Welcome to the Smart Wealthy Stylist Podcast. I'm your host, Emily Carton. Over here we are dedicated to helping hair stylists manage their finances, stay organized, healthy, and manage their time and mental wellbeing. We focus on staying healthy in all areas of life and maximizing productivity. If you're a hair stylist looking for these things, then this is the podcast for you.
Together we'll avoid burnout and step into being the smartest, wealthiest stylist that we can be. Hello, I'm so glad you're back. I am so glad to be here once again. Um, so after last week's episode, I posted on my social media platforms and asked if you had a magic w. What is the one financial problem that you could just wave that wand over and that problem would be solved?
Pretty much everyone said debt. I agree. Debt is one of the most life sucking things that can totally drain your dreams and crush that excitement that you have. You know, looking forward to all the things you wanna do, but you just can't because you have. And then one of my friends, I've done her hair since basically right outta cosmetology school.
I respect her and her opinion. Um, she came in and was getting her hair done, that she had listened to the podcast on the way up and she said, friend, I gotta be real with you. You know, I. I love your podcast. So when I say this, you know, don't get mad. I love constructive criticism. You can not offend me. Um, even if you call me bad names, I'm just really sorry you feel that way.
And I know that when you know if people are ugly and awful and mean, it's because hurt people hurt people. So I'm unfundable. There's really not much you can say to me to offend me. So, but Tracy, Tracy is her name, and I, I just love this woman because she said, you know, I think of so many people that I know that they, they can't see to 10 years.
It was about the goal setting podcast. She said they can't see to 10 years. They can't, they can't see past today. They can't even set a goal for today and. Just totally struck a chord in me and I'm like, oh my gosh, that's so true. I'm, I'm talking to people who, you know, are maybe on my level where I'm at at this moment, but I wasn't always here.
There was a point in my life where there was no 10 year goal setting. It was, you know, I gotta get these kids up, I gotta get 'em to school. I'm late for work. I got all this crap going on. I'm in debt massively. I, you know, I can't even set a budget because I'm in the red. How am I supposed to do this? And I think that there's so many of you who resonate on that level too.
My goal with smart, wealthy stylist is to speak to anyone, even if you're not a stylist. But if you're in that place right now where you're. I can't dream for 10 years down the road when I can't make it through today. I can't pay off debt because I can't even pay my bills. I'm a single mom with no help from others.
You know, you're just in the trenches and you're just trying to keep your head above water. And after I talked with my friend, I was like, okay, so how can I coach these people? That are in this spot right now that are just barely keeping their heads above water. They're not the ones that have already conquered debt payoff, and they're not the ones that have, you know, already made financial, mental, physical health strides in their life right now.
They're in the trenches. How can I speak to you? Well, I think I have a little bit of advice for you. First off, I just wanna say that, Kudos to you for still trying. You're still trudging along and you know you're giving those babies what they need. And if you're a single mama, you are a superhero. You're doing the best you can and the best you can is all you can do.
If you are in the red every single month and you cannot seem to even get your bills paid desperate times, call for desperate measures. And if you want to make your life different, I think I might have some tools for you. I. The number one thing that you're going to have to do is to get real with your finances.
If you haven't already listened, I want you to go back to the Untangle Your Finances episode. On that episode, you're gonna go through and figure out where your money's going. You cannot know where you're going until you know where you've been, so you need to make sure that you are absolutely clear where your spending's at, what your bills are, what your debt.
What your extra expenses are. You know, anything that is within your finances, that is money coming in and money going out. You need to know exactly what your numbers are. If you don't have a computer or a way to print things off, to do that exercise, just look at it on your phone and write it on a piece of note paper.
You know, just, just a regular piece of paper. And then what you're gonna do is you're gonna get really serious about your spend. There are some non-negotiables in your spending. Number one is food. You're going to have to buy food to feed you and your children or just you. Whatever your life circumstance is, you have to eat, but that is just groceries.
If you are in the red and you cannot pay your bills, you do not get to eat out, period. It is an absolute luxury. You cannot eat out. You are burning through hundreds of dollars a month in eating out cost. The second is lights and water. You obviously have to pay your utilities to make sure that you have electricity and water.
The third is rent. That's a place for you to stay for you and your children to have shelter. The fourth is a car payment. If you are, if you do have a car payment, you have to have transportation. And I know most of you, if you are a single mom, you have childcare. Those are your non-negotiables. Anything past that, if you are living in the red, you need to get cutting expenses.
So I'm talking subscriptions. Internet. If you're not working from home and you don't need the internet, cancel it. Well, and you're gonna say, Well, you know, my kids like to watch their favorite TV shows. Well, I'm gonna tell you something. You're teaching your kids that living in debt is the only way. If you want to change their lives and your lives, you're gonna have to make some really hard decisions.
They may not exactly understand at the moment, but if you do these things, you are going to better your life and their life. You're gonna want to cut any extra subscriptions internet. If you have a $300 a month phone bill, you need to switch carriers. Um, any anywhere that you can cut expenses, do it. In my debt journey, I had a shiny new Tundra Toyota Tundra and it was a lease and you.
I had to make some serious sacrifices in order to get where I am right now because it was worth it to me to get outta debt. So I turned that lease in and when I did that, they gave me a few thousand dollars back for that truck. I never owned the truck. It was a lease, but we were going to buy it at the end of the lease.
And when I went in and got my oil changed, they said, We're so low on inventory, can we buy this truck from you? And that was right after I had my come to Jesus moment and I asked Adam, I said, Adam's my husband. I said, what do you think? Like, you know, this would put us ahead months on getting this stuff paid off.
And he said, well, you do whatever you think. So I turned the truck in. I turned my brand new beautiful truck that I loved. Back into the dealership and now I'm driving an oh five three quarter ton, 8.1 liter farm truck that sometimes I have to get out and open the fuse panel and pull the radio fuse out and put it back in in order for it to work.
You know, there's it, it's not a bad truck, you know, it's got a little tiny bit of rust in the rocker panels. It's, it's fine, but it's beautiful to. Because it puts me closer to my goal every single day. I know that the sacrifice that I made in the interim will have long-term payoffs. Because of that sacrifice, I was able to pay off my debt that much faster.
You have to get into that mindset. You know, an abundance versus scarcity mindset. An abundance mindset, you're, you know, even though you're in the trenches at the moment, you are looking towards the future. And so many times when we're in the red and we're just. Barely keeping our heads above water. We're in a scarcity mindset.
And you know, you're just like, well, I'll just, you know it, it's fine. It's fine. I'll just keep doing what I'm doing and you know, I, I, you become the victim and you know, I'm not enough. I'm a sucky mom. I don't do enough at work. I can't do this, I don't do that. Stop all that nonsense You are. And you can do hard things, but you have to do the hard things.
You're not gonna make any progress until you say, okay, this is enough. What can I do to change my life? And even if you're not a hair stylist, or if you are a hair stylist, there are so many things that you can do to elevate your income. So a lot of people have been asking me, okay. You know, I'm in debt. I need to get outta debt.
I want to, you know, get more income coming in. How do I set my prices? Da da da da da. I went through Brit Sivas Thriver Society, and she teaches you exactly how to set your prices, what your perceived value is, or basically saying like, What, what services and the experience that you offer your customers is what you can set your prices at, essentially.
But then she also has you go into what the median income is in your area and there's, there's a lot of different factors that go into that. But if you raise your prices, some get some more money rolling in and it's still not enough, consider doing a side hustle. Get a part-time job if, but if you don't have childcare and you're a single mom and it's just you and these kids, I understand that you can only work so much.
There are so many online side hustles. There's direct marketing. You know, a lot of people do like Jack Win color as a hair stylist, you can also earn passive income off people. Just simply, you know, ordering color under you. Several different, um, you know, hair, hair care products that are direct marketing.
Or you can do something like I'm doing, you know, I just went to Google and started grinding and started looking up different side hustle ideas and listening to podcasts on side hustles. And I found lots of different things. I did print on demand through Amazon, Kindle Direct Publishing. Um, if you are any sort of tech savvy, you can create digital products on can.
It's an app and then you can upload those images onto t-shirts and it's all print on demand. So say you like a T-shirt that I designed, you go onto my website and buy it, and the print on demand company prints that shirt just for you and sends it to you. I don't have to keep inventory, I don't have to print them myself, my profit.
That I make off of those products is less than if I were to make them myself, but it's still profit and it's automated and I'm not swapping dollars for hours. I am doing the work once, and then I'm bringing in that income that's called passive income. My budget planner, I did that with my online boutique, is a drop shipping boutique, and even for that, you know, I pay 1999 a month for my Shopify account and my drop shipper.
It's free to go through them. Um, I was listening to a Side Hustle podcast and there was a guy who was actually a felon and no one would hire him, you know? It. He, he just didn't know what to do. He was stuck in this like poverty circle where he could not escape it. You know? He didn't wanna go back into, you know, selling drugs or anything like that.
He really was a changed man and wanted to change his life, but there was no way for him to do that because of the, the tag that was on his name of a felon. People won't hire felons. So he actually, Went to a neighborhood by his house and, um, asked if, you know, he could help. He saw that, uh, someone was asking for, um, lawn care on the next door app, and so he.
Contacted the guy and said, Hey, I'd be more than willing to come over and do this yard work for you. And so he started doing yard work for him, and then he liked it so much. Told the neighbors that you know, Hey, this guy's really great. They started using him and he just kept expanding and expanding and now he has his own lawn company.
And even though he's a felon, He is able to have his own business with employees. He turned his life around and he's made something very successful out of himself. So what I'm saying is that no matter your life circumstance, there are opportunities if you are looking for them, you have to get serious with your debt situ.
You have to cut those expenses out that are not absolutely non-negotiables. Make sure your non-negotiables are covered and after that, get to cutting, cut all those extra expenses out, and then once you have a little bit of money left. I like to follow the Dave Ramsey method. I'm what you call Dave Ramsey ish.
I like what a lot of his stuff. So he says to the very first thing that you do is create a $1,000 emergency fund. In that emergency fund. You don't touch it, you put it in a savings account. You pretend that it's not there, and it is just that only for emerg. And then after you have your emergency fund set, it could take you a little while and that's okay.
You make minimum payments on all of your debt payments until you get your emergency fund set up. And then after your emergency fund, whatever your smallest debt is, you are gonna work on paying it off first. So say you. A credit card, some medical bills and student loans. Your student loans are 20,000, your medical debt is 10,000, and your credit card's 5,000.
So the next thing that you're going to do after you get your $1,000 emergency fund is you are going to start paying extra on your $5,000 credit. Pay minimums on the other two. Then after you get that credit card paid off, you will then take what you were paying on that credit card and pay that as well as the minimum payment on your medical debt.
And then once you get that 10,000 paid off, you take all of that money that you were paying on your credit card and your medical debt, and then you apply that to your student loan. You see, it's called the debt snowball method because the, the more you get your stuff paid off, the faster that it begins to roll, and you really begin to pick up some momentum and pay this stuff off super fast.
After that, there's a lot more steps, but those are to get you going, to get you out of the red, and like I said, desperate times. Call for desperate measure. You have to live like no one else so that you can live like no one else. And if you are surrounding yourself with people who are broke, who are also in debt, who drag you further into debt, you know, sometimes you have to set healthy boundaries in your life in order to escape situations.
But you can't live like this forever. You've got to make a change in your life. I know. It's gonna take time, and I know that it's going to take discipline, but I also know that you are capable of great things and that you can do this. I want to encourage you, because I've, I've been there, I've been in massive debt.
I have not been able to pay my. When Covid happened, you know, those stimulus checks were not enough to cover what I was spending, plus all the debt I was in, and so I floated myself on credit cards just going deeper into debt. Now I have a husband to help me, but I know people who don't. I was fortunate enough to, you know, my bills and everything were still covered because he pays like the household stuff and I pay like internet, gas, groceries, you know, all the extra stuff.
My life situation is different from most, and I understand that, but I still am digging out myself, so I know that you can do it too. And I've seen people that are single moms, like one of my friends, she's single mom, three kids, and she has no debt. She makes it on her own. She lives off of about $50,000 a year and.
She is able to contribute to savings and retirement every month, so I know that it is possible. I have another friend that's a mom of four and she was single and she put herself through medical school and I mean it is absolutely possible, but. You have to make serious changes in your life. So I'm gonna leave this here.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on my Instagram at Smart We Stylist. I would love to kind of help walk you through this. Um, let me know if it would help if I created a. A graphic image for this, you know, some sort of spreadsheet, maybe you know, personal. Should I create a personal budgeting book as well as a business budgeting book?
I want to be of value to you guys, so please reach out to me and let me know what I can do for you. I want to add value to the community and really help people if I can. I want you to be a smart, wealthy stylist, and I want you to be wealthy in all areas of life. And whenever you get that stressy situation over debt off your life, your health improves, your relationships, improve, your mental health improves it.
I'm not saying that money fixes everything. That's absolutely not what I'm saying. When you are living in harmony in all areas of your life, health, wealth, finances, mental health, you know, all of those things, it is a great experience. I'm still digging out of debt as we speak, but I see the future. I see the progress, and if I can do it, so.
You've got this. Let me know if there's anything that I can do to help you. I hope you guys have a great day. Thank you for listening in today. If you have a burning question or a topic you want me to cover, leave a review and ask the question in the review. This is the best way to get your questions answered.
Just remember, you are a smart, wealthy stylist and you are capable of anything you set your mind to. I'll catch you later. Don't be a stranger.
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