On the one hand, people are really striving for homeownership,
and people also like to improve themselves by getting a higher education.
But unfortunately, what a lot of people don't talk about is
on the other side of those two big goals,
homeownership and college, is that nasty little four-letter word, debt.
And we've got $1.5 trillion in student loan debt outstanding,
a trillion dollars in auto loans,
so the challenge is how do you meet those goals
without putting yourself in the hole financially?
Part of the big mistake that a lot of people make is ignoring it.
So many people abdicate financial responsibility.
I'm all for people having trusted advisors
and accountability partners,
because I think that having an expert in your corner
definitely helps you to reach your goals more quickly,
but what I don't like is for people to just turn over
their finances 100% to any third party, whether that's a spouse,
a family member, an advisor exclusively,
without being plugged in and engaged and sort of
knowing what's going on with their finances.
If you spend more than you earn, you will always be broke and in debt.
That's economics, you will never get around that.
And so it really doesn't matter if you make $50,000, $150,000,
$15 million, if you're living above your means,
it's going to catch up with you.
It's frankly, much easier to get out of debt than it is to stay out of debt,
because staying out of debt requires a mindset shift.
It really does require you to reorient your thinking
and to not care so much about everything else
that's going on around you.
And increasingly, as we move into this era of social media,
I find that a lot of people fall victim to this,
because they're watching their Instagram pages or on Facebook,
and they're seeing what other people have
or the curated version, at least,
of what people want you to see.
The challenge is to understand where was I a year ago?
Where was I two years ago?
I'm not going to compare myself to others.
I'm just going to benchmark myself against me
and measure my financial progress.
Once you start doing that and kind of disassociating yourself
to the extent that's possible from what other people are doing,
it actually really liberates you.
Because you start to say I'm on a unique path
and that journey is all about me and what my financial goals are,
what my priorities are, and what my special considerations are
given my family circumstances.
One of the things that I think women in particular need to do,
especially young women who are starting out in their careers,
is to negotiate more.
And this is true whether or not you're an employee
working for somebody else
or you're a business owner and you're charging clients.
I think when women fail to realize their value,
it impacts them financially for decades to come.
As a matter of fact, research shows that
women who don't negotiate, they actually lose out on about
2 million dollars' worth of earnings in their lifetime.
So it's critical that women see themselves as capable
and that they know their worth and frankly,
assert it and demand that they get paid
what they are, in fact, worth.