69. Beyond Worry: Building a Secure Financial Future

In this episode, Laura Sexton addresses the common tendency to worry excessively about future uncertainties. Drawing inspiration from Walt Disney's view on worry, the episode emphasizes the importance of not letting worry consume one's imagination. Through anecdotes and practical advice, the host encourages listeners to focus on proactive financial planning rather than fixating on every possible scenario. Key topics include building emergency funds, setting up sinking funds, understanding various types of insurance, and adopting a positive mindset to overcome worry and live abundantly.

In this episode we’ll discuss:

.     Financial Preparedness Over Worry

.    Positive Mindset and Balanced Thinking

.    Practical Steps for Financial Security

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Transcript

Laura: 0:02

Hello and welcome to the Accelerate Your Legacy podcast. I'm Laura Sexton, your trusted financial coach and money mindset specialist. Join me as we explore the world of money and money mindset while also paving the way for a lasting legacy that extends far beyond money. Together we'll eliminate stress, amplify freedom, and ensure you stop paying for your past so you can start saving for your future. If you're seeking peace in your finances, more margin in your budget, and a legacy that inspires generations to come, you're in the right place. Hey, accelerators. Today, I want to talk to you about something I do every single day. And maybe you can relate with me. What I do every day is I worry. I'm a worrier. I don't know about you, but sometimes I just get really caught up in this idea of worrying. But you know what Walt Disney says about worrying? Disney says that worry is a waste of the imagination. And he's totally right. You know, worrying doesn't fix anything. Worrying doesn't do anything for an outcome. All worrying can do is build a rut in the middle of your floor from you pacing back and forth. No, nothing productive comes from worrying. So, I just wanted to go ahead and come to you today and put your mind at ease. I wanted to tell you that you don't need to prepare for everything. This topic came up when I had a conversation with a prospective client and they were asking about, well, I can't have a 1000 dollar emergency fund because that's not going to cover everything. We've talked about this before a thousand dollars is not going to cover everything. A thousand dollars won't cover, most big medical emergencies, a thousand dollars not going to cover it. A thousand dollars is just a buffer between you and life. It's just while you're getting started and while you're paying down your debt, this is just going to be a buffer between you and life so that you don't go backwards. But this person was having a really hard time letting go of money they had in their savings account. And part of that was because the savings. Made them feel safe. We've talked about this before. Uh, it's not your money. So the safety that you feel there is a lie, but coming back to the topic at hand, he kept trying to make a plan for everything. He was trying to plan for car needing to be replaced, trying to plan for the hot water heater going out, trying to plan for a blown tire. He just had this list and he's like, well, what about, well, what about, well, what about, well, what about, what about, what about, what about, and I just was like. You need to slow down, sir. You can't fix everything right now. And I heard a really funny thing on the Dave Ramsey show where John Delaney was talking about how he had called a friend that worked in the banking industry and he was getting really worked up. And his friend looked at him and said, Hey, John, I don't have meteor insurance. And what that said was if a meteor strikes, well, we'll deal with that one. And when we deal with it, A lot of you may have heard your parents say something like, well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. What does that mean? That means we don't have to be prepared for crossing that bridge because we may never come to it. We may never have to deal with that thing, so why don't we prepare for what things we know are coming in life and then give ourselves an umbrella for the other things. Let's talk about living in the what if. There are things that we can set up for ourselves to mitigate risk to put an umbrella above us to make things a little bit easier. 1 of those things. Is an emergency fund, like I said before, a 1000 dollars is not enough, but the 1000 dollars is what you set aside while you're paying down all of your debts. And then we're going to build a fully funded emergency fund. And what that looks like is 3 to 6 months of your expenses. Now, you get to decide is that 3 to 6 months of you. Only covering the basics? Or is that three to six months of you only having to change your lifestyle a little bit? Totally up to you. How much are you going to save and what's going to make you feel comfortable? Now, I don't want you getting crazy. It does not need to be two years of expenses. That's insane. That money can be better served elsewhere, but an emergency fund is a way to go. I will tell you that for my family, my husband and I have 4 months of expenses saved up. That feels very good to us because if he were to have to have time off of work, he has 2 months of PTO and if I have to take time off of work, well, that's fine. My work is a bonus for my family. My work is just paying for us to do extra travel. So if the 2 of us were out of work for a couple of months, it's covered by the business already. And we have another 4 months of expenses covered. If we were to need it for that. However, we know that an emergency fund is not just for job loss. We know that an emergency fund is going to cover other things. Like, when my son was 5 weeks old and had to have emergency surgery. What that would have cost us out of pocket was around 25, 000 dollars. Thankfully, we had insurance and we didn't have to pay that much, but we had that sitting in an account and we could have just paid it. Another thing that we can set up to mitigate risk are sinking funds. These are things like we know eventually our car is going to break down and need maintenance. So we put money into the car repair fund. We know that eventually we're going to have to replace a roof. We're going to have to replace the hot water heater. We know those things are coming up. So we set money aside. Now, if you need to replace the roof in five years, that changes your savings goal per month, as opposed to if you need to replace it in 10. Once, you know, where you're aiming for, you can know how much to put into those sinking funds. Hey, guys, you know, what else you need to be saving up sinking funds for birthdays anniversaries. Christmas things that you're willing to put a big ticket on. Those are great things to have sinking funds for. That's not mitigating risk. But that is setting you up for really smart, a really smart play. Another way to mitigate risk is to pay off your house. Now this is not something that people do. Most people are like, what about the tax break? What about the, I don't care about any of that. Paying off your house means that as long as you pay your property taxes, no one's coming for it. It's yours. You own it. You can do what you want with it. Another way to mitigate risk is to have money set aside for retirement. My friends, you're going to retire eventually. Don't you want to have a good time when you retire? Don't you want to be set up for success and feel good? That's not to say I don't want you to enjoy your life along the way. I do. I want you to live abundantly. I want you to be happy. I want you to be joyful. I want you to feel fulfilled. I want you to have a good life. Whenever you're in this State of worry and things come up and you're worried about the what ifs I want you to give just as much attention to the positive. Possibilities as you do to the negative. So what does that look like? It looks like I'm having a thought. Oh, my goodness. What happens if I got the front door and I shut the door and I locked the keys inside and then I'm just I've locked myself out of my house. The same amount of time that it took me to think that needs to be. All right, so what's going to happen if I walk out the house and I lock the door and I have my keys and everything's good and we go about our day. It works the same with, negative feelings. It works the same with I just, I don't feel good today and I don't, I'm really frustrated with my kids and I'm unhappy the same amount of time that you give that negative feeling. You have to give to the positive feeling. It may not have started out great, but today's going to be a good day. I have a chance to hit the reset button and just get up again and go, what happens if things go really well with me and my kids today? Anytime that you give to the negative, you need to give the same amount of time to the positive. And what that is going to do is it's going to re train your brain. 80 percent of your thoughts that you have every day are repeat thoughts. They're thoughts that you've had before. And if you're going to have an 80 percent repeat Tomorrow, from what you're thinking about today, you need to put some positive thoughts in your head. The same works with money. If you were stressed out about money and you're living in that what if, and it's hard and it's frustrating, my friend, you need to put some people in your corner that are going to lift you up and be a positive influence for you. That's what you need to be doing. And the way to do that Is to find people that are going to lift you up and build you up. I'm going to give you a sneak peek of something that I'm not telling anybody about yet. So, this is between you, me, and so you might be getting in on the ground floor on this. Okay. I'm going to be starting a group coaching program. Normally, I only do 1 to 1. I love my 1 to 1. but what I'm finding is there are certain people. That I'm not being able to impact because they're thinking financially, they're just not ready to invest that kind of money in themselves. So, instead of my 1 to 1 price, what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be having a group coaching session at a much lower price. And because this lives on the Internet and will be forever. I'm not going to tell you what that price is here. You are going to have to go over to my website to check it out. It's accelerate your legacy dot com. We talked about, Mitigating risk earlier, so now I want to talk about something that's so fun. It's called insurance. And it's not actually fun. There are many different types of insurance and sometimes we can get just so overwhelmed with the possibilities and the, what do I do? What do I not do? I don't sell insurance. So I'm not getting anything out of this other than knowing that you are well taken care of my friend. What insurance do you need to have in place? Well, let's talk about the really easy ones that everybody kind of already knows about. The first one's car insurance. You need to have car insurance. In fact, most states require you to cover at least liability insurance on your car. If you were to get into a car accident. And you did not have any coverage at all. You get an additional penalty. You might even lose your vehicle or your license. So you have to at least have liability insurance on your car. I would also recommend having collision and comprehensive unless you can pay, cash to buy a new car tomorrow. My family and I have 2 paid off cars and if we had to, we could take our money and go buy a new to us 1 tomorrow. I'm not willing to do that. But I am willing to pay my car insurance to make sure that if something were to happen to my car, it's covered fully. So you know you have to have car insurance. Here's the other thing that I, my friends, you need to have this. This needs to be a part of your life. You need to have medical insurance. And I know the cost is stupid. I'm well aware. So you need to do some shopping around to figure out where your best resource would be. And the same as with car insurance is with medical insurance. Shop it around every couple of years. If you're an independent broker, if you're not getting medical insurance through your employer, shop around. Find other options because every couple of years, you might find a better rate by switching carriers and it's a pain in the butt to do. But sometimes you find a better rate with somebody else. You can call your insurance provider and say, hey, they're quoting me this rate. Can you meet it? And a lot of times they'll say yes, because cost more money to find a new customer than it does to keep 1. Why cable companies didn't figure this out. I do not know. Cable and Internet companies just wanted to make life really difficult for themselves. And now they're losing customers left and right. So, when it comes to your medical insurance, I need you to have it because 67 percent of bankruptcies are because of medical debt. 67 percent it's not because people went out and made stupid decisions with their credit cards. It's because they racked up medical bills and I hate that for you. And I'm so sorry that that is something that has happened to you. And you've been put in a situation where you have all these medical bills. But of that 67 percent of bankruptcies that are filed because of medical bills, the majority of those did not have medical insurance to cover what was needed. If they had had medical insurance, would they have still gone into bankruptcy? I would venture to guess not, but maybe, I don't know, I don't know their situations and I'm not going to make a generality over that whole swath of people, it's a lot of people, but I do know that we can mitigate our risk by having medical insurance. Here's a pro tip. When you have your fully funded emergency fund, when you are into that savings stage of things, you want to have a higher deductible. That may sound counterintuitive. You're sitting here going. I want to pay more. No, I want you to pay less monthly. But know that if you have a higher deductible, you have it in your emergency fund to cover it. If I were you, I might even go ahead and have a deductible sinking fund that you put money into until it reaches the amount of that deductible. This is going to reduce your monthly cost and it is going to prepare you in the long run to cover these things. So, the next. Type of insurance that I would put in place if I were you that I have done for myself is term life insurance. Life insurance is to cover those that are dependent upon your income when you pass away. You do not need life insurance on children unless they are child actors and they're making millions of dollars because, you don't need to replace their income and if you have an emergency fund and God forbid, oh, please Jesus, if something were to happen to 1 of your children, you would have the money to take care of burial expenses. Sorry, that went dark, but you, you need term life insurance on you and you need term life insurance until you can self insure. And what that means is that you have enough money liquid that can cover you. Were an expense to happen where your partner would be okay financially if something were to happen to you. Okay. That one's kind of morbid. So we're going to move on to something more fun. Um, homeowners insurance and renters insurance, depending on where you're at in your life. If you are a homeowner. You need to ensure your home, unless you can pay for your home to burn down and you replace the home and everything in it, but here's a pro tip on homeowners insurance. The value of the insurance does not go up with the value of the home and every couple of years, you need to reassess the value of the home and reassess your homeowner's insurance for renters. You want to make sure that you have renters insurance renters insurance does not cover. The building that's what the person that owns the building has insurance that covers the building renters insurance covers you your liability should something happen to the building and your stuff. I have a friend who tells this story about how they had a rental property and. Something happened, I'm not exactly sure. I don't remember how the fire started. It was a freak accident, but the house was on fire. Everybody got out. Everybody was safe. And he had gone over to check on everybody and and the guy was standing there, he was just distraught and he's like, you know, everybody's safe. So, at least I have that. And he looks at the homeowner and he says, so, do you know how long it's going to take. Um, for you to give us money to, to rebuy all of our stuff guys like, man, well, what are you talking about? He goes, well, you have insurance on the house, right? He said, yeah, I have insurance on the building. Did you not have renter's insurance? You were supposed to have renter's insurance. And the guy's like, no, I didn't because you have homeowner's insurance. He said, yeah, homeowner's insurance only covers the building. It doesn't cover you or, or your stuff. The man fell. He just completely crumbled because he thought somebody was coming to save him, but nobody was coming to save him. They lost everything that night. And whereas having renter's insurance wouldn't have gotten back any of that stuff, they would have been able to go out and buy new stuff. And instead they had to completely start over and rebuild. Didn't I just say that we were going to be more uplifting and more fun? Long term disability insurance is something that you should have, and I was shocked by this, I didn't know that, 1 in 4 people in their 20s will become disabled before they turn 67. That means between the ages of 20 and 67, 1 in 4 of you will become disabled. Now, that doesn't mean that you need to have, the next one that we're talking about is long term care insurance. You don't need that yet. but long term disability insurance, because if you become disabled. You need to be able to take care of yourself financially, and that means you need to have about 60 to 70 percent of your income in long term disability insurance. Most workplaces have short term disability included as part of their benefits package and if you want to put a little bit of extra money into that for short term disability, you can, but I wouldn't recommend it. I know in California, short term disability comes out of our check automatically. We don't really have a choice. And it was great when I had my 1st child and I needed to go on maternity leave and we had paid family leave and I got a small stipend from the government was great because I put in a lot of money towards that night. I paid money towards it now, but I don't get anything. Even though I've had 3 children since then. So that's long term disability. Long term care insurance is the other thing. I wouldn't recommend getting long term care until you are 60 years old, but the 2nd, you turn 60, you need to apply for it because the older you get, the more expensive it becomes. And statistically, you're not going to need nursing home care until after you're 65. You can't wait until you need it to get the insurance. You can't have a fire and then get fire insurance. Right? That doesn't work that way. So, you want to go ahead and cost out long term care insurance at the age of 60. Make sure that you are covered because an average nursing home stay is about 100, 000 a year, and unless you have enough money in your in your savings to cover 100, 000 a year and have your partner be comfortable. You need the insurance you need, and it's actually not that expensive if you get it when you're 60. so. If you're under 60, like, most of my audience is, you don't need to worry about this right now, but if you have parents that are nearing 60, or are already 60, and they cost it out. Because what they're doing there is they're giving you peace of mind. I think that's great. The other insurance is ID theft insurance in this online world, where we do so much stuff online and 1 person gets 1 password and access to your account. Like, everything goes up in flames. I highly recommend Xander insurance for ID theft. I recommend Xander insurance for any of these other things. They are great brokers and they are great brokers. Work with a lot of different companies across the United States to find the best deals for you. They have my term life insurance policy. As well as my ID, theft insurance policy. Our medical and cargo through my husband's work, or I'd use them for that too. So the ID theft insurance through Xander, what they do is they do 100 percent of the work to get you up to a million dollars back in fraudulent purchases. They do everything. You say, hey, this happened, someone stole my identity, and they do all the work. And what it's going to save you is around a hundred hours of trying to figure it out. That's crazy it's crazy to think about all the things you have to go through when you have your identity stolen, and you have to file police reports and then you have to call the companies and you have to do all the things Xander covers that and it's 13 dollars a month for your whole family. I mean, why wouldn't you spend that money to have so much. Backing you and so much care put in this is not simply a monitoring. Thing they do monitor your, your social and your credit cards and. Look for unusual activity, they notify you of breaches, like AT& T just got breached and they had, I was notified that my information may have been compromised. If something were to happen, they would do all the legwork. I call them. I say, hey, this happened. They say, great. Ask a few questions and they are off to the races to cover everything. 13 a month. I highly recommend it. And the last insurance policy that I'm going to talk to you about today is called an umbrella policy and we talked about umbrellas before and how it can kind of mitigate our risk. But this umbrella policy is just that it's just in case something were to happen. You see, once you start getting up into millionaire status, you want to make sure that you are not. The target of headhunters, you want to make sure that people don't look at you, especially somebody like me, where I have a business where I'm forward facing and people could see me and go, oh, I know that girl. I know Laura Sexton. I've seen her name around. I know her. She has money. That's what she does for a living. She helps people build their wealth. So I know she's got money somewhere. I'm going to go after her. Well, an umbrella policy keeps me safe. And as you approach millionaire status, or if you own a small business, an umbrella policy is something that I highly recommend you have because it keeps you away from people coming after you just because https: otter. ai Don't let it be stuck in worry. You see, when you put these insurances in place and you put things like an emergency fund, a sinking fund, pay off your house, have retirement savings. What's there to worry about? You are setting yourself up for so much success. There is no worry. And if you are worried. We need to have a conversation because I don't want you to sit around and worry. I don't want you to stress and there's something deeper psychologically that you need to work through. That's when you work with a coach and I can sit with you and help you figure out what it is that's causing that block that's causing you to live in worry instead of an abundance. It's time to live the abundant life that you were called to. You probably have some homework. There's probably one of those insurances that you don't have right now and you need it. So do the legwork. Might be an evening of research ahead of you, but what you're going to do is you're going to make a difference in your life. And what it's going to do is it's going to cause you to see the people around you differently. And it will enable you to go out and make a difference. Thank you for investing your time with us today on the Accelerate Your Legacy podcast. Remember, your legacy isn't just measured in dollars and cents, but in the tools, habits, mindset, and reputation you leave behind. Don't just listen to the show, but take action on what you've learned. Share this wisdom with a friend who can benefit and help us spread the word by rating and reviewing the podcast. For questions or encouragement, reach out to me on Instagram at Accelerate Your Legacy or explore the resources listed in the show notes. I will be back with you next week. Until then, build your legacy with intention.