Afford Anything - The Unbelievable Power of Building a Community - Live at FinCon

Episode Date: October 10, 2016

#46: This episode is a little unusual because I interviewed fellow podcast listeners live at FinCon (a conference for financial bloggers). Why? To get to know you and understand you better. I want to know what makes you tick, and where your interest in money comes from. Ultimately, why you're here, listening to this podcast, when most people couldn't care less about these topics. Why are you different? To discover that answer, here are some of the questions I asked our panelists: • Why did you decide to make learning about personal finance your hobby? Why do you spend hours reading blogs and listening to podcasts about money? • What made you approach personal finance head-on, rather than burying your head in the sand, like most people do? • Do people in your "regular" life know that you want to retire early and reach financial independence? Or do you avoid talking about this because people give you funny looks when you mention it? • Have you all had the same experience that community - finding like-minded individuals - is important in this journey?
 I hope you were able to learn and identify with your fellow listeners about why you manage your limited resources in such a conscientious way. The chief takeaway I got from this episode was the importance of building a community, which is critical to maintaining motivation on the journey to reach financial independence. Not only that, but you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Seek out a support system of people with similar values and goals to have your back when times get tough.   Resources Mentioned: 
 • Nick: True Tightwad • Melissa, "The Roamer": Traveling Wallet • Emma: Emma Lincoln • Gwen: Fiery Millennials • The One Percent Challenge Facebook Group • Everything I Know About Blogging, Condensed into One Post • Financial Independence Subreddit • Meetup.com -- Paula Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything, but not everything. And that's true, not just of your money, but of your energy, time, attention, any scarce resource in your life. My name's Paula Pant, host of the Afford Anything podcast. Today's episode is really unusual. It's also one of my favorites. If you've been listening to us for a while, you've probably noticed that most episodes feature interviews with authors and influencers. people like New York Times best-selling authors, Gretchen Rubin, Chris Gillibault, Cal Newport, Laura Vandercom, J.D. Roth, who started a major website. Jim Wang, who also started a major website. These are people who have made a career out of talking about these topics. And while they have many valuable insights to share, theirs are not the only voices. In today's episode, which I recorded live from the Trade King podcasting stage at FinCon,

which is a conference held once a year. That's right, finance now has its own con. I decided to talk to four of your fellow community members. Their names are Nick, Melissa, Emma, and Gwen. I'll let them all introduce themselves and share their story of why they decided to become part of an unusual community, a community of people who want to gain financial independence and live their best life in a world where so many people accept the default.

Hey there, I'm super glad you could come on to today's show. I'd like each of you to introduce yourselves. Nick, let's start with you. My name is Nick True, and I've been reading personal finance books for a long, long time and just started recently blogging about personal finance. I worked for an engineering firm in Chattanooga and I've been married for two years. We have two cats and we just got a little puppy. She's now three months old. So we have no kids but we got a full apartment. It's a little ridiculous. We now are outnumbered by four-legged animals. So my name's Melissa and I'm the Romer and I write at traveling wallet.com and my blog's about our financial journey through debt repayment and building wealth and how I want to fit travel in our aggressive goal of early

retirement. Hi, I'm Emma Lincoln. I blog at emmalincoln.com where I talk about how to make money work in your relationship and how women can become more financially empowered. I live in Portland, Oregon, and I am married. And we have a dog named Winnie. And we actually named Winnie after Winnie from Go Curry Cracker. It was just discovered today, and I was a little bit ashamed, but it is the truth. I mean, just a really cute name, and I never heard it before outside of the Winnie the Pooh context. And so it's like, that's a really sweet name, and I like it, and it fits our dog. But people are always like, oh, so like Winnie the Pooh.

And I'm like, well, no, it's like Winnie, the lady's name. And they're like, is that a lady's name? Well, there's this one lady on this one blog, you know, Go Curry Cracker. And they're like, wait, what? I'm like, okay, never mind. It's Winnie the Pooh. Just Winnie the Pooh. I'm Gwen. I blog under Firing Millennials. I am 25, and I'm trying to get to early retirement by the time I am 35. Currently, I am single and the proud parent of a wonderful 18-month-old cat, whose name is Bartholomew. He's ridiculously adorable. And I live in the Midwest.

In an undisclosed location, which may or may not be the bad cave, except surrounded by corn. Out there in the regular world, most people are interested in surfing or painting or, you know, hobbies that are commonly seen as fun by the majority of society. Your hobby is learning about money and you care about it so much that you read blogs about money management, you listen to podcasts like this one, and you even journeyed to a conference full of people who blog and podcast about money. Why do you care? How did this start? Where does this come from? Why are you so weird? Yeah, so I think for me it goes back to kind of my parents. So growing up, my dad put like this huge, huge emphasis on hard work and working for money. And it wasn't so much that you needed to work to get money. It was just like, hey, Nick, like look at all these things that I'm able to do for you, like take you to these places. is if you want to be able to do this one day, you're going to have to work really hard.

And so from an early age, I was really blessed, I guess, and money was kind of a thing that was like, you don't need to go after it, but you need to learn how to do it. And so I guess for me, it's just, it's something that was talked about a lot of my home growing up. And ever since probably high school,

I was reading books and reading blogs and just learning. So that's probably me. I guess my whole family's weird then play a monopoly and everything. I think before I cared about money, I cared about feminism. So I'm a lifelong feminist. And as I remember as a kid, I saw a lot of my friends' parents splitting up.

And they would go from living in sort of like a nice house to living in an apartment with their mom. Their mom was going back to work. All of a sudden, money was really tight. She was totally stressed out. And I remember thinking I never want to make that decision. Do I have to stay with someone I don't want to be with? Or do I have to live in a shit apartment with my kids working a job that, that I'm, you know, overqualified for.

And I think not that everyone's situation is like that, but it opened my eyes up that women often get the brunt of that. And I decided then, like, when I'm a mom, I'm going to be able to support myself no matter what. And I want to be a stay-at-home mom. So how can I make enough money that I can be financially independent to be there for my kids? And that's kind of what has inspired me to start my blog,

because I think a lot of the mistakes people make are when they're in love, when they think everything's going to be perfect. And that's a time when we don't think sensibly about money and when the people around us don't remind us to think sensibly about money because you're supposed to be having the time of your life and creating beautiful memories. You're not supposed to be budgeting or looking at spreadsheets. And that's kind of what brought me here

and what sort of started my interest in finance. So I kind of have a similar story. My mom and my dad got divorced when I was two. So I grew up in a single parent household. And we were super poor. My mom worked all the time. And we were on government assistant in basically every form possible. And I hated being poor.

I hated having to say, my mom had to say, no, you can't do that because we don't have the money. I hated being poor. I hated not having nice clothes to wear or living in. The ghetto is where we grew up. So then my mom got remarried when I was seven. and we moved to a really nice neighborhood, and all of a sudden we could afford nicer stuff, and I went to the best school district,

and my parents said, hey, listen, this is our money, not yours. You need to make your own money. You've seen how bad it is when you don't have any money, so you need to make the right choices, so you're not in that position again. So I ended up getting a full-right scholarship to college, and while I was in college,

I ended up finding Mr. Money mustache, and was like, wow, yeah, that's kind of a cool concept, like save up all your money and then you can do whatever you want. And then I had an internship in between my junior and senior year and I went to work. And I was like, yeah, I'm a big kid now. I have a grown-up job. And then I got there and like three days in was like, this sucks. Like, who does this for the rest of their life?

30 years? What? And I was like, this is not what I want to do with my life. So then I went back and I fell on those principles that Mr. Money Mustache spoused in his blog. So mine was also family-based like Nick mentioned, but it was out of necessity. As soon as I was 18, I was pretty much on my own. I was not going to have someone to fall back on if things got tough because it was tough all around in my family. So it was out of necessity.

I graduated college, and not only was I supporting my son, I was supporting my mother. So, and then it grew into, you know, learning from paying off debt into like, hey, I don't need to live this lifestyle. I can, I can be financially free. And that just became an amazing goal that I want to follow. When you're out there in the regular world, the default world, do you talk about these topics? Do you talk about wanting to retire early or reach financial independence? Or do you avoid these conversations because people look at you funny? Yeah, I think especially when it comes to my husband, I do a lot of real estate investing, and I sort of play the more active role in that in terms of like going to the inspections, working with the contractors.

And that's definitely an area where nobody will, they just won't even speak to me. They will find anyone in the room older or more male than me and speak to that person before they will ever speak to me. And so that's definitely an area where I see a lot of that. And then in terms of investing, I mean, I don't think I've ever said a word about investing that's been taken. seriously by someone older than me. And I'm okay with that. We live what works for us. We're here doing our thing. It's not definitely not my mission to change someone's mind who thinks they know better. We're just going to keep doing what works for us. And if people want to listen, that's great. We're happy to share our knowledge. I'm seeing all of you nod your head. So I'm going to pause here

and let's unpack that a little. Because I know the people who are listening at home can't see the faces of the four of you, but all of you look fairly young. So I'm going to to ask, have you had that same experience, the experience that your age reduces your credibility when it comes to talking about money? Absolutely. Nobody takes me seriously. You can't see it, but I have a very baby face. So I haven't changed much since I was 17. So that compounds the problem. But most people are like, well, what do you know? You're only 25. You know, I've been around for so much longer. I know what's possible. And there's no way that you can retire by the time you're 35. that's just not possible.

You're going to get married. You're going to have kids. And kids are really expensive. And what happens at the market? They throw all these scenarios at me. And it's like, well, if those happen, then I'll deal with those. And I'll adjust my plan. But right now, this is the plan.

And they're like, okay. And they, like, figured it really pat me on the head. And I'm just like, thanks. Well, there's a reason that I grow my beard out four inches, okay? Like, I'm 23. And if I don't shave, if I shave, I look like 16. So it's really actually sad that sometimes I even try to hide my age because I know that some people won't want to listen to me if they hear that I'm in my early 20s because like, well, what do you possibly know? You know? And it's like, well, I know 23 years of trying stuff, you know? I mean, it's hard sometimes when people look down on you for your age.

I blog anonymously for that reason is that it's difficult to talk to people in person about it. I've mentioned it. Like one of the people that I, probably talk to a lot is my dad because I'm just like always, why don't you have a 401k? Why aren't you saving in an IRA? Like, you're at the point where you can even do the catch-up matches. And he's talking to me about, like, how taxes are too high. And I'm like, but if you were to do this, your taxes would be lower. Like, I'm just trying to be helpful. And that's why I blog, because the people around me, if I do say something, it falls on deaf ears. And, you know, I'm younger. How can I know more than my parents? That doesn't make sense to them. And so in this topic, it's easier for me to blog it out and reach hopefully somebody else.

Hey, have you ever wanted to talk to a financial advisor just to ask like one question, maybe two? Well, guess what? NerdWallet has this cool new app that lets you have one-on-one conversations with financial advisors through your phone. And it's available at no cost to you. You can chat with an advisor about anything related to money, such as retirement, investing, insurance, debt, all things money related. And you'll get personalized one-on-one advice. Check it out at no cost to you by going to nerd.me. me slash Paula. That's nerd.m.m. slash Paula, P-A-U-L-A. I've noticed that when people are in a state of financial necessity, when there's trust.

trouble just meeting your basic needs. People often have one of two responses. They'll either bury their head in the sand and try to ignore it, or they'll face it head on and learn everything they can about money and get really good at it. Why did you decide to become proactive? Why did you have the confidence to face it head on rather than burying your head in the sand, which is what a lot of other people choose to do? You know, I was raised by a feminist. When I was younger, I was taught that I could be anything and do anything. I think a lot of women were that sort of grew up in my generation.

But I think often we, even my mom, my mom's an amazing feminist. She doesn't know anything about money. She has no idea how much money my parents have or how much they make. She would not be able to manage her own money. And I think for me, I really saw that. Like a true feminist manages their own money, a true feminist, understands their own finances. To me, that's the way. I could talk all day about feminism, but there's a lot of people doing it better than I could do it. So this is a way that I can contribute

to something I really care about, is I can talk about money, and I can inspire women to care about finances. I guess for me, it's really just the idea that I get one big shot at this, and I'm going to kick myself if I don't at least try. And so, I mean, to be honest, like some days I don't think I can do it. Like, I don't think I can every single day, But it's the constant reminder that if I don't try, then of course I'm not going to be able to do it. And so I look to people who have achieved that. And I just, I keep trying to look at them and go like, okay, that's how I want to be. And if I don't even, if I don't even give this thing a whirl, then yeah, my life's going to kind of suck.

So, you know, I just, I guess for me, it's like the idea that I've got to give it a go. I've got to at least try to find a life that's extraordinary. You've all spent a considerable amount of time and money and effort coming to a conference that's full of people who talk about money. Why? What are you hoping to learn? How are you hoping to grow? Why do you feel that this is a good use of your limited assets? Yeah, going to FinCon is a big investment.

And to any conferences, there's so many where you could meet people like the Chattacaqua. but they're expensive and so you know you want to find friends before that point and for me it's mostly just online like just finding people whose stories resonate with me and then commenting on them

reaching out and trying to talk to them that way you can't afford FinCon or conferences you know in general yet don't stop your journey you can still find that inspiration in that community just online So coming here to FinkCon, I'm trying to improve my writing in this way of delivering my story. I have a lot of ideas, but then I get stuck.

And so I'm like, how are the people who are already in this industry doing it? And one of the things that I've come back to is the relationships help you stay accountable. And so one of my main goals is that I want to try to form a mastermind group so that that's going to help keep me moving forward. and that'll hopefully take up some of my time, you know, after the FinCon, and that's what I'm going to get out of it, is forming some tight-knit group where we're keeping each other accountable and helping ourselves, you know, move forward with our stories. Yeah, so I guess for me it's maybe two main things.

So I've been blogging for about a year on True TieWod, and I feel like I've kind of had a lack of focus, a little bit of all over the place. And so I wanted to come here, and I was hoping that I could learn maybe what areas, I can focus in on and how to really figure out my message and hone my own voice in my writing. And so I'm hoping to learn that from the sessions and just talking to people. The second main thing that brought me here is really just building relationships. So back home, you know, talking to my friends, talking to people that I grew up with, telling them like what I'm trying to do with money or how I'm trying to become financially free

or how I'm trying to do this thing. A lot of them just give me weird looks. Like, what do you mean? you're not just going to spend all your money doing this thing, and it's really discouraging. And so I'm just trying to find people who are like-minded, who get it. One theme that I'm hearing come up over and over in many of your answers is that community is important.

Finding like-minded people is important. Have you all had the same experience, and if so, why? Why does it matter to find like-minded people? So many of my friends from high school just don't get it. So as far as finding groups of people who are like-minded, I think the easiest place to start is searching on the internet for local meetup groups. I've got a really good buddy of mine who's super into Bitcoin, like all about Bitcoin, and he found a random group of people in Chattanooga, Tennessee, that are all about Bitcoin.

And he meets up with them once a month, and they just hang out and eat and talk about Bitcoin. And like, I think you would be really surprised at how many local. meetups you can find just by searching on Facebook and searching on Google. I mean, just literally type in like investing meetup and then your city. That's really a good place to start. And then probably the second place says, I would say, get on the Facebook groups of your favorite blogger or podcaster. I think Paula has a Facebook group that you should totally join and see if people in that group live in your local area. Because if you are friends because of the podcast, then talk to those people. Start there. So I think that would be how I would start.

I would pitch hosting your own event. I think for us that's been really big. That was the impetus behind Camp Mustache, and now we're planning the fourth year of that. The idea was literally, let's just have a camp out with people from Portland and Seattle that want to retire early. And now it's like a worldwide event, and the people fly all around the world to come to.

And same with our monthly money group that we started, you know, which is people in our city who want to retire early or who even just want to live a more frugal life. We like hang out, it's a potluck, we play board games, but at the same time we like really talk deeply about money, about how we do with families, about how we're saving, saving strategies. There's people there that are like lawyers, doctors, experts at travel hacking, like every type of person. And so we kind of share the knowledge and share the encouragement, and that's been really huge for us. I would say be brave. Reach out to people, start something. Everybody's going to be super nice. and if they're not, then they're not people that you want to be around at all.

So if you have blog, even if you're just a reader, reach out to if there are any finance bloggers in your area, or even if you're not looking to form people in your necessarily geographic area, then just reach out to anybody who you think is interesting and want to get to know better and try and see if you can start a conversation with them. They're saying out there, you are the people that you're around, and rich people hang out with rich people, and poor people hang out with poor people,

and athletic people hang out with athletic people. So I want to be around people who are early retired and who are responsible with their money. And so if I want to be around those people, I have to go out and hunt them down because they're not going to be out necessarily right around me. Thank you so much for spending your time here with us today. Where can people find you if they want to learn more about you?

Yeah, so I'm Nick True, and my website is truetutaitwad.com. I don't have that many finance friends, so please send me an email. Melissa the roamer at Travelingwallet.com. And same thing, just reach out. I'd be happy to get back to you. Yeah, you can reach me at Emma at Emmalincoln.com. And totally happy to talk to people about how to start your own event or how to get on track with real estate.

You can find me at Gwen at fiery millennials.com. And I'm also all over Reddit and Twitter and Facebook. Thanks again to all the panelists who came onto today's show. And thank you, those of you who are listening, who are with us during your drive to work or while you're cooking dinner or while you're taking the dog for a walk. Thank you so much for tuning in. You have a choice of any podcast that you could listen to. And you've decided to spend your time with us. And that's why I'm so excited that we did today's episode, that we talked to some of y'all so that you could hear other voices.

within the Afford Anything community, you could learn from your fellow listeners about why they share your interest in managing your money, your time, all your limited resources in a conscious, deliberate manner. Some of the chief takeaways that I got from today's conversation is, number one, that finding a like-minded community of people is incredibly important. Somebody on the panel mentioned that I have a Facebook group called the 1% Challenge Facebook group. It's a group of people who are dedicated to boosting their savings or their earnings by 1% every month. And then building on that by an additional percent every subsequent month. So let's say that you make $5,000 a month. 1% of that is 50. This month can you save or earn an extra $50?

Next month? Can you double that? Can you save or earn an extra hundred? The following month? Can you turn that into 150? And so on and so forth. That is the challenge that I've put out to my audience. A lot of people have joined this group.

So that's one of the ways that you can talk and interact with like-minded people. It's a Facebook group. We'll link to it in the show notes. But that, of course, is not the only way. You can start your own blog. There's a post on afford-anything.com called Everything I know about blogging, condensed into one post, we'll link to that in the show notes. That has loads of information about how you can start a blog that just helps you build that community

and get to know more like-minded people and have the types of connections that we're building here. Alternatively, you could just reach out to people, go on Reddit, get into forums. You could host events in your local community, go on meetup.com, and start an event based around people who want to reach financial independence. There are many, many ways that you can find community, but regardless of how you do it, maintaining that community is critical to keeping your motivation. That, in fact, is such an important takeaway that it's going to be the chief one, the soul one,

that I emphasize in this episode's roundup. Create that community, find like-minded people who share your passion for managing your money and time and life, and surround yourself with those people because you become the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. So look for high quality people,

high value people. I don't mean value as in net worth. I mean value as in good people with great priorities. Find them and integrate them into your close circle of friends and advisors because those are the people who are going to keep motivated, they're going to give you good advice, and they're going to have your back through thick and thin. Stick with them, because that is how we all create a better life. Thank you for listening. My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford- Anything podcast.

You can find show notes at podcast.orgat-aforething.com. Again, those show notes are at podcast.orgate-aforenithing.com. If you liked this episode, please head to iTunes, give us a review. Really appreciate it. Those reviews are instrumental in helping us become increasingly more and more awesome. Thanks again. See you next week. Jane, do you want to eat some recent peanut butter with me right now? Yes, we're looking. This is ridiculous.

They literally have a jar of peanut butter right here in front of us with spoons. Are those sporks? Yes. Awesome. That's awesome. All right, let's do it. Okay. All right, we're going to have two forks.

Jane and I are going to have five seconds. That is the power of peanut butter to be. Okay. Ready. One, two, three, go. All right, Paula took the first bite. You got off the thing in your mouth. All right, Paul's on two.

Oh, oh. Oh, my God. All my beer. It's delicious. You're living. Yay, Paula's the winner. Good job, Paula. They're both like, this is the best thing ever.

Man, that was special. Very rich. Oh, wow. I'm instantly rewriting that. Ha ha ha ha ha ha