn as you go.
01:28:22
Speaker
If we thrust people into money at 22 and say, figure it out as you go, we are failing them. And that's why I loved being able to work in high school because I was able to take a lot of the lessons and mistakes I made in very small dollar figures and translate that into something that didn't kill me in my twenty s Um,
01:28:40
Speaker
I think by taking away that opportunity, whether people choose to use it or not, is actually hindering our workforce and our our young, our youth, anyone between 14 and 18. It just it's a good opportunity to have if they want it. And not everyone comes from a good financial household. Some kids have to work. So taking that off the table in situations where they need the money to feed themselves, and I have a lot of players like this, like they had jobs and they didn't know where their parents were for five weeks at a time.
01:29:09
Speaker
That's very real. By eliminating their ability to earn money at 16, you're actually hurting them more. um So there are economic factors that also come into play that we could talk about from a higher level and different income classes that would also actually be hindered by this Illinois law.
01:29:28
Speaker
Coachella, you and I are well aligned, but if I continue to ask you about this and bring things up, we'll be here for another hour. So
Conclusion and Resources for Financial Learning
01:29:38
Speaker
it's been so much fun though, hasn't it?
01:29:40
Speaker
Yes, it has. And I really appreciate it. So let me wrap up with these two questions and you can handle them however you like, long or short, that does not matter.
01:29:52
Speaker
Where should I go if I want to learn more, connect, you know, I have your book, but not everyone does. So where should I go? And then the second question, if you were to have me think about one thing after this conversation, whether we talked about it or not, you know, do you have a recommendation or words of wisdom that you would want to leave me with?
01:30:15
Speaker
Love this. Okay. Well, we'll do the words of wisdom last. You can grab my book, Train Your Money at trainyourmoney.com. That is our website. You can sign up for our newsletter. We do once a month newsletters with just value add, personal finance tips, tricks, and all the fun stuff. And then the book itself is a reference book. You don't have to read it cover to cover. You can find a chapter you're interested in, dive into it. It's designed to be bite-sized.
01:30:38
Speaker
um So enjoy and again, engage with us on financial footwork on all social platforms. We love to hear from people and we love when you ask us questions so we can share it with the community. So we're very much a collaborative in that regard.
01:30:51
Speaker
In terms of one thing to walk away with. For anybody listening to this tonight, take five minutes. I want you to write down your first memory with money.
01:31:03
Speaker
The first time you ever saw it being handled. The first time you remember it being spent. The first time maybe you remember asking a family member for their credit card to make a purchase on Amazon.
01:31:15
Speaker
Whatever it was. I want you to write it down. Then I would like for you to take that memory, fast forward to where you are today, and ask yourself,
01:31:27
Speaker
With all of the things you know about yourself and how you learned about money from the beginning, how has that shaped where you are right now? And what's one thing you can do to shift your mindset into a more positive, helpful, useful way to start controlling your money? That may simply be slowing your spending.
01:31:49
Speaker
That could be tracking your expenses, actually physically writing them down when you come home. That could be checking your account balances more because you're afraid of opening your bank account out. Figure out where you feel comfortable.
01:32:03
Speaker
anxiety around money or fear and figure out how you can reframe it into something positive based on what you know about your environment. So that's what I'll leave you with. It will help you moving forward and you'll think about it a lot more than just tonight.
01:32:16
Speaker
That's interesting and I appreciate that. Well, Coach Hill, thank you for being here. I've really enjoyed the conversation. i enjoyed your book, as I said, and so I'm looking forward to everyone being able to listen to this. Thank you.
01:32:30
Speaker
Thank you.