57. SPECIAL GUEST SERIES 2 OF 3 – THE BUSINESS JOURNEY TO INFLUENCE WITH SARAH VANHOOSE

Guest Sarah VanHoose 2 of 3

Adrian  00:02

Hello future millionaires and welcome back to the get rich slow podcast. We are your hosts, Adrian Shermer, Rob Delavan and Lance Johnson. Good morning, gentlemen.

Rob Delavan  00:10

Good morning.

Lance Johnson  00:12

Good morning. Welcome, Sarah. Good to have you again.

Sarah  00:15

Thank you.

Adrian  00:16

Yeah, joined again by Sarah VanHoose. Part two and a three partner on her and her life and the services she offers part of her company journey to influence, which I absolutely love. Today we’re going to talk to Sarah, who has as a financial coach, as we talked about, she’s focused on helping individuals, couples and small business owners stress less about money by making a plan and walking through it with encouraging accountability through her online coaching business journey to influence. As a trained Ramsey preferred finance master coach, she makes money stuffs simple and easy to understand, going back to basics, Sara’s background as a leader in a large healthcare organization, and she and her husband James have two daughters, and they live in Portland, Oregon. As an aside here, as usual, you can find out more about what we are doing outside of the podcast at ROI-fa.com/events. That’s a great place to get links to our individual websites, find out what’s happening. Locally, if you want to be part of one of our wine and learn events, or, we did the movie theatre thing pretty recently. We’re always doing something fun out there. We’d love to engage with you guys. But today is all about Sarah and today specifically, we’re going to be learning about the business journey to influence and what sets you apart as a coach.

Lance Johnson  01:46

All right, Sarah, tell us about your business. What makes you so passionate about it and what makes you different and set you apart?

Sarah  01:55

That’s such a good question. My business is online coaching. So, I love that we can do these things through zoom these days It’s a whole new world. I love helping others just come side by side with them and helping walk the walk with them through their financial journey. My business was created out of passion, marrying my passion for leadership, and which is another word for coaching, and finances and blending that together. A couple of years ago, my husband and I were vacationing down in Mexico and had picked out like a retirement home for ourselves and thought about what we were going to be doing later on. As we were getting back on the aeroplane, I had this epiphany moment where I was like, wait a minute, why do we have to wait to do these things that we love until we’re old? I don’t want to do that. So, my husband looked at me and he said, well, number one, how many drinks have you had?

Rob Delavan  03:03

Always a good question.

Sarah  03:04

Yeah. So, it was still a question. You make a plan for that, and we’ll kind of talk about it. So, I did, I made a plan. I was like, alright, I’m going to pencil out what it looks like to rent out our current home, we’re going to vacate for a couple of years and move south, bring the kids, teach them all about the community and culture and language of being somewhere different and live the life that we really want. I started a blog. That’s where my journey to influence my husband to move to Mexico was originated and it grew from there. So, in this blog, I talked about what it would look like to kind of pick up and do something crazy, this crazy idea about doing something different and living life on my own terms, and making sure that our finances supported that. As I began blogging, one of my most popular blogs was just showcasing it was it was about like transportation, how are we going to get around, when we were down in Mexico, and I had referenced the fact that we had paid cash for our vehicles, our most recent vehicle purchase, we had paid cash. In that conversation, there were so many people that came back and were like, oh, my gosh, that’s so unusual. How did you do that? What is this, though? Strange, this is crazy and it was at that point that I learned that there were more people that were like me, that realize that there was another alternative for mountains of debt. My husband and I had gotten ourselves out of debt several years prior. So, we had the ability to think differently about what our life looked like without the debt loan. So, in in those coming those months following those blog posts, my husband ultimately decided that he really didn’t want to move to Mexico. He is also self-employed, and he’s like, I don’t know that, I want to move my business to Mexico. But maybe you need to be doing something indifferently. At the time I was working for a large healthcare organization, in a leadership role, lots of hours, and lots of responsibility. I really wanted to have more flexibility and freedom in terms of what I did. I was able to turn reflect a little bit of like, okay, well, what do I what do I really want to do? Chapter two of my life, how can I marry what I know and love about operations, and leadership with personal finances, which I saw, I heard, the need for that, and I had personal love for  a good spreadsheet on the back of a napkin, or napkin math or whatever it looks like making a plan for your money. That’s how my coaching business was born from this idea to move to Mexico, to seeing the need for people doing money a little bit differently, and putting those things together.

Rob Delavan  05:53

So, would you say you were looking for, like some freedom from status quo is, I’m trying to pick up that concept, what was that core that was the driver?

Sarah  06:04

Yeah, it was definitely the freedom and flexibility to not drive not driving to work every Monday through Friday and be able to impact lives in a different way.

Adrian  06:18

Oh, that’s fascinating. What do you get asked most by your clients and what’s what would you say the number one pain point is that you solve for them?

Sarah  06:34

I think the number one question that I get asked by clients is how do I start with finances? It comes with a lot of shame, honestly. The folks that are reaching out to me are, they’re not fresh out of college, necessarily. They’re in their late 20, they’re in their 30s, 40s. They’re in their 50s and 60s, right sometimes, and they’re a little embarrassed that they don’t maybe have all their financial house in order, and they really just want to know, like, okay, how do I get started? I know this by now, there’s some embarrassment and some shame that goes with that and unfortunately, money management or financial literacy is not common core in colleges or in high schools, as I think that it should be. So, people are learning through trial and error and sometimes a lot more then they wish.

Rob Delavan  07:38

The shame or embarrassment, that’s the pain point, obviously. That’s a symptom of the pain point is, I guess what I would say. So, addressing that, what does that look like?

Sarah  07:54

Yeah, it’s helping people strategize right around what their plan should look like. Budgeting, creating a budget for yourself is one of those core tools that I use with my clients. Sometimes we call it a spending plan, because that feels just a little bit better, whatever you want to call it, but it’s making an intentional plan for your money, and helping people with the habits. The daily ins and outs of what that looks like, and sometimes modifying your habits or your behaviors around how you use your money. It really deals with the person, the individual and their relationship with money, most of all.

Rob Delavan  08:33

I’d like to hear a little bit of dialogue between you and Lance of the difference in the relationship between that personal financial coach, and the financial advisor and what’s that?

Adrian  08:47

Especially because you guys use very similar language here, we’ve got it going back to the basics, and we’ve got Mr. brilliant at the basics. Maybe that’s part of where the shame comes from. People think this is simple, but then it’s not easy to execute, is it?

Sarah  09:01

Oh, that’s such a good point. It’s simpler. I think right at times, just like taking control of your money with a financial advisor, like Lance, my job as a coach is to make sure that my clients are ready to invest, I want them to be more intentional with their money, which means diversifying and investing those things, but they have to have enough money to do that, they have enough margin and enough breathing room within their current income. They can’t spend it all right in order to make sure that they’re ready to do more proper planning.

Lance Johnson  09:38

Yeah, we’re like two concentric circles that come closer and closer together to make one big circle and the biggest thing I look at is time, you can’t make up time. So, some of the anxiety that people feel is that the longer time goes on and they feel broken, the more resentment they have because it’s less time for them. to get ahead of the curve, and so, they just feel like they can never dig themselves out of a hole, or they’re always drinking from a straw underneath the water. So, addressing time and then addressing change, Sarah, and not knowing enough about you, but as I learned throughout this year, Dave Ramsey, he’s like, get yourself out of debt, get yourself out of debt. Once you’re all out of debt, then start saving. Whereas I might say, let’s start saving free up cash flow, through tax savings to apply towards debt. So, then there’s this chicken and the egg. Neither one of them are right or wrong. It’s just which one really resonates to the client, which one is the client going to adopt faster to get them using time to their side. As an investment advisor, we’re always talking about money and time value of money. So, we want people to make money and save and get ahead of them. But if a lot of people don’t budget, or they don’t track their expenses. So, if you don’t track your expenses, then you got to make up a budget, to try to keep you on track, knowing that budgets are like urine resolution, you’re always going to break them. So, you just got to have fusion that takes place so that you can keep on a railroad track, per se. I think it’s interesting. I’m very looking forward to working with Sarah, because you got two different philosophies that accomplish the same thing. I think one plus one can equal three here, as we hopefully work together on the courses next year.

Sarah  11:47

I think when it comes down to like you said, it’s not wrong, it’s just different and using money, money is not a moral is not moral. So, it’s finding what sticks with each client, like you said, some are going to gravitate towards one or the other and sometimes they don’t know what they don’t know. So, we need to lay out some different options and different ways to get them to those results faster and just intentional planning, I think is just part of that and sometimes they really need somebody that’s not in their household, that can come outside and look in and be like, okay, let’s take a look at this, let’s do this together.

Lance Johnson  12:27

Yeah, sometimes we end up being the mediator between the two people grow up with different philosophies. There’s 15% that are savers and 85%, that a spender. I’m a spender that saves 32% of his gross income. But I find that hard and given my base relaxation towards when I get to that point, I’ll spend money because I’m a spender by nature. I’m brown eyed and bald. You can’t change who you are, you just have to modify your routines to embrace the future of finance.

Sarah  13:11

I think create awareness around what your natural state is. Also, I work with a lot of clients on thing, as you indicated, a lot of spender’s right are out there. What happens when you go off the deep end with your spending. What happened just before that? What’s feeding into those things, so that we can kind of catch them sooner, and perhaps have some alternatives or some boundaries, right around that spending so that you can still do what feels best or what feels right without compromising your situation.

Lance Johnson  13:43

So, my wife and I adopted the Delavan spending habit. So, we tried to spend his money instead of our money, and it works a lot better.

Adrian  13:53

We’re going to get a whole episode on that one. Standard strategy.

Rob Delavan  13:55

Yeah, we need a bell every time you guys are killing me. So ,the last question for you today, Sarah, is what are you most excited about right now?

Sarah  14:15

Right now, just today? So, ironically, I’m sure it’s going to have passed by the time this episode airs. But I am launching a membership programme called friends with budgets and it is just a low cost membership in order to help support more people getting educated around how they’re using their money, get strategies and tips around just different components around what money looks like through some, some group coaching and some helpful reminders on a regular basis. So ,super excited about offering again, a low-cost opportunity working with me one on one is a higher ticket price point and I wanted something that’s more accessible. Again, that whole journey to influence is around dropping the money shame, encouraging people and support, bring them in a different way. So, I’m really excited about that.

Rob Delavan  15:03

Of course, it’s a very clever little pawn. How do folks connect with that?

Sarah  15:12

Yeah, my website should have more information about it. My journey to influence.com.

Rob Delavan  15:18

Gotcha. So, literally, you said it’s happening today. So, this is spring, late spring of 2022, we’ll have to keep tabs on y’all. That’s going to be fun.

Lance Johnson  15:34

Can you say it again? Say the phrase again?

Sarah  15:37

Friends with budgets. That’s the name of the membership. We’re opening and closing with within a week, and then we will reopen the membership in the fall.

Rob Delavan  15:48

Yeah. So, it’s basically like a beta test here.

Sarah  15:51

Yeah, we’re testing it out and seeing how many people we can get in and on help support and then also, it’s exclusive. I want some best friends up in there. So, we’re just going to open and open and close in a short period of time.

Rob Delavan  16:03

Okay, interesting. I’m looking forward to that.

Adrian  16:10

Well, thank you again, Sarah, for enlightening us with your knowledge and this is part two of a three-part series. So, I’m really excited about what we’re going to be recording next. But there’s some solid information here.I hope that our audience walks away with some important ideas in your mind. Sarah, when I first met you, and especially as I entered finance myself, I would have thought your services were sort of tier one and then maybe you’d work your way up to someone like Lance Johnson, but I got to say, I’ve got a decade in real estate now. My job is to analyses people’s personal income and asset situations. I know people who have dual six figure incomes, I know people who are multimillionaires, who I’ve talked to who could desperately use services like yours. I think Lance, even himself might have admitted that these are the kinds of basic building blocks that a lot of people need to get where they’re going in life, or to get where they want to be in life. So, I hope that we can guide more people to you. I love working with everyone in this room, because you are the part of the financial sector that is passionate about helping people grow. I hope our audience can gain from some of your wisdom here. Sarah VanHoose journey to influence Sara at my journey to influence.com You can also reach her at 503-961-4602 and you can get our individual websites. We’re going to have up on a slide here as well. Go ahead and jump on the get rich slow podcast to find links to rest of our information and our disclosures, the always necessary information about all the disclosures for our industry. Thank you so much, audience for joining us. Sarah. We’ll see you on the next episode.

Sarah  17:50

Thank you.

Rob Delavan  17:50

Thank you so much, guys.