202. Stop Being Lukewarm: The Real Cost of Going All In

Are you all in on your money plan… or are you stuck starting over?

In this episode of the Money and Legacy Podcast, Laura Sexton talks about the hidden cost of being lukewarm with your finances. From budgeting and debt payoff to emergency funds and long-term goals, consistency is what builds confidence and helps you create real financial change.

If you’re tired of making the same money decisions over and over again, this episode will help you recommit to your plan, align your choices with your values, and take your next step toward paying off debt, growing wealth, and building a legacy.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why starting and stopping your money plan keeps you stuck
• How consistency builds confidence with budgeting, debt payoff, and investing
• Why going all in on your financial values helps you reach your goals faster

Ready for clarity with your money? Schedule a clarity call at accelerateyourlegacy.com/claritycall.

Learn more about working with Laura Sexton

.        Join the Facebook group Legacy Builders Network.

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

·        Checkout the resource library here!

Want to ask a question Laura can answer on the podcast? Connect with her here!

Want to receive a live money or career audit? Apply Here

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

Elevate your coaching with daily devotionals and prayers from 'Seasoned with Salt.' Get your copy HERE!

Transcript

Laura 0:01

I have never in my life been a jump in the pool kind of person. In fact, it, it astounds me a little bit because my kids are, my husband is, my best friends always jump directly in the pool. Even my dad back in the day would let me push him into the pool. He'd sit down and test the water every time to see, if it was good or not, and I'd push him in. He was always a jump in the pool kind of person. But me? No, never. Not once. I do not jump in the pool. I'm a wade in kind of person. But I'm learning that however you get in, once you're in, you should be all in 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, my legacy builders. Welcome back to the Money Legacy podcast. I'm so excited to have you here today. It is hot here in Middle Tennessee. It is hot, H-O-T-T hot. And sometimes I just want iced cold coffee, and it brings me so much joy. And if I don't finish my coffee in the morning, which is rare at this point because I'm always tired, if I don't finish my coffee, I'll stick it in the refrigerator and let it get really, really cold, and then in the afternoon I get iced cold coffee. And I realize some people are, "I only drink hot coffee. It doesn't matter how hot it is, I want hot coffee." some people like their coffee hot and some people like it cold. But you know what nobody likes? Lukewarm coffee. No one wants a lukewarm cup of coffee. Yuck And I think that's a lesson for all of us, isn't it? Whatever our financial plan is, we either need to be all in or all out. Hot coffee or cold coffee. But lukewarm coffee's gross, and nobody wants lukewarm coffee. Now, I will drink it. Please know I will drink that cup of coffee. I just won't like it. But I will enjoy the little bits of caffeine that I can. Same is true with our money. If we have lukewarm financial plan, we can spend the money But we're not going to get the enjoyment out of it that we are hoping for. I learned from watching an episode of Seventh Heaven that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. This may seem like a total left turn, but it's not. Come with me here. There is an episode where Lucy Camden keeps leaving her lunchbox in her classroom when she goes to lunch. It's a class right before lunch. She leaves it in the classroom. She goes to the lunchroom, realizes she forgot it, runs back, and her geometry teacher's already eating her lunch. Now, in today's world, if the teacher's eating the kid's lunch, there's going to be a really big problem. That's no good, right? But what's so funny is after, like, the fourth or fifth time, this woman eating her lunch, she realizes there's a shorter path, straight line through, for her to get back in time for her to get her sandwich before the teacher eats it. And that's all the geometry teacher was trying to teach her was that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. I have never forgotten this. What does this have to do with our money, and what does it have anything to do with jumping in a pool and the temperature of our coffee? Well, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The shortest distance between where you are right now and where you wanna be financially is a piping hot financial plan. And I want you to be all in on this hot cup of delicious financial plan. There, you see, there's a really big cost to stopping and starting on your plan. Think a bit. Think about investing. You put your money in the market. You let it ride the roller coaster up and down and up and down and up and down. But every time you stop and you pull it out, you lose all the progress. It's like the 401k loan you took. You just stopped the progress. "Oh, I'm paying myself the interest." You've stopped all the progress. When you take your money out of the market, you've stopped all of the progress. And a lot of times we take it out at the wrong time. We take it out at the bottom of the market because we get scared. We get scared and we don't want it in the market anymore, so we take it out, and guess what we've just done. We've locked in our loss. But if you'll ride it up, it goes back up always. So far in the history of the stock market, it does go down, and it always goes back up. If you look at it far enough, the timeline, the trajectory, it's all up and to the right. But sometimes we get scared, and we pull it out, and we lock in our losses, and we lose all of our progress What does a piping hot financial plan look like for budgeting? Well, it looks like consistency. But when we stop, when we get lukewarm about our budgeting, we lose consistency, we lose control, and we think, "Oh, I've got it. I've got it. It's all in my head. It's all in my head." It's not. I promise you, 'cause I've done it, and this is my job. I promise you that you will think that you haven't spent the money that you've already spent, and then you will overspend in the category because you weren't paying attention. This happens all the time, not only to me occasionally when I fall off the wagon, and I do from time to time, especially with this big move. I'm finally back on it, and I'm on it because we have some awesome goals and awesome plans for this new house. And so I want to stay on top of it, and I want to be consistent. And I want to build the confidence in myself. When your money plan, your general plan with how you handle your money is consistent, it's a piping hot money plan, you have confidence in yourself But if you are not paying attention to your money, if you're starting and stopping and starting and stopping, you will lose that confidence in yourself. And when you lose confidence, it's really hard to get it back. It's really hard to keep the plan going towards the ultimate goal because now you've lost confidence in yourself. You've lost confidence in the plan because the plan's not working. But you know why the plan's not working? 'Cause you're not working the plan. There is a huge disservice that you are doing to yourself when you lose the hot in your plan. The cost of starting and stopping, it's the cost of going the long way around. Your sandwich is gonna get eaten Do the shortest distance between the two points. That's why when we're talking about getting out of debt, we are often recommending that you get, like, crazy intense about it. People will come to me and they're like, "Well, I don't wanna be, I don't wanna be paying off debt for 14 years and just not be able to live my life." I don't want you to do that either. That's insanity. But if you can do it in a short sprint, if you can work hard, diligently, focused, hot, you can get out of debt quickly, and then you never have to worry about it again. But if you're going to work really intensely and push, and push, and push, just hot, hot, hot plan, and then you get to the end, and then you go get a car payment, or you open another credit card, you're lukewarm now, and you no longer like yourself because you just did all of that work for what? To put yourself right back in the same position. That is the cost of starting and stopping. You start to waste all of your effort. And look, while you're young, all the effort while you're young. While you have the energy, before kids, especially if you're coming to me and you don't have kids yet, do all of the hard stuff now because you're setting yourself up for so much ease later in life. So let's talk about what it means to go all in. For the record, I did go to a church service this weekend, and this was the name of the service, the sermon. It was All In Cross the Line, and I was like, absolutely yes, 100%. I was incredibly convicted during this sermon, and I've decided that I'm no longer going to do things like using ChatGPT to give me any ideas, thoughts, or comments about my podcast episodes. I was leaning on it a little bit too much to give me the next topic, the next topic, and I'm not going to be doing that anymore. This is all going to be 100% off the top of my head. And before, it was all completely me, too. I would write all of my, I'd write my podcast episodes, but I would ask it for thoughts. Not doing that anymore. I'm 100% here with you. I'm 100% committed to giving you 100% of just me moving forward. However, I'd like to give you some of you, too. So if there's something that you have a conversation question about and you want to either talk to me about it, we'll jump on a Zoom call and we'll talk about it. Or You can write in your question and let me know. You can do all of that on my website accelerateyourlegacy.com. If you want to jump on a clarity call, it's accelerateyourlegacy.com/claritycall. So what does it mean to go in- all in? It means that we commit, and we commit wholeheartedly, and we commit to the end goal, not just the day-to-day decisions that we need to get to the end goal, but we make the end goal our identity. We say, "Okay, I am going to be a person that is debt-free," and we go in completely unwaver- unwaveringly. Is that the way you say that word? Unwaveringly. Goodness, English is hard today. But when there is no wavering because we are fully committed, you know what else we don't have anymore? We don't have any more decision fatigue. And if you are a mom of young children, you know that decision fatigue is real, and I promise you, if we can cut this off at the knees, if we can commit to our financial plan, there is no wavering from that financial plan. Guess what? There's no more decision fatigue because instead of making 17 choices a day about your money, you've already made all the hard choices. So now it's, "Does this align with my values or not? Does this align with my end goal or not?" And then you don't have to make any more decisions 'cause you've already made the big decision. If you have decided that you are not going out to eat this week, and somebody says, "Hey, do you wanna join me for tacos?" You've already decided, and you've already committed to and therefore are not wavering from your decision. Sometimes this can be really hard in those moments, but if we've already decided who we are and what we are committed to, it doesn't have to be hard. We're committed Another thing it means to go all in is that we live out our money values every single day. We live our money values. You know what is never going to happen to me? I'm never gonna get a Kohl's card. I'm never getting any kind of store credit card ever. And I will tell you, the other day I was tempted to get a Southwest card because you have to pay $35 per bag now, which is just insanity. E- except I think it just went up again. I think it's $45 per bag now. When Southwest has trained us that bags fly free, and now they've turned on us. Maybe that's not the nicest way to say that, but it's how it feels. But if you have a Southwest credit card, you don't have to pay for the bags. And I was like, "Well, we're flying so much for the next couple of months, like, maybe that's worth..." Absolutely not. That's not worth it. $45 is not worth completely degrading all of my integrity. No It's not gonna happen. You're not gonna get me over $45, Southwest, just because you had trained me that bags fly free and then you went and changed the game. Doesn't change me and my integrity. No, absolutely not. Will not be happening. Also, I'm looking at other airlines now. Thanks, Southwest. The other thing about going all in is that we reach our goals faster. 10 years ago, if you had told me that I would own a four-bedroom, three-bathroom house with an office, I would have thought you were completely joking. Also, for, you know, 10 years ago, if you told me I was gonna have five kids, I would have laughed at you. You reach your goals so much faster. I never could have imagined the life that we have right now if I hadn't gone all in on my financial commitments, if I hadn't decided to work so hard to become debt free so that every dollar we have goes towards the things that we value and any of our financial goals We know what we want, and we have gone all in. Now, I'm telling you to go all in on the system, and I have a system that I would love to walk you through if you have any questions. But I know that there are a lot of people that have different systems, and lately I've been hearing a lot of hate for Dave Ramsey's baby steps, and so I wanted to address this. Now, do I agree 100% with Dave on absolutely everything that he has ever uttered? No. You can't agree with somebody like that, except for Jesus, okay? Like, people are fallible. People make mistakes. But lately there has been this huge backlash of hate against his baby step one. Baby step one is save $1,000. Now, I do the same thing when I'm working with my clients. I want you to have a starter emergency fund so that we can make sure that you don't go backwards. 98% of my clients have a $1,000 starter emergency fund. That is what we have decided together to do. Some of my clients have decided they need more than that, and guess what? It's not my job to tell you what you do and do not do. I will help you walk through and decide for yourself. I will ask you questions. I will push back so that you have a solid reasoning behind your argument for why your system is going to be your system, but I will hold you accountable to keep it, too. So Dave has this system. His seven baby steps have changed over 10 million lives. There are 10 million people that have read his Total Money Makeover. There are, every year they're hitting a billion dollars of debt payoffs just in their debt-free screams. So who knows what other people are doing that are not coming on their stage and doing debt-free screams. I don't know. But there's this hate right now on this $1,000 emergency fund. They're like, "It's from the '90s. It needs to be more than that. If you adjusted for inflation, it's 200, or $2,356." Go ahead and adjust for inflation all you want, but what we're not doing is we're not taking into account the fact that there is financial behavior. That is what we're talking about. It's the financial behavior that needs to change, not the dollar amount. The dollar amount in the emergency fund doesn't really matter, and again, that's why I tell you I let my clients pick their dollar amount. My clients are free to choose a higher dollar amount. You're not free to choose less than $1,000. You need $1,000 there But here's the crazy thing, and this is what I want to address mostly in this episode here, is that less than 40% of Americans can pay cash for a $1,000 emergency. Now, there are all these people online talking about how $1,000 isn't enough, $1,000 isn't enough. You're crazy if you think $1,000 is important. 60% of Americans could benefit from following his baby steps and having baby step one set aside. 60% of Americans would be helped to put $1,000 aside for an emergency. I want to help 60% of Americans. I would love to be talking to 60% of Americans. Please share this podcast with a friend, okay? 60% of Americans could be helped by having a $1,000 emergency fund. That is what we're after. This is about behavior change. It's not about the dollar amount in the bank account. The dollar amount in the bank account does not matter. It is how you behave. Are you all in on the system? That's it. Who do you want to be? Are you all in? A $1,000 emergency fund is the beginning of life change. It is not the be-all, end-all. It is not the most important thing, and in all honesty, I don't want you to have only $1,000 in there for more than 12 months. You should be working your butt off to get the debt paid off so we can get your emergency fund picked up. That's the whole goal. This is the whole plan. I have never once had a client that had $1,000 saved have a larger emergency that could not be covered by the $1,000. Now, does it happen? Sure Hasn't happened to any of my clients, and I've helped hundreds of people a year Whichever way you choose to go, my friends, whichever way you choose to go with your financial plan, go all in. Go all in. Jump in both feet What is it that people say? They, they call it 10 toes down, standing on business. Is that a thing? Go 10 toes down. You cannot move me. I've made my plan. I'm unwavering. I promise that you will be happier with your financial decision, your financial path, because you've made your decision and you're walking it out. You're standing in integrity, and that feels really good. And you will get there faster if you hone in, "Here's my plan. Here are the steps that I'm gonna take." You're at the starting line. Cross the finish line. Give yourself small finish lines to hit so that you're hitting them over and over and over again, and you will continue until you get to your ultimate goal. Now, my husband and I are working hard to put extra money to pay this house off very quickly, and next year we're going to hit a huge milestone on having this house 50% paid off next year, and we've only been in the house for a month. My friends, you can hit your financial goals. You have to set them first and you gotta take the first little baby steps. And then I promise, once you're toddling, you'll start going a little faster, you'll start to sprint, you'll start to run, and you will reach your goals. But you gotta know where you're going and you gotta be 10 toes down. That's it this week, Legacy Builders. Go out and make a difference