More Money Podcast - 155 Practical Strategies to Pay Down Debt and Retire Early - Deacon Hayes, Author & Founder of Well Kept Wallet

Episode Date: April 18, 2018

Want to learn how to become debt-free and financially independent? It doesn’t have to be one or the other, you can dig yourself out of debt and retire early. Just take it from Deacon Hayes from Well Kept Wallet who was able to pay of $52,000 in debt in only 18 months, then become financially independent and retire early with his family. If he can do it, why not you? Long description: Deacon Hayes, the blogger and podcaster behind Well Kept Wallet, was knee deep in debt to the tune of $52,000 in 2010. But instead of digging himself further and further into the whole, he decided to take responsibility and dig himself out. He started by looking to the experts, other bloggers and authors that offered personal finance advice, and was able to implement their strategies to become debt-free in only 18 months! Now, he’s all about educating others to do the same. But he doesn’t just focus on helping others become debt-free, he also wants to share how they can become financially independent and retire early too. That’s certainly never something he thought he’d be able to accomplish, but now, in 2018, he is financially independent and technically an early retiree. But instead of drinking Pina Coladas on the beach somewhere, early retirement to him means being able to afford to do what he wants with each day. And what he wants to do is educate and inspire others to take control of their finances so they can live the lives they really want. How to Become Debt-Free So, in this episode we talk about a lot of things, but first let’s talk about debt repayment. Honestly, at the end of the day, to get a handle on your spending and debt, there are two simple things you need to do. Reduce your expenses Make more money If you actually implement both things, you’ll be able to become solvent once again. It may take some time (longer than 18 months), but even if it takes a few years, these two things are key and they work! Deacon also recommends the cash envelope system for reigning in spending, and having monthly money meetings with yourself or your partner to talk about your budget, your spending and net worth, and your future goals you’re working towards (and I totally agree!). How to Become Financially Independent Now, let’s talk early retirement. In order to achieve financial independence, there are three paths you can follow (though technically you don’t have to pick just one, you can do a combination or all three): Invest in real estate Invest in the stock market (no more than 10% individual stocks, then diversify your portfolio with index funds and ETFs) Earn more money through entrepreneurship And to help guide you and give you examples on how to do this, Deacon share real-life case studies on his website. Get His Course for Free Want to take Deacon’s “Debt Free in 18 Months” course for free? It’s valued at $97, but you can sign up for free by going to: wellkeptwallet.com/retire For full episode show notes visit https://jessicamoorhouse.com/155 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to episode 155 of the Mo Money Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Morehouse. Thank you so much for joining me for another episode. And this one is a really good one, guys. I am interviewing Deacon Hayes. He is the blogger behind Well-Kept Wallet, also a podcaster himself with a podcast called Well-Kept Wallet. And if that was enough, he's also an author. He wrote the book You Can Retire Early. And it is on bookshelves now, guys. Grab it. He's from the States.

If you don't know, he is from the States. And so when we were actually chatting, he asked me, he's like, I know, I think it is available in Canada, but I haven't physically seen it. Would you be able to, you know, if you go to a bookstore like an Indigo or whatever, can you take a photo for me? So of course I did. I went there. I was, you know, in the area of a bookstore, went to Indigo and took a snapshot of his book on the shelf. So if you're American, Canadian, it's on bookshelves now. Go grab a copy of You Can Retire Early. So for this episode of the podcast, we talk about kind of two main topics. First, debt, because one of his kind of big stories is he was able to pay off $52,000 in debt in only 18 months, which sounds like a lot of money in a very short amount of time. So we go into how he was able to

do that. I think one thing that always kind of drives me crazy is you see so many stories out there. They're like, so-and-so paid off like $100,000 in debt in like a year. And you're like, but how? And then there always turn out to be clickbaity things. You read the article, they never really tell you how to do it. No, no, no. I ask them literally, what is the strategy? How were you able to do that? So if someone else is in a similar situation and they need some help, they can kind of get some tips. And so he shares that. And also we talk really about kind of what his book is about, which is about retiring early, financial independence, kind of a theme this season. And so we go into more about like, what does that mean? How does one accomplish this realistically? And all that good stuff.

So a lot of good stuff in this episode. But before I get to it, here's just a few words about this episode's sponsor. Freelancers and small business owners, I feel you. Tax season is in full swing. And I bet there's a good chance that many of you are trying to dig your way out from underneath a pile of receipts and spreadsheets. Do yourself a huge favor and stop digging. Before you completely disappear under that abyss of paperwork, go and check out FreshBooks Cloud Accounting Software. Not only is it going to save you a ton of time and stress, it might actually change the way you feel about dealing with your taxes. Need to send your accountant a quick summary on the amount of tax you've collected last year? How about pulling together a profit and loss summary? FreshBooks can generate these reports in seconds instead of the hours it would take you to do them manually. You can even set up

FreshBooks to import expenses directly from your bank accounts, which means next time you use your debit card for that meal, tank of gas, or new computer, boom, the purchase is recorded instantly into FreshBooks. All this and FreshBooks is ridiculously easy to use. It's made especially for people who don't like dealing with numbers and their taxes. And right now, FreshBooks is offering a 30-day unrestricted free trial to my listeners. To claim it, just go to freshbooks.com slash MO and enter Momany Podcast in the How Did You Hear About Us section. Once again, that's freshbooks.com slash MO and enter Momany Podcast in the How Did You Hear About Us section. Thanks, Deacon, for joining me on the Momany Podcast. I'm so excited to have you on the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me on. You are so welcome. So you have a pretty interesting story. I know there's a lot of stories out there of people being able to pay down a lot of debt in a short amount of time, but it's nice to actually talk to someone one-on-one to really figure out how did you do it? So your story is that you paid off $52,000 in debt, which is a ton of money in only 18 months. We'll get to how you did that. But first, I want to know, I guess, like before that, how did you get to that point? How did you somehow accrue that much debt? Yeah, so it was our normal everyday decisions, right? So we, you know, I wanted to go to college. So instead of, you know, working

100% through college, I got student loans. My wife and I wanted to go on a honeymoon, you know, we're like, hey, let's put it on a credit card. We'll pay for it later. We got jobs, you know? Yeah. Hey, I need a new car. My boss is basically hounding me like your car. He basically was like saying your car sucks. You need a new car. Here, he actually gave me an ad for a Nissan Altima, brand new. He's like, you can afford this. So I literally went to the dealership and I bought that car, right? Because I was like, hey, this guy writes my paychecks. I better, you know, listen to him. Yeah. So, you know, those things combined, you know, to the $52,000. And my wife and I got married. So we combined our finances. And so some of that was her student loans and credit cards and that type of thing as well. Awesome. Well, not awesome. You probably got married and

realized, Oh crap. So I guess, yeah, I'm guessing, did you not, did you, or did you, or did you not talk about your finances before you got married? We didn't talk about specifics, right? Like I didn't say, Hey honey, how much student loans do you have? Or Hey, how much credit card debt? And we probably should have. Um, but yeah, we didn't know, like we both knew we had debt. We just didn't know it was that much. So it was after kind of the wedding date that you're like, all right, so let's see where we're at. And then you're like, Oh no. Yeah. It's like, Hey, we probably should do something about this. Yeah. So when you did see those numbers in black and white and realized you have a bit of a problem on your hands, what did you do? Before that point, did you have any sense of how to

manage money properly or did you kind of think you were doing the right thing and then realized you weren't so much? Yeah. Unfortunately, I didn't really have much of an upbringing as far as understanding how to manage money well. So that's kind of why we got to that point. So when we sat down and we said, okay, we need to figure out how to do this well, right? Like how are people that are handling money well doing it? So I researched guys like Warren Buffett, Dave Ramsey, Jim Cramer, John Bogle, like anybody who is kind of like a personal finance guy. Yeah. And I decided to start reading their blogs, their books, their, you know, if they had a podcast, that kind of thing and learn from them.

And so in a short period of time, I kind of said, oh, this seems pretty straightforward, right? Like, well, you just need more money each month, right? So we need to make more money and we need to reduce our expenses. So those are the two things we focused on. Awesome. Yeah. It sounds so simple when you say it like that.

That's all we have to do and then we'll be fine. So how, so I guess, yeah, what, what did you immediately change in your lifestyle to be able to pay off $52,000 in just over a year? Yeah. So we looked through the budget and we said, okay, like what's not necessary. So a couple of things, a gym membership at the time, right? Like I never used it and I said, Hey, I don't, I can go walk outside. Right. Like I don't need it. So I cut that cable. We didn't need cable. We got Netflix instead. Right. So it was kind of just going through one by one and

saying, Hey, how can we either get rid of this or make it smaller? You know, we did adopt the cash envelope system. So for us, for, yeah, for variable expenses, we're like groceries, you know, entertainment, those type of things. We're going to put cash in an envelope or actually going to use it, you know. And if it was gone, then we had to, you know, make food out of our freezer or out of our pantry. And so it sounds drastic. Like we don't do that now.

But to get results that you haven't gotten before, you got to do different things. Right. And so we knew that we needed to adopt these new habits to really achieve our goal in a short period of time. Now, did you have the goal of doing it in 18 months or, or what was like, why did you set that deadline or what deadline did you set originally? Yeah. So Dave Ramsey had a course called financial peace university. And he said that the average person that, you know, applied his principles paid it off in 18 to 24 months. So I'm like, well, if that's the average, then I can do it in 18 months. Right. So it was kind of that benchmark of, hey, somebody else has done it there. So it's possible, I guess. Did you feel like it was really difficult and restricting to kind of, you know, kind of gold, go cold Turkey, so to speak? I think it depends on your attitude, right?

Like, so I think we gamified it. We made it fun. Like it was, we had a chart on our fridge that said like, Hey, here's the 52 grand and we want to like fill it down lower as we go. Right. So, you know, we're like 52 the first month and we want to like fill it down lower as we go, right? So, you know, we're like 52 the first month and then 51 and then like 50, you know, and then we got like a tax refund and it's like 46 and then you sell a car and you're at like 30 and you're like,

oh my gosh, like we went from 52 to 30 like that. So it just made it more fun where we didn't feel like we're missing out, right? Like, hey, no, we're getting closer and closer to our goal. Yeah, absolutely. So how, when you did kind of reach that moment where you became debt-free, how I think this, and this is like kind of a big struggle that most people have, it seems fairly straightforward and how to get out of debt, but how to maintain that debt-free life and not go back to your old way, it seems to be pretty difficult. How were you able to do that? Yeah. So we slowly implemented things, right? Like, cause we had drastically reduced our grocery budget. And so our grocery

budget today is different than it was when we paid off our debt. Right. Um, and so we have two kids now. We didn't have kids when we were paying off our debt. So that expenses has gone up. Um, but we're very conscious of how our different habits, you know, and our purchases affect our goals. Um, so we have monthly meetings, you know, where we sit down and we say, habits, you know, and our purchases affect our goals. So we have monthly meetings, you know, where we sit down and we say, Hey, what are, it's, it's less a budget meeting and it's more of a goal setting meeting, right? Yeah. Our goals are, we want to buy a second home. We want to put our kids through college. We want to be able to, you know, do certain things. And so we have all of these buckets, right? And so are we getting closer

to those goals, right? Are we putting money into each one at a certain level? So instead of like going, we used to have this kind of like, okay, well you spent this much on groceries and then you did this much. And it's like, no, it's, hey, here's our goals together. And are we getting closer to them? And so we have kind of those monthly check-ins to make sure that we're still moving in the right direction to kind of keep us from the ship going off course. Exactly. No, and I think you bring up a good point. I think sometimes when you bring up monthly money meeting, my husband and I do the same thing.

A lot of people think that it's just a time to be like, hey, you did this. I did this. You did, you know, playing the blame game. It really shouldn't be. It should just be like, listen, no one's perfect. Always make mistakes. The budget is like the guide. But obviously obviously sometimes we kind of go off course. So it's just about kind of re-navigating so you are on course to reach your goals. Absolutely.

I love that. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. Yeah. So when did the idea to start Wellcut Wallet, your blog, and then your podcast come about? So it was while we were paying off our debt, I thought, hey, how could I share our story with other people and just be able to say, hey, here's some ways that we saved money, made money, and paid off our debt. And so yeah, it was back in 2010. 2010. So kind of right after the recession. Good time. Perfect time. Perfect timing. Yeah, there's a lot of people that had that need, you know. Oh, especially during that time.

Absolutely. I think that's like the moment where most people that never really had to think about their finances because everything was fine, really had to kind of change their lifestyle to make things work again. And now, you know, so it started out as a hobby, but now this is what you do for your living, right? Right. yeah. So it started out as basically just a way to help people, right? And I didn't really think there was a way to make money with it.

Yeah. And then I started getting more traffic. And then when you have traffic, you can have advertisers. And so the advertisers at the time was AdSense, would pay if they clicked on them. And then I got an affiliate marketing. And so now it's a full-time job making six figures, potentially seven figures this year. We'll see, fingers crossed. But yeah, it's been a crazy ride to go from this hobby to actually making a living. Yeah. To being like $52,000 in debt, starting a hobby blog to making like seven figures and working for yourself. And how long did that, when did you start a well-kept wallet? How long did it take

you to get to where you are today? Yeah. So it's interesting. So it started in 2010, but it wasn't probably until 2016 that I actually started making decent money with it. So there's this six year dry run. So, um, so during that time I did have, I started a job as a financial planner. I thought, Hey, that's a, that's a logical next step, right? I want to help people with their money. Uh, but what I found is, is that financial planners make money off of high net worth individuals. They don't really make a living off of regular people. And I'm like, well, what about all the rest of the people out there? So the blog was a great platform where you can reach anybody, right? And the podcast as well.

And so really, it was about having something that used kind of my interests and my skill sets versus kind of the traditional way of doing it. Exactly. And so how do you, I guess, use your platforms now to educate other people? I know you've got the blog, so there's resources there, the podcast. I also saw on your website that you have a course. Yeah, so we just have different ways. I actually wrote a book last year, which was really a fun experience. So that's a new way. I'm really just trying to figure out ways to reach people, right?

So we have an audio book, right? It's called You Can Retire Early. So people can listen to it that way. Or we have the podcast, which is something people can listen to in their car. We have a YouTube channel where people can watch videos. So really we try to use all the different platforms, you know, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter to reach people. And our goal simply is to help, you know, put more money back in people's wallets, right? So help them save money, make money and pay off debt using all those different platforms. Now you mentioned retiring early. Is that kind of your next big goal? I know,

obviously you, you know, reach some form of financial independence where you can work for yourself and don't have to do a nine to five, but is retiring early one of those goals in the future for you? Well, so it's interesting. So we, we technically are financially independent now, so we have enough financial resources to do what we want when we want. The thing that I think people have this misunderstanding about is retirement to me is more about being able to do what you want, right? Using your skill sets. So I don't want to like lay on a beach and sit by ties. Like I actually want to help more and more people. So now I have more time, more freedom. I can actually do more than being kind of confined in a cube and working for somebody else. So, so for me, I'll never retire, like in the traditional sense, I just might work smarter, different hours, I like to have the flexibility to spend time with my kids. So it really is, it's, it's kind of turned upside down, because I think, you know, my grandparents,

I could just they bought a home in Arizona, where it's warm. And, you know, my grandparents, I could just, they bought a home in Arizona where it's warm and, you know, they just, they, in their fifties, they decided that they were going to go move out there and I'm not knocking it, but, you know, she likes to play bingo and, and, and, you know, go, you know, hang out with her friends and do. So it's, it's a very different mindset where mine is more like, Hey, how can I help more people? How can I add more value? How can I be productive? And so that's kind of my view of retirement. So let's talk, I'd like to talk a little bit more about your book. What are some of the, I guess, tips and tools that you share in your book for people to kind of emulate what you've been able to do? Yeah. So I basically found three different paths and they're not like rocket

science. Pretty much people hear these, they're going to be like, Oh, I knew that. But still that's good. Cause you're like, Oh, I could do that. Exactly. So what we did is we took three different paths, right? Real estate, um, stock market and entrepreneurship and said, okay, how could someone become financially independent through one of these three paths? And so we actually have multiple case studies and we'll say like John and Susie, um, make $80,000, you know, combined. And so if they could live on $30,000 and be able to get $50,000 a year,

they could, they could go and they could buy the first, you know, rental property in that first year. They can, you know, fix it up, get a renter. Then they can save another 50,000. They could get another one. Then they can pay them down, you know, so we literally have like the step by step, hey, here's this couple, and you can say, hey, I can I can resonate with that, like I make 80 grand, or hey, this couple only makes 50 grand, or, you know, this couple is actually a high income earner, and this is what they decide to do. And so really kind of map out for people like, hey, if you're interested in getting your hands dirty and fixing stuff up, real estate might be for you. If you're like, set it and forget it, like, I don't want to think about it,

stock market's probably for you. And if you're entrepreneurial, where you like to solve problems and help people and kind of get in the weeds, entrepreneurship might be for you. So really, it's kind of a practical guide of, you know, one of these three paths could be right, you know, to help you retire early. I like that. And so when you talk about stock market, what specifically are you talking about? Like, are you kind of like,. And so when you talk about stock market, what specifically are you talking about? I feel like whenever I talk to someone, everyone's on the bandwagon of index fund investing, the passive kind of couch potato method. Is that kind of what you're referring to? Yeah, for the most part, because we talk about the risks that are involved. There's definitely

money to be made in the stock market and single you know, single stocks. The challenge is, is not the average person is going to spend enough time researching and understanding their balance sheets and, you know, their earnings per shares and all that kind of stuff. And so for the average person who's like, hey, I want to look at a track record, let's say the S&P 500 or the Russell 2000 or whatever, and say, okay, over this period of time, it's average 10, 12%, whatever, and the fees are really low. That's more of the set it, forget it model. And in the book, you know, it really kind of talks about, I mean, you can do single stocks, but I prefer that you would stay less than 10% of your net worth, right? So, you know, if let's say you had $100,000, you shouldn't put more than $10,000, right? That way you're kind of protected from, if that goes bankrupt, you're not going to be

in financial trouble. Because the thing that really gets me is people with Bitcoin and all of this cryptocurrency and that kind of stuff, it's speculating, right? You could invest it today and lose $6,000 like that. So the stock market on index investing definitely has a better track record. I would love to actually get your perspective because it does seem like everyone's talking about cryptocurrency.

What are your thoughts on that? Is that something that you would ever dabble in? Personally? So more from speculating, not from an investing standpoint yeah so um just just to kind of say for fun like hey i put a grand in and it turned into 1600 or whatever uh but never as an investing strategy i mean i think the reality is is it's got a lot of time to kind of prove itself there's so many options out there um there's there's still a lot of unknown. And so for those reasons, I would definitely steer

clear of it from an investing strategy. If someone's a high net worth and they want to put less than 10%, I mean, even I would say less than 5% is something like that, right? Like really low just to kind of maybe find entertainment out of it. That would probably be the only reason I would do it, but not to actually make money. Yeah. No, I agree. It's just, yeah, everyone's just talking about it. Personally for me, I'm like, all right, that's fine. If you want to dabble, if you have some money that you're fine with losing, because you just don't, you can't, you know, it's so new. But yeah, definitely don't make that your retirement plan. Exactly. Exactly. That's amazing. So it does seem like from your website and everything that you do,

that you've helped a lot of people. Are there any kind of some case studies that you'd like to share of people that have maybe like taken your course, read your book that have implemented some of your strategies? Yeah, probably the best one actually is my in-laws, which is kind of cool. Yeah. So my mother-in-law and my, my father-in-law was a doctor, so he made really good money, but they were in their sixties and they had $400,000 in debt. So this is like, wow, $400,000. Yeah. But, but it's mortgage debt. They had, they had a mortgage, they had a home equity line of credit, They had car loans. They had credit cards. And so basically when my mother-in-law saw what we were doing, she's like, Deacon, can you sit down with

me and help me do kind of what you guys are doing? I'm like, sure. So, you know, I give her my budget form and we go through. And what do you know? So in four years, they put off $400,000. Wow. But now, so keep in mind, he was a doctor, he's making a good six figure income. But the reality is for, you know, 40, 40 years of their working life, they hadn't made any progress, right? They'd always just been maintaining the status quo. It wasn't until they said, okay, we know that this is an issue, we need to, we need to track it, we need to figure out how to pay it off, that they were actually able to get results in a short period of time. You know? And I think that that's possible for anybody, right? And it's not

like, I mean, maybe not $400,000, but maybe it's $40,000 or, you know, whatever it is in someone's situation where it said, okay, I just need to figure out where am I at now? Take a snapshot, you know, have that budget and figure out where I want to be. And then it's just a working backwards, right? And that's, that's why I, for me, like, let's just say if I want to get out of debt in 18 months, and I basically have $18,000 in debt, and that means I need $1,000 a month to get to that goal, right? And so you can do that two ways. I can trim my expenses 500 bucks, and I can increase my income 500 bucks, and you're there, right? So it takes kind of the uncertainty out of it. It's like, no, I can actually do this if I put those steps into place. Exactly. And then I think also like being, as you said, you know,

it's one thing to know this knowledge, but I think also kind of being part of a community, you know, like, you know, part of your podcast listeners or a Facebook group or whatever that are working towards the same goals. I feel like that is like the key is to continue that motivation because it's, there's so many people that they have the knowledge or they know the tools that they need to use and they just don't do it. And I think it's because they feel like they're alone. They, no one else is doing it or no one else has the same struggles as them. So it's, it's important to, you know,

find the people that are on your side that are, you know, going to help you and motivate you and support you. Yeah. Community is huge. Definitely. We could not have done it without kind of surrounding ourself with like-minded people, people that want to kind of better their financial lives. So that is huge for sure. Absolutely. Awesome. Well, I feel like we talked a lot in a short amount of time somehow. Like you're just like, yes, yes, yes. Give me all the great, good answers that I'm looking for. That's awesome. It's nice talking to another podcaster, I guess.

Yeah, I've got some practice. Yeah, you've done this before. I can tell. If someone wants to look more into you and some of the resources you have, where can they find you? Yeah. So the best thing right now is if they go to wellkeptwallet.com slash retire, we actually are giving away my course that you kind of referred to the debt free in 18 months for free if they buy the book.

So it's a $97 course. You get it for free for buying like a $12 book, right? And so for anybody that of your audience that's struggling with debt or anything like that, I highly recommend it because it walks you through kind of step-by-step what we did to pay ours off in a short period of time. Exactly. And I think sometimes, again, there's so much information out there. For me, I love taking online courses where I just need some structure and someone to tell me this step, this step, this step. So yeah, if someone's dealing with some debt and needs some guidance, that's an awesome deal. That's awesome. Thanks for sharing. Yeah, for sure.

And thanks again, Deegan, for being on the show. It's a pleasure chatting with you. Yeah, thanks for having me, Jessica. And that was episode 155 with Deacon Hayes. Make sure to check him out at wellkeptwallet.com. He also has the awesome podcast also called Well-Kept Wallet. So make sure to check that out on iTunes, wherever you can listen to a podcast, again, called Well-Kept Wallet. And make sure to check out the show notes, jessicamorehouse.com slash 155 for all the goods on this episode and a recap and

everything you could want and more. I have a couple things to share as always, so stick around. Here's just a few words about this episode's sponsor. Track your hours, format the estimate, work out taxes, capture your expenses, chase that late payment, format the estimate, work out taxes, capture your expenses, chase that late payment, prepare the invoice, submit the proposal. Welcome to the worst part of being a freelancer, otherwise known as paperwork. The good news is that the good people at FreshBooks have created a ridiculously easy cloud accounting software for freelancers that turns tackling these time-sucking, never-ending tasks into no big thing. Send a polished invoice in 30 seconds, set yourself up to get paid online in two clicks,

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and they had kind of a special deal going on. So there's a discount. And so I'm going to go off on my own. But then that same orthodontist contacted me in the summer and they had kind of a special deal going on. So there's a discount. And so I'm like, all right, let's do this. Let's get some adult braces. So I've actually had that for since August. So eight months or something like that. And just this past Monday was my last day.

And they put a wire into the bottom part of my teeth. I still have to wear a top aligner for next couple months and then I'll be, you know, perfect teeth for once in my life. So I'm pretty excited about that. But just in case there's some of you who've listened to every single episode of my show, in case you've ever wondered, hey, she sounds slightly different. I think those S's are a bit different than normal. I know. I noticed too. And it's because my teeth have been moving and changing.

But now they're beautiful teeth. And eventually, once I lose a few more pounds, get back to the gym. I'm going to get some new headshots from a blog because it's time. Those photos are old now. They're a couple of years old and I do not look like that anymore. Too innocent. Had no idea what I was getting myself into with those photos. Anyway, so that's just like some personal news I want to share with you. Okay. Next, I know I've been bugging you a lot, but yeah, I've got this free webinar replay that you can watch because it's almost tax time. And I know a lot of people are freaking out.

So if you want to learn more about how to do your taxes, if you're a freelancer, a small business owner, self-employed, just have a side hustle in Canada, just go to jessicamorehouse.com slash tax webinar. And you can watch it for free and download the slides and all that and have some good old tax fun. Other news. So a couple of things. So I know I mentioned a couple of episodes back. I can't remember exactly when, but me and my business partner, Jacqueline Phillips, are working on splitting up our Rich and Fit Bootcamp into two separate courses. So one's just finance, one's just fitness. And we are very close to being able to launch that, especially also with a new

website. But another idea we've had too is to do a live event. She comes to Toronto quite often. So we're going to set something up. I'm hoping maybe something in June when it's kind of nice and pretty outside. It's still snowing here in Toronto, so it is not the time to do something like this. So yeah, anyway, so I'm just saying that, just putting that out there into your mind so you kind of know if that's something you'd want to do. And also, if you do, if this is something that you want to participate in or you have some ideas or whatever, you know, shoot me an email. I'd love to chat about it because we're at the very beginning stages of creating, um, our first live bootcamp. So just go to Jessica Morehouse at Jessica Morehouse. No, wait, no, wait, that was wrong. Jessica at JessicaMorehouse.com.

That is my email. Okay. Um, that is really all the stuff I have exciting to share. Oh no, I'm sorry. I just lied there. There was one super exciting thing that I forgot to share. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I just lied there. There was one super exciting thing that I forgot to mention. I'm sharing it to, you know, on social media and my e-newsletter list. But I am doing a contest right now. I'm giving away two tickets to the Leaders and Icons Conference in Toronto. It is taking place downtown on May 10th. Tickets cost $399. Let's just round that up. They cost $400 each, and I'm giving away two tickets. And they've got a stellar lineup of guests. And the keynote or the featured guest is James Comey, the former director of the FBI. So he just came out with a book, and he's always in the media, and it sounds like a pretty cool event.

So if this is something that you would like free tickets for, because why wouldn't you? Free is awesome. And this sounds like a really cool event. Either check out the show notes, jessicamorehouse.com slash 155 or just go jessicamorehouse.com slash leaders conference. And it'll make you go to the contest submission form. So jessicamorehouse.com slash leaders conference. There you go. Man, I could really hear my S's. I hope that's not bugging you. But if it is, well, I'm stuck sounding like this. Maybe I'll just adapt. Maybe I'll learn how to not do such crazy S's. This is new. These are new teeth for me, guys. This is new territory for me. Anyways,

enough of my yabbering. I'm going to let you get on with the rest of your day, the rest of your life. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of mine. I'll be back here next Wednesday with a fresh new episode. As always, I look forward to seeing you then. This podcast is distributed by the Women in Media Podcast Network. Find out more at womeninmedia.network.