200. Your Legacy Begins Today: From $372K in Debt to Building the Life We Dreamed Of

Episode 200 is here, Legacy Builders!

In this milestone episode, Laura reflects on the journey that started with $372,347 in debt, a dream of becoming a Ramsey personality, and a deep desire to build a different life for her family. Now, after years of hard work, intentional budgeting, debt payoff, saving, moving across the country, and building Accelerate Your Legacy, she shares what life looks like on the other side of doing the hard thing.

This episode is about more than money. It’s about legacy.

Laura talks about moving to Middle Tennessee, buying a home, watching her kids ride bikes at sunset, building a business, preparing for the release of Rosie Earns It Herself, and realizing that legacy does not begin someday in the future. It begins today.

You’ll hear encouragement for the hard middle: making the budget, paying off debt, saving when it feels slow, making big decisions, and staying consistent when the dream still feels far away.

Because the truth is: the hard thing is worth it.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

•  Why your legacy begins today, not someday 
•  How small, consistent financial choices can change your family’s future 
•  What it looked like to pay off $372,347 in debt 
•  Why budgeting, saving, and delayed gratification matter 
•  How to keep going when the dream takes longer than expected 
•  What life can look like on the other side of financial discipline 

Don’t forget to fill out the quick listener survey for a chance to win a $50 gift card. Laura wants to hear what you’d love to see next on the Money and Legacy Podcast.

Your legacy begins today, friend. Go make a difference. 

Learn more about working with Laura Sexton

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·        Become a master with your money. Learn more here!

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Send an email to Laura@AccelerateYourLegacy.com or send a DM on Instagram @accelerateyourlegacy

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Transcript

Laura 0:01

You are listening to the Money and Legacy Podcast with Laura Sexton. I'm helping families pay off debt, grow wealth, and build a legacy without sacrificing what matters most. This is where money feels easy. Hello, Legacy Builders. I'm so thrilled to be chatting with you today because today is episode 200. I honestly cannot believe that we've made it to this point. When I think about why I started the podcast, in case you didn't know, back in the day, the reason I started this podcast was because I was auditioning to be a personality with Ramsey Solutions. I learned how to be a financial coach through Ramsey Solutions. We paid off all of our debt following Dave Ramsey's seven baby steps, and I fell in love with the idea of being a Ramsey personality. I've been a Ramsey Preferred coach for five years now, and as that program is coming to a close and, other money personality opportunities have not been available because of some changes at the company, I've decided that I'm going to go out and do my own personality thing, or I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna start doing more speaking and I'm gonna do more live events and I'm gonna do more getting out into the public with you. But the number one thing that I'm going to do is this podcast. I absolutely love it and I'm absolutely thrilled that that is what I was asked to do, to start, to begin, and I have loved every second of making this podcast for you. So today I wanna talk about a couple different things. First of all, I wanna tell you about the move. I wanna tell you about all of the exciting things that are happening and what happens on the other end of doing the hard work, and I'm also gonna talk to you about the future of this podcast. Obviously, it is episode 200. We're gonna talk about the highs and the lows, right? And I do want to talk to you about discomfort. Now, I might go ahead, depending on how long it takes me to record this episode, I might do a whole episode on discomfort. We might keep it short for today, but I wanna talk about the highs and the lows of what it looks like to live your dream and what it looks like on the other side of doing the hard work. A lot of times on this podcast, we're talking about what the hard work is and how to go through the day-to-day, and we talk about how to make the budget, and we talk about what it's like paying off debt, and we talk about our new careers, we talk about family life and things like that. It is the Money and Legacy Podcast, and I wanna focus more on the legacy piece, and I wanna talk to you about what a legacy looks like, and I wanna talk to you about what your day-to-day operations have to look like so that you can get to the legacy that you want. And your legacy starts today, my friends. Your legacy is not in the future. It's not some far-off distant thought. Your legacy begins today, and we're gonna talk about it. So I wanna start off by telling you a little bit about where we're at in our move situation. We are almost all the way unpacked. There are many different boxes in different locations, but my kids' rooms are unpacked. My room is not. The kitchen is almost completely done, which is very exciting. We have a beautiful dining room table that I got off of Facebook Marketplace. And it's starting to feel like home. The other day I was like, "All right, kids, let's get in the car. Let's go home." And I was like, "Oh yeah, that's my new house. My new house is my home." And we've been thinking about this for a long time, and I, I think back to how it all started. My husband and I got married. We met in 2013, and we got married in 2015. And in 2016, we welcomed our first little girl. Now, this precious little monkey was born, and she did not sleep. She was rather difficult. And I don't know if she was difficult or if I was just so new at being a mom that I was so stressed out, and she was feeling all of my stress feelings, but she didn't like to sleep. And my husband would get up and go to work, and he worked nights, so I did not have help at night, and I had help during the day when I really didn't need it because she was up at night happy, and I needed help at night. But that was not the season that we were in. And this precious little thing changed our whole lives because we started looking at things differently. We started looking at the future. We started looking at possibilities and what we wanted ultimately, and we decided, living behind a place called Studs Theater was not our ideal, right? We were living in a part of town that was not the best for raising children. Fun for nightlife, not so fun for raising a family. So we wanted to move. And when we looked up and realized that we were $372,347 in debt, we were like, "There's no way to live the life that we want. It's absolutely impossible. We're never gonna get there." And that's when we started talking about bankruptcy, and that's when we had to make the decision to change our lives. And I really credit the day that we decided that as the day that our life changed, not when we made our final debt payment on December 31st, 2019, not when we finally had our fully funded emergency fund in the summer of 2020, which was terrible for many other reasons. But the day that we decided we weren't gonna live that way anymore, that's the day our lives changed it's crazy to think the timeline there. We started paying off debt on December 31st, 2016. That is the day that I have our official dollar amount. Now, it was more than that because I was paying things off before he and I really combined and created our whole ecosystem. It was me doing my stuff with my money, because our money was separate up until this point. And December 31st, 2019, we made a pact, a New Year's resolution, that we were going to start working together So exactly 36 months later, exactly three years to the day, we made our final debt payment and we were debt-free. $372,347 gone. We were now level playing field. We were at a $0 net worth, essentially. So here we are, it's a fresh start. We go into 2020 thinking that it's gonna be our year, and it was obviously not. It was not for anybody. But it was that year that I started helping people with their money, and I became the financial coach that I want to be. I didn't even know this was a job that I could have, and now I'm living in it, I'm thriving in it, I'm helping hundreds of people a year totally change the way they see money, how they feel about money. Money-- They come in and money feels stressful, and they come out of our program feeling like it's easy and they enjoy their money as opposed to being stressed by it all the time Two years later, I start talking to Ramsey Solutions about joining their team, and that's a completely on-site, in-person job, and what does that look like for our family? What does it look like to move? We started coming out here to Middle Tennessee and just fell in love with it. We said, "This is where we wanna build our life. This is what we wanna do. We're gonna have to start saving money." we went back and forth a couple of times. Are we gonna live in California? Should we buy a home in California, and when are we gonna move? Our timeline kept fluctuating, kept moving, and we were putting a lot of money into savings, trying to save money to buy a house in California. We could have done further faster, but we had our kids in private school, and that's a lot of money out of pocket every month. So we didn't make it in California, and we decided to move our entire lives to Middle Tennessee. We had gone back and forth on it, and we said, "Yeah, we wanna do that. So after a couple start and stops with this company and different iterations of I'm gonna be in this position, I'm gonna be in this position, I'm gonna be in this position, we pulled back. Right now, I am simply the, the CEO and head coach here at Accelerate Your Legacy, and I love my job, and I love my business, and I love my clients, and I'm not upset at where the Lord has led me. We've decided this is where we're at for now, and that's wonderful. we're very happy about that But last year, in 2025, I got the itch to come out and start looking for homes. I just wanted to see what area do we wanna live in, where do we wanna be. I started interviewing schools because we found out that the school that my kids were going to was closing, and it made perfect sense for us to move at this time. So I came out here just looking. I wasn't gonna buy anything. I didn't want to buy anything, and I found this house that we are in right now, and I walked in, I was like, "This is our home." There's just this feeling sometimes that women get that's just like, "This is it," and I was right. So I told my husband, I said, "Hey, we need to put in an offer on this home. We should buy it now and make essentially double mortgage payments," 'cause we were paying for our apartment out in California. What we were paying for our two bedroom, one bathroom apartment is 59 cents cheaper than what we were paying for this four bedroom plus an office, three bathroom house with a yard. It's crazy. We have a yard. The kids can go out and play. The kids can ride their bikes. I'll tell you about that in a second We essentially were making two mortgage payments because like I said, the mortgage here is only 59 cents more than our apartment payment. So we put in an offer in December. It was accepted. We closed in January, and then we had to make double payments March, April, May. Three months of the majority of our disposable income went towards a house or rent, some sort of housing, and that was hard. It was a stretch. We had to put in some overtime. We had to do some extra work. I had to build up my business a little bit more, and we were also packing and moving and getting things ready, and there was a lot of planning and things going on. But now we're here, and the other night, I put three of my kids to bed, and the older two were still awake, and they said, "Mom, can we go ride our bikes?" I was like, "Yeah, go ahead." And they're riding their bike up and down the street at sunset Splashing in puddles, being kids. And I was like, "All right, guys, when the streetlights come on, come inside." And in that moment, I could have cried. I could cry right now thinking about it because it's literally the thing that we have dreamed up for our kids since we had that first little monkey back in 2016. 10 years ago, this is what I was dreaming of having for my family, a place for them to spread out and create a room that's just theirs, and they can decorate it how they want, and they can have fun, and they can run in the streets, and they can do chalk on the sidewalks, and they can just have the best time. And we're here, and I don't have to worry about them being in the street because there's nobody zooming through our complex. I don't have to worry about them screaming and having a good time 'cause you know what? We have neighbor kids who are also screaming and having a good time. This is the coolest thing. This is literally the thing that I have dreamed of, I've prayed for. And as the sun set and the sky lit up with beautiful colors, I was just like, "Thank you, God, so much for this beautiful blessing. It's exactly what I wanted." I walk around my house and I say thank you over and over and over again. I know that I had to put in the work. I had to work hard to pay off $372,347 in debt. I had to work hard to save our money, to spend less than we make. It's so hard, and it is so worth it. I've been in this home for a couple of weeks now, and I could weep when I walk into my office just how thankful I am that I have this space where I'm gonna get to create this vision I have of this dark, moody library and office, and I get to... I can't wait to show you guys the journey. I'm going to be able to work with more clients. I'm going to be able to do more speaking. I just went and met with my illustrator for my book, Rosie Earns It Herself, and while I was meeting with her, I had two people offer for us to do book signings at their place of work. We're almost done, guys. The book is almost here. It's so incredibly exciting. But let me tell you what's not exciting: putting all this stuff away, deciding where things go. The decisions themselves are hard, but can I tell you that once the decisions are made and the things are put away, there's so much peace? You, my friend have to do some hard things sometimes, but the benefit of those hard things is so worth it Sometimes we get overwhelmed in our minds and we can't fathom all of the things that are happening And then we get to the other side and we're so thankful that we went through the hard thing. I promise you the hard thing is worth it. When it comes to your finances, if you're sitting there and you're struggling, you're like, I don't wanna make a budget because it's hard," yeah, it's hard, but the hard thing is worth it, I promise you. This is 10 years in the making. This was not overnight. It was not an overnight success. Nobody handed us money. Nobody gave us, giant gifts, and this was not done in a lump sum. This was done little by little, incrementally, consistently. That's how we got to this dream. That's how we got here. And my friends, I'm gonna let you come along on the journey of us paying off this house, and I will tell you, I was meeting with my estate planner because we're in a new state. We have to update our trust. We have to update our wills. We have to update all of those things because you need to make sure that your will is state specific, so if you move, you need to update it. I was meeting with an estate planner, and I, he asked me how much the house was, and I told him. And I was like, "Wait, that's not right. It can't, it can't be that much. Hold on." And I told him $100,000 less than what I paid for the house. I devalued my house by $100,000 'cause I can't imagine having a home this nice and having this much money in equity and having this much potential holdings. It's unfathomable to me from how I grew up in a town of 800 people To being here, to being in this place. It's hard to wrap my mind around But the legacy that I'm creating with my children is not one of material things. The legacy that I'm creating with my children is that if you work hard, you can have nice things. We have to take care of the things that we have. And I no longer want to buy a lot of cheap things. I used to be a stuff person. I used to want a lot of things because I didn't have a lot of things growing up, so I wanted a lot of things, and I wanted a lot of things around me. And the only thing I want a lot of right now is books. I love books, and I'm building a library. You have to have 1,000 books to have a library. I used to want a lot of things, but now I want quality things. I'm too broke to buy cheap things. And what I mean by that is I need things that are gonna last a long time. That's why we bought a home with brand-new expensive appliances. That's why we bought a home, and we're making sure the things that we buy and things we bring in are good quality things. Now, there are some things that we don't care if they're good quality yet. I am buying a couple things off of Facebook Marketplace. I bought some bar stools. I don't care if they're great quality. I need to be able to sit in them about my kitchen table. Our plan was to go to Amish country, which is not far from here, and buy a very nice, well-crafted kitchen table, but you know what I did in- instead? I just needed a table for now, so I went on Facebook Marketplace, and I looked for a table for now, and I found the most beautiful, delicious, amazing table on Facebook Marketplace, table and chairs. It's gorgeous, and it's solid wood. It was very heavy, and it's solid, and I'm gonna get to keep it, and I'm so excited. So you find little treasures, right? There are little treasures that you find that are in the most unexpected places. We wanted to buy a new table, and I found this one. I love it. We don't need a new table. My kids are gonna take this ta- table to their house one day I'm building in bookshelves and an entertainment center upstairs for the kids. I'm building things. I put curtains in a wall yesterday. I didn't even know I could do that. This is gonna be a lot more fun when my husband's here full time. Right now, he's traveling back and forth for work. But guys, the hard is worth it. 200 episodes. Do you know how hard it is to record 200 episodes, to find quiet time when you have children running around all the time? Right now, my kids are in homeschool. It's June, and my mother has decided to play homeschool with the kids, and they're loving it. It's absolutely amazing Your legacy begins today, friends. Not 10 years from now when you hit that thing that you've been dreaming of. Your legacy begins today. This, the little things that you do, the way that your kids are following you around and watching you, the way that you're storing up your money and you're saving your money and you're building your life, this is when your legacy starts. Today is the day that you get all of your dreams to come true because you write them down on paper, you decide what it is you want. You have to decide what it is you want. You write it down on paper And then you work towards that goal little by little. Slow and steady wins the race. Be consistent. Do the things that allow you to be the person that you wanna be one day. If you can do that, you too can live the dream. Oh, my legacy builders, I am looking forward to 200 episodes. If you have thoughts, if you have something that you want me to talk about, if you want me to dive deeper into any subject, I right now have a little questionnaire that you can look for down in the show notes. It is a quick Google document, and literally it's six questions. You fill out the six questions, you ne- leave your name and your email address, and you're entered for a chance to win. I will be drawing a winner in the middle of July. So go ahead and get in, fill it out. There's a $50 gift card. It's gonna take six seconds of your time. There's literally six questions. Let me know what you wanna hear, 'cause I want this podcast to be all about you. I realize I made today all about me. I'm very excited about this 200th episode. I am also, just so you guys know, I wanna do a little mini movie money mashup, and I want you to be a part of it. I'm gonna talk about our Disney villains and how we learned money management from them, and the things that we can do to avoid the same mistakes that they made. Anyway, we'll get there. All right, my legacy builders, I will talk to you soon. Thank you so much for being here today, and never forget that today's the day that you can go out and make a difference