More Money Podcast - 024 From 6 Figures in Debt to 7 Figures in Savings - Revanche, Blogger at A Gai Shan Life

Episode Date: October 28, 2015

Revanche, the blogger behind A Gai Shan Life, and I talk about growing up extremely frugal, helping her family out of a tough financial situation and her aspirations to become a full-fledged millionaire. Long episode description: Talk about overcoming some major obstacles, Revanche seriously is one inspiring woman. It’s one thing to try to get yourself out of debt by working hard and saving aggressively, but it’s quite another to do the same to help your family out of a tough financial situation. Although I think Revanche’s story is quite unique, I also feel like she’s not alone in being thrown into a situation where your loved ones need your help and you need to make some big sacrifices to get them out. I’d love to know in the comments if anyone else has experienced something similar! Please share your stories if you have them. Although it was a long journey for Revanche, which you’ll learn in our podcast episode together, she didn’t just stop when the debt was finally paid off. She set herself an even loftier goal to achieve next — become a millionaire so she never has to experience debt like that again. I applaud Revanche’s dedication and hard work, and seriously can’t wait until she makes it into the two comma club. Notable Blog Posts by Revanche My kid and becoming human: Notes from Month 6 Will This Loan Be Repaid? Revanche’s Real Estate Investing Series Learn More About Revanche The Who, What and Why of Revanche from A Gai Shan Life Shownotes: jessicamoorhouse.com/24 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, and welcome to episode 24 of the Mo Money Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Morehouse, and in today's episode, I will be interviewing personal finance blogger Ravash. She is the blogger behind Agation Life. And the reason I was really, really interested in talking to her on this show was she has a very unique story, a story that I think, honestly, a lot of people can also relate to, even though it is very unique she her story is you know involves struggle overcoming diversity and really I mean I just don't know if I could have done what she did and I'm very excited we're just going to kind of dive in because I'm doing a terrible job of describing her story. So we're going to just kind of dive in and find out how she was able to help herself and her family get out of a crazy amount of debt and then

move on into this next phase where she's living this, you know, financially free life. Thank you, Ravange, for joining me on the show today. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. Thanks for, yeah, joining me. And I'm excited to talk to you because I think you have a very interesting story and background. So let's kind of just jump into it. How did you kind of get into this crazy personal finance sphere? How did you get interested in money management and everything like that? Well, it's pretty sort of, I guess I would say that I grew up sort of always being interested in money. I was the kid that, you know, the best present you could possibly give me was

something for my savings or a piggy bank of some sort. So pretty early on, I liked playing with money. I mean, I was, you know, asking to write checks for the bills when I was like seven or eight, because checks looked great, and they were interesting. And, you know, so I started out being a really nerdy kid. So, you know, and money was the thing I fixated on. So. And why do you feel like you fixated on? Because I'm just thinking, I don't think I was really that interested in money when I was super young. To be entirely honest, I think it had a lot to do with growing up relatively poor. My parents were pretty careful about money early on. You know,

one of the funny things that I didn't realize wasn't normal was that we never bought new clothes. I was probably a teenager before I actually went into a store and bought new clothes. That was something we did not do. Did you just get hand-me-downs? Yeah. So hand-me-downs, my mom made some of our clothes. You know, I had a fairly large family and a chunk of them immigrated to the States together. And so I was kind of lucky enough to be the tail end of that. I was born here, but I had a fair number of cousins who had come over to America. And so anything that they used, I would use. And I was a tiny kid, so I never outgrew anything.

So I wore all their clothes forever. Shopping was yard sales. We bought used stuff. It was not normal to go to the store and buy a new thing if you wanted a new thing. It was either you made do or you got creative. You know, either you use something that you had had for ages or you figured out a way around needing that thing. And so I kind of grew up in this environment where you looked for ways to get more use out of the thing that you had. Or you looked for ways to solve your problems without spending money. And that got me thinking about money.

Because I thought, well, okay, I know you have to pay for things. Like we have to pay for things. Like, we have to pay for rent. I knew that we paid rent because we had a landlord, and he's a really nice old man, that would come by, you know, when I was like five, I thought he was super old, but he was probably only 50. You know how when you're a kid, everybody seems really old, right? Yeah. He's a super, super nice landlord, but he would come and visit, and he did all the repairs himself.

So the thing that I kind of took away from that was, okay, well, there are certain things that you have to actually pay money for, but we sure do work hard at not spending it. So what's that about? It was the absence, I guess, of using money regularly that made me think about it. And currency, physically currency, was just a fun thing. You know, these days you can find and play piggy banks and play coins and, you know, there's monopoly money and stuff like that. It had that sort of novelty to me. You know, when my parents would have like a spare change jar, I'd play with that. You know, you'd go through and stack all the same size coins and they actually meant something. You know, you'd go through and stack all the same size coins and

they actually meant something. You know, when you had a big stack of the biggest round ones, that meant you had X number of dollars. And so when, when I'm curious, so, you know, it seemed like, you know, growing up, you had this really great kind of representation of like, you know, how to save, how to, you know, best utilize the money that you have. But I'm assuming that as you kind of grew up and maybe were in high school or university or whatever, and you'd see how other people were spending their money or they weren't as frugal, that kind of like, hmm, you kind of saw it in a different light. Well, like I said, it wasn't until I was a teen before I realized that you

actually, normal people went to the store to buy clothes. And that didn't bother me in the way that you would expect it to bother a teen, right? I guess the good thing was that I didn't grow up caring very much about things like clothes and how I dressed in comparison to other kids. It was sort of an anthropological interest. It was like, okay, well, you people shop at stores. That's interesting. Let's go see how you live life. And I was lucky enough to be friends with a family that,

a larger family with more kids than we had in our family. And so they were also very careful about money, but they were a bit more modern than we had in our family. And so they were also very careful about money, but they were a bit more modern than we were. So yes, they did shop in stores, but they also did it maybe a different level and different type of frugality. And so I started learning, okay, well, we do it this way because this is what works for our family, but they do a similar thing just in sort of a different manner, right? So in their family, the mom was stay-at-home mom and the dad worked and she made the dollar stretch. And in my family, everybody, every adult had to work and you kind of made your dollar stretch in a different way. So as I got older, I would start sort of noticing, okay, well, this family,

because the mom stays at home, they only have the one income, they're careful with money in this way. And then I'd meet people whose both parents worked and they were quite affluent. You know, some of my closest friends were spanning the range of maybe not as poor as we were to very wealthy. One of our friends was, you know, we called them the Mercedes family. They were in business and they were very wealthy. So the entire family drove a fleet of Mercedes, you know? So as soon as they could drive, you know, for us, it was like, uh, I learned to drive in my dad's beat up old truck from 1980 and they grew up and took their driving lessons in, you know, the newest model of Mercedes because that's just the way they live their life.

So, yeah, I absolutely noticed there were big differences, huge differences between how I grew up and other people grew up. But I think very luckily, I also knew that we were happy at home for the most part. I think probably the changes were kind of the easiest ones when it came to learning about money. Because I was happy with my family and my family was starting to do a little bit better. So we had some money. And ironically, I think that's kind of when things were slowly starting to fall apart and I didn't know it. My mom's health wasn't good, but she hid it. It's sort of a typical, I think, thing that parents do.

They don't want kids to worry, so they don't tell you the truth about their health, right? So mom's health wasn't awesome. You know, my grandmother got fairly ill, but we weren't really aware of the extent at that time. My parents worked really, really, really hard. I mean, they worked every single day, 15, 16 hour days for years. I didn't know what a vacation was. When people said family vacation, again, to me, that was a thing that you heard about and you read about, but it wasn't part of our lives. Family vacations were not a thing that existed in reality. You know, it was like, oh, unicorns exist.

Also family vacations. You know, days off. What's that? Yeah, exactly. Wow. You know, I guess it was, there was such a stark difference between my life and everybody else's. And I saw how hard my parents worked. There wasn't room for envy is, I guess, what I'm getting at.

Okay. That's an interesting way to put it. Yeah. That what we had was plenty. So as I said, that's when things sort of started falling apart a little bit. My parents were very good at making do when there was very, very little. But what I think might be more common is when you go from having very little to having maybe a moderate amount of money and sort of income. You don't necessarily have the skills to manage that to grow it beyond that. Right. Right. Right. So let's say, you know, you come from a family that just never can afford to go to college,

never can afford to get past high school, and you need immediately, you know, you go into blue-collar jobs and you're just making it paycheck to paycheck every month. When you go from that to having a decent income, sometimes the, I think the instinct is just, well, there were a lot of things we couldn't have before, so we can have them now, rather than looking forward to how can I secure this for our future? How can I make sure this stays the way things are at least this, you know, at least we have this much, right? So that part I started learning, you know, how you sometimes when you have a very bad example in front of you, you learn what not to do.

I saw the effects of that sort of approach to money. And I realized, okay, well, after that did not turn out very well. I was probably 18 when I realized, okay, so the last few years seemed fine, but I was missing a lot of the details and they've gotten us in a situation that's not very good. So, you know, it's the situation with money where it's easy come, easy go. That's like a windfall. If you don't have the skills to manage that kind of money, it's just going to slip through your fingers. And that's when you kind of, I guess, start educating yourself on best practices and how to budget and stuff like that? Yes. Yes. So very early on, like I said, we had learned the, um,

through the rock bottom sort of reality, right? Like make every penny a stretch. And so I was balancing between that and okay, well, how do I make, how do I get us out of this hole? My parents had, were entrepreneurs and things had gone well for a while because they worked very, very hard at it. But between the luck of the market and some bad management, not on their part, but on the part of some of their employees, that all kind of went away, leaving them with no steady income, mom's failing health, and a pile of business debt. So here I am, 18, thinking, okay, well, I am going to college now. And I also need to keep my family afloat.

Because back then I really thought, okay, well, I just need to help them through a rough patch. Right. I had no idea the rough patch would be forever. Oh, really? Yeah. So back then I thought, okay, well, I was going to get a job and pay for college anyway, even though my parents said that they wanted to take care of it. I didn't want them to have to. I thought, you know, you've done your time.

Yeah. And I think it was lucky that I just had decided that before everything kind of went down the drain because I was ready to work and I had a job and I think it paid minimum wage back then. I think it must have paid like $6 an hour if that, maybe $5.45 or something like that. Oh, wow. But you know what? You got to start somewhere. So I was going to school and I was working and I figured, you know what? One way or another, the hours will add up and we'll deal. So then, you know, I spent a lot of time on the internet. This is when,

I think this was just right before Money Blog started really taking off, but, uh, fat wallet was a tremendous resource. Um, I spent a lot of time going through all their forms about making money, saving money, um, you know, again,

stretching every dollar. So, um, this is when I learned how to use credit cards. And you'd think that would be an absolutely terrible thing to learn at that age, particularly in the circumstances we were in. But what I learned was credit cards can pay you. What do you mean by that exactly?

So a lot of people use credit cards to buy what they can't afford at that time. So, you know, you say you've got a $5,000 credit line and you don't have $5,000 in the bank. A lot of people might think, well, this is licensed to spend $5,000. So I never had that problem. I didn't actually know right before I started using credit cards that my parents had sort of fallen into that trap of using credit cards ahead of the money that they had on hand. And with interest piling on top of that, it gets out of control very fast. What I learned about credit cards was, okay, you can have as large a credit line as you want. That doesn't mean that's your money.

That means the credit card company has a fairly large opportunity to make money off of you, or you can turn it around, only spend what you know you can pay for using a credit card with rewards. And then you actually come out ahead. And that's actually what I did. So I had to pay for college tuition every quarter. And I put that on a credit card because back then where I went, I went to a school that didn't charge much more than a community college and I didn't take more use the float. You know, you get like 25 days before your purchase or before the credit card cycle closes to, or before they close the cycle, and then they give you a payment due date, right? So I would use that time to just keep saving up the money that I would have spent on that tuition, that cash, kept it in my checking account, and when the balance came to you, I paid it off, and then I'd get rewards. So it'd be, you know, 1%, 2%, 5%, depending on whatever the card was. And after a while, those rewards were

like my fun money because back then I couldn't afford anything. You know, I was, I was just making it. I was paying the rent. So I was paying the utilities. I was paying for tuition. I was buying my books for school and there was no room in the budget. There was no room in my paycheck for anything like fun. Yeah. And that's important. And you know, I barely had time for fun because I was working so much. But this was my little bit of fun. It was okay. I'm going to squeeze out that extra one to 5% off of money. I have to pay to get money that I can keep for myself for whatever I want. So discover card back then was my absolute favorite because you could earn, you know,

their equivalent of $25 in rewards and you could redeem it for $40 in gift cards. Oh, nice. Yeah. But to this day, I think back to that gift cards. Oh, nice. Yeah. To this day, I think back to that like, oh, I sure do miss that. I know. That's a really good return on your spending, right? Yeah.

So, yeah, so definitely in sort of the late teens was when I started having to learn all of these things because I thought, you know, this really sucks for the family right now, but I'm going to work my butt off and save any pennies that I can. And, you know, that was before I realized how much debt my parents really had. And at some point during my college career, I decided I'm going to pay this all off because I could see the toll it was taking on my mom. And part of that was her health. But stress is a really, stress can kill you. Oh, yeah. And people don't realize this. So the stress and anxiety of not having a steady income to pay off their debts and to sort of to pay for everything in the household was really, I could see that taking a toll on my mom. And I just thought, you know what, I can do this. I can take care of this. So I really lived in finance

forums and I lived on every finance blog that, you know, every personal finance blog I could find at the time. They were great. That's awesome. Yeah. So that's but I think a very incredibly long-winded answer to your question no it's I like that's an amazing story of you know because I feel like a lot of people probably had you know maybe a similar situation than you or just you know found themselves yeah and just like one of those situations where they don't know how to get out of this big hole and it's amazing that you, you know, kind of found the light at the end of the tunnel and you just kind of like, no, I'm going to, I'm going to get out of this. I'm going to fix this. I'm going to help my family.

And, you know, that's, that's pretty amazing. I don't think a lot of people would be able to be that motivated and work as hard as you. So props to you. Thanks. I do. Honestly, there's a bit of me that chalks it up to a bit of denial because like I said, I really thought it was just a rough patch. So every year I thought, you know, all right, we'll make it through this. It's just a rough patch. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. So how many years were you kind of

dedicated to, how many years did it take you to kind of, like, were you involved in helping your family? And then was there a certain point where you're like, you know, I need to kind of step away? It was a pretty long time. So I've been probably about 10 years where I was doing different things. One, I was trying to get into some sort of a position career wise that I can where I can keep growing. I can't just sort of sit back and let things happen. I can't just let someone recognize my hard work and promote me or give me raises when when they think it's possible. Right. So I was very focused on pushing my career forward. As I said, even as far back as when I was a teenager, my mom's health was slowly getting

worse. And I think probably my early 20s, I started realizing how bad it really was. And this was her trying really hard to spare me. She was trying really hard to continue working. And my dad was as well, but there was sort of, you know, some family conflict with just trying to, you know, do this without leaning on me. And that caused a lot of communication problems because for my part, I thought, well, we're a family and this is, I'm happy to do this, but you got to work with me. And for my parents, I'm sure you could understand that when you raise a kid, you don't ever expect

for them to have to then support you. For them, just getting through a rough patch, it wasn't that simple. You know, there were all sorts of sort of cultural and generational conflicts in how they viewed the situation. It was very difficult for them to accept my help. So we had a lot of that kind of stuff going on, a lot of push-pull between us trying to make it work. And it turned out, and I had no idea, but it turned out their debt was just this enormous mountain of debt between sort of the businesses and personal loans that were tied to the business. They had a lot of credit card debt. And none of this was really what I would consider frivolous debt. You know, they weren't going out there buying nice things.

They were trying to stay ahead of the expenses, but just doing it in a way that was detrimental to their financial health. Right. You know, so all told, I would take it, I think it was like $5,000 chunks at a time. Mm-hmm, wow. Which back then was a lot, because again, like I said,

I started out making minimum wage. Yeah, exactly. And I was still paying for school, and I was paying our rent. So there was really very little left over. Well, there was nothing left over at the end of the month. It's just I had to kind of figure out how to make a little bit more each paycheck to pay for the debts that they were slowly sharing with me. You know, my mom and I actually had sort of a sit down

come to come to reality moment where I said, look, I'm going to do the best I can. But you guys really need to be honest with me because what you're doing here, when you're hiding this stuff and trying to say, we're fine, we can take care of it. If you're just kind of killing me slowly here, every time something comes up that you couldn't handle and you could have, um, had me help out earlier and kept the fees lower and kind of, you know, when you, you waited until it was critical, every time that happens, you take like five years off my life. So my mom understood that and she stopped hiding everything. And, you know, as it came out, it was, oh, got six figures worth of debt one way or another. Wow.

Yeah. And in some ways it was kind of good that it only came out little by little because that would have felt crushing all at once. Yeah. And in some ways it was kind of good that it only came out little by little because that would have felt crushing all at once. Yeah. But, you know, to pay off that much money and continue to pay for the household, it took a long time. I think if I had known, you know, we had $100,000 or $150,000 worth of debt when I was 18 and making minimum wage and still trying to pay for tuition, I'm not entirely sure I would have had the kind of outlook that I did. When I looked back several years later, kind of taking it bit by bit by bit, I realized, well, holy cow, that's where all my money went. Right. But it was paid off.

That's amazing, though, that it's paid off. Yeah. So sometimes I look back and think, well, you know, what could I have done better? And I think, honestly, I probably did the best I could with what I had at the time. Totally. So now I look back and think, okay, I did spend a lot of years trying to fix a situation that was not terribly fixable. And, you know, it's kind of funny when I look around the PF blog community now, a lot of people really power through their debt in an incredibly impressive way. So I think, you know, a lot of us can do it if we actually sort of set our minds to it and make a plan.

But there are so many different ways we can make it happen, right? As long as we're personally motivated to just keep at it, however you get that motivation. Exactly. Yeah. There's no kind of one size fits all solution. It's kind of, you have to find out what motivates, what will motivate you to, you know, kind of pay it off and then find out what plan makes the most sense for you. That's kind of what I understand from like a bunch of the debt blogs out there. Everyone has kind of a different way to go about it, but you know, if it works for them, then it works for them. Yeah. And there's so much we can learn from the various stories, you know, you can read a hundred stories and maybe only 99 of them resonate in some way or, you know, only one of them resonates in some way. But they all have really valuable experiences and information that you can glean something from.

Absolutely. So let's kind of switch gears a bit. So you focused, you know, it seems like for a long time on, you know, getting your family out of that situation. But now it seems like now you're kind of, you know, you have your own family and you're kind of on a different path, not so much like, okay, I need to kind of fix this and get out of debt, but you're kind of on this new path journey to, you know, kind of not ever be in that situation again and hopefully become a millionaire. Yes. Which I think is awesome because I feel like it's one thing to, you know, kind of get out of a bad financial situation, but it's another to be like, okay, well that's done moving forward. Let's have this other huge goal of like, let's, you know, see how much money we can save and

how wealthy we can become, which is also, I think sometimes a, a scary task because people may know how to, um, get out of debt, but they may not know how to, you know, make more money and save it and, you know,

get, you know, especially like, I'm just kind of like thinking of it for me. It's like, I was never poor growing up. We were definitely always kind of middle class, but we did,

you know, definitely had to make some sacrifices and yeah, we didn't do like crazy family vacations. So we definitely lived on a budget, but that definitely kind of always inspired me. I'm like, well, I don't want to always live like that. I would like to have, you know, be a, you know, a little richer than how I grew up, but it's also hard to be like, but how do I do that? Yeah. Well, to be honest, even when I was in sort of survival and debt mode, there was a little part of me and I think, um, I don't necessarily call it hope, but there was a little part of me that said, you know what, we can get through this

because dammit, this is never going to happen again. And I had seen this play out in my mom's life. She had, you know, they, she and my dad came here from a different country where she grew up very poor. So, okay. When I say we were relatively poor, it's because I contrast it to, you know, second and third world countries where it's so much worse, where indoor plumbing is unheard of. So, you know, I had grown up on these stories of what it was like to grow up essentially like in the country where you don't have anything that we consider normal here. Running water, hot water, plumbing. Oh my gosh. I can't even tell you how much I love flushing toilets. Oh my gosh. Yeah. You know, electricity, day and night. I've been in places

with families where you only had an hour of electricity at night. So you went to bed when the sun went down, or if you stayed up, there had better be a really good reason you're using that electricity. Wow. So it was an eye-opening perspective to understand that, okay, I have it really hard here right now. And it doesn't invalidate the difficulties that I'm going through to know it could be so much worse. But at the end of the day, it could be so much worse. So make the best of what you've got now. And by the way, let's make sure we never get here again. Absolutely. You know, and one of the biggest things for me, the biggest push was remembering, look, mom had to grow up under these circumstances. And I leave my dad out a little bit because he didn't grow up poor. So he grew up in a poorer country, but his childhood compared to my

mom's is different. So I am a lot more like my mom. So it's not to say my dad doesn't count. He does. But when you look at it, it's like, okay, well, yes, everything right now is incredibly hard, but I have the opportunity to earn money. I have the opportunity to grow my career. I can actually say, you know what, once we get through whatever this is, it's going to be so much better because, and it's going to be better because I will have made sure that this doesn't happen again. So even as I was putting away, you know, I was shelving each one of their credit cards and paying off that debt and paying back their loans, I was looking at

every single paycheck and saying, okay, that money that I've got here for fun, what can I do with that instead to secure my future a little bit more, right? So social niceties like birthday presents and Christmas presents and things like that, I would use my fun money for things that were not strict necessities, but that are sort of social norms, right? And whatever I could not spend my actual cash on, I would kind of squirrel away a little bit of that. So I'd tuck away, you know, a dollar here, five dollars there. You know, if I couponed the groceries and I saved, you know, 15 cents, I would squirrel that all away. And so there was this little, you know,

you could almost call it like hope savings, right? I was going to save something to make sure that once we're out of this debt, we're not just cleared from the debt, but we have some, something that says this isn't going to keep happening. We're going to have something so that when an emergency comes up, because it always does, something will always come up. You will not just get thrown right back into that pit because you will have had this little bit of savings here. It'll pay for that emergency. You won't put it on a credit card. So in fact, I was juggling the two mentalities at the same time. It was much harder for me to let go of the survival mentality than it was to embrace the

wealth one. I can imagine that because especially if you're in like that survival mode for so long, that's, it becomes your normal. Yes. So yeah. So to this day, I still have to stop and remind myself, we're not going to go broke if I eat out once. My rule was if I was out running errands, honest to goodness, I would rather run six hours of errands and go home and eat some belated lunch and risk passing out than I was willing to spend a dollar. That's how it was so ingrained. So to this day, so my husband will have to remind me every so often, like it is actually okay if we spend $5 right now, because your health is kind of more important than that $5. Um, and it's, it's a lesson that I've relearned in the last sort of, you know,

three to five years. It's okay to spend a reasonable amount. This is why you've done all this stuff. And it won't, you know, obviously you're not going to do this every single day because yes, that will then impede the growth of the wealth. But a reasonable amount is by definition, okay, it's reasonable, right? Exactly. Yeah. So, so I think I was very, very lucky to have the exposure to both frugality things as well as to sort of wealth mentalities online because that helped me shape my approach to, okay, we're going to do this to pay off debt, but we're also going to start doing these things to build wealth. And because I was finally able to kind of cut away that pure survival instinct for at least submerge it, right? It didn't need to be the top and foremost thing on my mind forever. I was able to say, you know what?

Well, we've kind of knocked out one semi-impossible goal. What's the next one? And, you know, I thought I definitely want to make sure that our families are taken care of. Our parents are getting older. At some point, they may need some help. So I'd like to make sure that doesn't bankrupt us. And before you knew it, it turned into this grandiose scheme of we'd be able to take care of everyone, although no one would know that we were rich. We were going to be multimillionaires. And, you know, after several, you know, bouts of this daydreaming,

I sort of settled into, okay, it's pretty reasonable to say that if I work very hard at building our wealth, investing, sort of shaking up our portfolios and looking at making the most of our income now, we should be on track to hit our first million, um, probably in the next couple of years, if I'm being realistic. Wow. That's awesome. I don't know. You know, I mean, part of a lot of things depend on the stock market, I hate right I hate having everything sort of sit in one basket because I've seen how disastrous that can be so it's kind of a okay well I'm gonna say the next couple of years and then even if that's not what the projections say I'm

gonna make it happen when we're at the end that's amazing yeah yeah I think that's like a really lofty goal, but I think it's impressive that, I mean, I think that's so important to have sometimes unrealistic goals because you may surprise yourself when you achieve them, you know? Right, because what's the harm? Exactly. If you don't allow that to demotivate you to say, oh, well, that's too big and I'll never make it. If you don't take that mentality, if you say, I'm just going to shoot as far as I possibly can, every extra inch you get from not telling yourself no prematurely is great. Exactly. It's a win. my approach to my career stuff. If, you know, if, if, if you push for as far as you can go, you know, if you're, if you're working hard, you're bringing value and you can prove it, why not ask for that larger reach? Why not ask for the promotion? Why not stretch yourself? Because the worst they can say is no, and let them say no, don't say no for them.

Exactly. So, you know, it kind of, it meshes well with sort of my, uh, the, the, the lessons I've learned with building the career and building the wealth and, you know, just go for it. If it, if you don't make it that far, there's no harm, no foul because you've made it pretty far. Exactly. Exactly. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story. I think this is, I don't know, I'm excited, um, to hear the feedback because I feel like your story is pretty amazing. And I'm not sure if you realize that because it is your story, but it's like not many people can kind of start from the bottom and work their way up to a possible millionaire in the foreseeable future. I think that's pretty amazing. Well, I really, you know, appreciate you saying that because you're right. It is my story and it seems kind of normal to me. It's like, no, that's not normal. It's pretty incredible. So thank you for, you know,

sharing it on my show. And I'm so glad that you're available to talk to me about it because yeah, you're just very inspiring. And I'm hoping that, you know, people that are listening will, you know, kind of this will be a nice kick in their pants to kind of maybe start trying to achieve some of their financial goals. Well, I hope so. Thank you so much for inviting me. No, no problem. So thank you so much for listening to this episode, episode 24. Make sure to check out Ravash's blog at agationlife.com. And for the show notes for this episode, go to momoneymohavs.com slash 24. And for every episode up until now,

momoneymohavs.com slash podcast. Now, since this was such an awesome episode and her story, like still, I still think about, I would love to know if any of you out there listening have dealt with anything similar. Have you had to help your family out of a tough money situation? I would love to get your feedback on that. You can email me at jessicaandmomoneymohouses.com or feel free to tweet me, comment on the Facebook page, comment on the show notes. And I would love to kind of create a dialogue on this. So thank you again for listening to this episode, and I will see you here next Wednesday. This podcast is distributed by the Women in Media Podcast Network. Find out more at womeninmedia.network.