274 | Creating Money-Making Assets and a Life You Love with Lauren Klein

Sometimes following the path you’re “supposed to” take leads to a life you don’t actually want to live.

That’s exactly what happened to Lauren Klein, Biglaw attorney turned boutique firm owner and money and mindset coach.

Through intentional planning and wise money decisions, Lauren has built a business and life she loves.

In this episode, Lauren and I talk about her journey, the tools that have helped her create the life she now enjoys, and the exact steps you can take to create the same kind of life for yourself.

• • Lauren’s journey from Biglaw to boutique firm owner and coach
  • exploring the life we’re “supposed to” live vs. the life we want
  • finding examples of others who are doing things you want to do
  • the power of your mindset
  • learning about personal finance and purchasing assets to make more money
  • how to connect with other people who think about money differently
  • the exact steps to take to create the kind of life Lauren has achieved
  • the importance of who you choose to spend your life with

Lauren’s website

Lauren’s Instagram: @lawyerlaurenklein

The Wealthy Lawyer $quad podcast

You’re listening to Personal Finance for Lawyers. I’m Rho Thomas, and as a busy wife, mom, and former Biglaw associate, I know all too well the tension between the culture of the legal profession and pretty much everything else you want to do in life. That’s why each week, I’m bringing you the information and tools you need to improve your money mindset and manage your money to create true wealth. Because ultimately, it’s not about the money. It’s about the freedom and flexibility the money affords.

Hey friend. Welcome back. Today, I’m bringing you a conversation with Lauren Klein. Lauren and I met earlier this summer, and we have a lot in common. A lot of similar views on personal finance. And I think you’re gonna love the way that she thinks about personal finance and creating the life you love, so let me read her bio and then we’ll get right into the interview.

Lauren A. Klein, Esq. is the co-founder of Flourish Law Group, a boutique law firm specializing in estate planning, elder law, and probate administration. Lauren has an LL.M. in Taxation from the University of Florida Levin College of Law, over 12 years of experience in trusts and estates and tax planning, including over 5 years in Biglaw with the U.S.’s largest private wealth services legal group, is a Florida Fellow of the American College of Trusts and Estates Counsel, an adjunct professor of Wills and Trusts at St. Thomas University Benjamin L. Crump College of Law and she is very passionate about educating her community about the power and importance of estate planning.

Lauren is also the founder of The Wealthy Lawyer $quad, a community and coaching program curated for pre-law and law students and lawyers and the host of The Wealthy Lawyer $quad podcast. Through the $quad, Lauren empowers those who are just entering the legal industry to dream big, chart their own path, and focus on a positive money and overall mindset.

Lauren has been featured in many media outlets including AOL news, the Women Lawyers Journal of the National Association of Women Lawyers, MassMutual, the CW Miami, The Daily Drip, and Voyage Miami, and has done recent collaborations with Memorial Hospital, Nova Southeastern University, and St. Thomas University Benjamin L. Crump College of Law. Most recently, Lauren Klein was awarded the Prestigious Corporate Counsel’s Women, Influence & Power in Law Award for the Mental Health & Well Being Initiative. She lives in Fort Lauderdale with her husband and two little boys (ages 4 and 3) and loves to travel, try new foods and read as many books as possible.

With that, please enjoy my conversation with Lauren Klein.

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[Rho] Welcome to the podcast, Lauren. How’s it going?

[Lauren] I am awesome, Rho. So excited to chat with you today. Thank you for having me.

[Rho] Likewise, it’s so good to have you. Thank you for being here.

For those who are not familiar with you, will you take a minute and just share a little bit about yourself and the work you do?

[Lauren] Absolutely. So I am a Big Law attorney turned boutique law firm owner and coach for law students and lawyers all around mindset and money. So left Big Law after having two babies, kind of took stock of my life, and looking at the big picture of where I wanted to be in 5 years, and 10 years, and 20 years.

And realized I really wasn’t in the right place. So did a lot of work on myself on leaving that big, you know, fancy paycheck to start my own business, which has been an incredible, incredible journey with its highs and its lows. But it’s been, it’s been a lot of fun and the best decision I think I’ve ever made.

[Rho] I love that, and I can relate to that so much because just like you, I was a Big Law attorney. I also have two boys, and I left the law in part because of trying to balance all of the things and having this interest in personal finance and wanting to share that with attorneys. And it was just kind of hard to do that all together. So, I wanted to try this and here we are.

The part that really stands out to me in what you said though is like building this life that you want, you know? And I don’t know if those are the exact words that you said, but that’s the way that I heard it. Can you speak more on that? Because I think sometimes as lawyers, we get stuck in this is what it’s supposed to be. I’m supposed to do A, B, C, D and we don’t think about what we actually want, and the lives that we want to live. So can you talk more about that?

[Lauren] I love this. I’m obsessed with this topic, I will say.

And once you, once you start to understand how much autonomy we actually have over our own lives and our own destinies, it’s incredibly freeing.

So I mean I look back to even you know, prior to law school as a child, young adult growing up. I really didn’t have a lot of guidance at home as to what I should do or who I should become just the fact that I went to college and my family was like whoa, that’s incredible. I was one of the first to go to college.

And so I didn’t really have a set plan. No one was dictating my life, but I kind of felt like I have to be a good girl and follow the rules and then everything will fall into place, you know, as it should. Get the good job – whatever.

Went to law school and it almost just like solidified the mentality – just go out, get the good job, get the good paycheck, and everything will be, you know, roses. It’ll be hunky dory.

And I started practicing–went to law school, then got an LLM taxation, started practicing, and I just started to kind of question like, is this all there is to it? Like do I just have to stay on this path, and it’s the only way?

I almost felt very… I loved practicing and I still do, but I started to feel stuck, and I started to feel like I couldn’t pivot. I couldn’t be anything but just a lawyer. I started really seeking out others. You know?

I would Google things like constantly, like, lawyer and owner of Pure Barre studio or lawyer and coach because I wanted to see examples of people who were doing multiple things and succeeding.

Then I found mindset work and you know, life coaching and therapy and I started to realize that there is this big, glorious, amazing world out there of choices and opportunities and decisions. And I started doing things like, you know, five-year plans, and writing letters to myself from my future self. I still do that every year, you know.

I’ll pick a year or couple of years ahead and I’ll write to myself currently like this is what I’m doing, this is what I’m earning, this is where I’m living. And I feel like once you start to dive into that mindset world it’s like you can’t ever put it back and you don’t want to.

So, you know, I got to the point like you, you know, in Big Law and I was about to make partner, and I thought to myself, I don’t have to stay here. I think most people think they do, and that’s just a lie that we’ve sold to ourselves, and it’s not without decisions and you know challenges like letting go of that big paycheck to start a boutique law firm.

It’s not that it’s all just ponies and rainbows, but it’s the ability to choose the life that we want. And it’s a very, like I said, very freeing.

So I chose, I said this is not where I want to be. I’m looking around and not seeing anyone who even seems that happy or that feels that abundant. It just seems like everyone’s spending the money that they’re earning to make up for the fact that they’re working 80 plus hours a week, and they want to just keep up with the Joneses and that wasn’t really the life that I wanted.

[Rho] Yes to all of that.

Like I think that so often we see this path that has kind of been laid out for us, and we just think that’s what we have to do. Right? This is the way it has to be.

And we don’t think to question it, and we don’t think to explore that little piece inside of us that’s wanting something more because you don’t have those examples of other people who are doing those things. So I’m like, yes, 100% to all of that.

And now you have a podcast, a community – The Wealthy Lawyer Squad – where you are teaching about personal finance and real estate investing in all of that.

And a big part of what I talk about is, yes, having the mindset, but also having the money to be able to pivot and make those different decisions. So, can you talk a little bit about that aspect?

[Lauren] Yeah. So it was interesting.

When I, when I went down the mindset rabbit hole, I also kind of went down the personal finance rabbit hole and it was very, it’s very intertwined as you well know.

But when I went into Big Law, I said to myself, OK, I keep hearing that everyone just spends all the money that they earn, and you’re trading your time for money. And you get stuck in these golden handcuffs, and I kept hearing that, you know, not many lawyers were millionaires.

I’m like, OK, what can I do about that? So I started reading personal finance books. You know, as much as I could, I had at that point a very long commute every day to the office. So I would just listen to Bigger Pockets, which is an incredible real estate investing podcast. I would listen to personal finance podcasts. I just tried to flood my brain with examples of people who created, you know, financial independence.

And what I learned by listening to all these podcasts, especially when there was guests were…it’s not that they, the guests weren’t smart, but they were just normal people. They didn’t have super high IQ’s. There wasn’t some secret that they were, you know, in on that we aren’t.

It’s just normal people being intentional and being informed about their money, and you know, like you teach in your work, you know, just looking at your debt and being intentional about it and how you spend and how you live your life. And it’s just like the mindset piece.

It’s once you dive into that world, you can’t come back because you look at everything very differently. You look at everything in a much more abundant way. What are the opportunities out there for me rather than oh I can only have you know XYZ? Or I didn’t come from money, so that’s not from me or that’s too scary.

I feel like lawyers, a lot of the times, you know we get scared because we our brains are trained to find all the issues. Which is it protects us on the one hand, but it also can really inhibit us from taking some risks that are often necessary to grow wealth.

Or not take risks. Even just learning about, you know, ETFs and what that means and how simple it can be. Learning about the stock market and how if you look at, you know from the beginning of the stock market to today, yes, there’s highs, yes, there’s lows, but it’s gonna average out over time. Just learning little things like that, that take the fear and the uncertainty away from money. I think is, it’s huge. It’s everything.

[Rho] I 100% agree and I think one, having that knowledge, like being able to educate yourself, it does take that fear away, because now I’m more familiar with it. Right?

When we went to law school, that felt scary as well, but somewhere along the way, because you’ve had experience, because you’ve learned what to do, it doesn’t feel as scary. Like, you know, 1L year versus 3L year for example.

And you know, you talked about listening to podcasts and reading books. One of the things that really struck me when I got into personal finance was I didn’t see lawyers in that world. I’m seeing people who are, you know, just your average American, maybe not making the same amount that I was making, but they were doing better than I was financially.

And so that’s where I really learned that it wasn’t about the amount that you made. It’s about what you do with that money. And like you said, a lot of times people make that money and then they go right out and spend it, they fund a lifestyle that they think they’re supposed to have as a lawyer, but then it leads to that stuck feeling, the golden handcuffs that you referenced.

[Lauren] 100% and I see it. I see it both in my coaching business and I see it in my estate planning practice because we have a lot of clients who are lawyers, and we see their assets, we see what liabilities they have, we see their net worth.

And it’s shocking sometimes to see the difference between, say, a client who owns a plumbing company versus a client who is in Big Law or owns their own law firm. Like it is astounding to see the difference, and a lot of it is the culture and the environment and the feeling that I’ve earned the ability to go out and spend all this money, but at what cost? At what cost are you doing that?

It’s not that enjoying the finer things in life is bad at all. I love the finer things in life, but it’s being intentional about what you’re spending your money on, when you’re spending your money on those things and like, what do you actually care about?

Like, do you need a $2,000,000 house? Maybe that’s really what lights you up – great! But are you doing that just because you feel like that’s what you’re supposed to do? I think that’s one of the biggest differences, and that’s just something we have to talk about as lawyers, I think starting in law school, you know, starting in law school where our little lawyer brains are getting shaped and we’re starting to look and see everyone around us and what they’re doing.

Hearing examples of people doing things differently and living lives that they actually love, I think is so key and that’s why I love your podcast and look listening to the episodes and the topics that you talk about and the guests that you have because it opens up your brain to new possibilities that you may not have thought of otherwise.

[Rho] Well, thank you so much for that. I appreciate the support, and I’m so glad that you’re enjoying it.

And a couple of things that you said there.

One, you said, what is it that you actually want or that you actually love? Because I think you’re so right that we sometimes get caught up in the image that we’re supposed to portray.

We see Susie down the hall bought this kind of house, or this kind of car, or this kind of bag, or whatever it is. And sometimes we fall into purchasing those things, even if it’s not what actually is important to us. And then that keeps us stuck, right? Versus if you ask yourself that question, what is it that I truly care about?

Sometimes it might be one of those three things, not all three of them. Sometimes it might be none of those things, but it’s following what is truly important to you and asking yourself what’s important so that you can use your money more intentionally. You’ve said that a few times now.

[Lauren] Yeah, or maybe it’s, I’m gonna buy one of those things next year, because right now, I’m gonna take that money, and I’m gonna put it in the stock market or I’m gonna put it in a savings account, you know, for an investment property,

I always think back to you know, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. And I know there’s a lot of controversy around the asset and the liability characterization that he has, but you know, it really, it taught me a lot when you think about it. Like your home, yes, it is an asset, technically, but it’s not something that is earning you income.

You know, so I think he gave an example in the book. His wife wanted this sports car. He’s like, well, first, we’re gonna go buy an apartment building that’s going to earn us… And then obviously that’s a next level of real estate investing, but let’s just roll with it…or we’re gonna go or we’re gonna buy this duplex that’s going to generate enough income that we can then make that car payment or, you know, pay cash for that nice car.

We’ve now taken money, created an asset that is creating income that allows us to have that thing – same result, delayed gratification, but now you also own this appreciating piece of real estate that’s also generating income. And maybe you live in one of those sides of the duplex and now you’re living for free. It’s like once you go down these rabbit holes, you’re, you just can’t turn it off.

[Rho] Yes. And I think the key in all of that is just changing the way that we think about money. This is something that I’ve talked about a few times where, you know, so often we view money as a way to pay our bills and buy stuff, but your money can be making more money for you. If it’s all tied up in payments on the different things that you have, right? We… a lot of us come out with student loans so you’ve already got that payment. And then I’m buying this car with a payment and then I’m buying this house with a payment, and then I’m spending on this credit card with a payment. And then all of the money ends up getting tied up in all of these payments going out.

What if we flipped it, and instead we viewed our money as a way to make us more money to buy us freedom?

Now, that calculus, right, that strategy of how you’re going to use your money is a lot different. You’re going to do different things with it when you’re viewing it in that way.

[Lauren] And even just hearing you talk about that, it creates a different energy in the body, right, versus just spending and paying bills.

And you could have happiness and joy, like I try to look at a bill, it’s not always easy, and say like I’m so excited to pay this bill because I’m, you know, I get to enjoy this thing and then I’m paying the people that work for this company.

Like I try to have good energy even when you’re paying. But when you’re spending money on something that is going to create legacy and is going to work for you while you’re sleeping, that’s a different energy that you’re you’re you’re then operating with and it leads you to think more strategically and make different decisions.

And just overall look at your life differently, which when we talk about like, you know, interest and building, you know, wealth by putting in the stock market. It’s the same thing with your brain. You’re starting to get that, that interest accruing in your brain of making decisions and looking at things differently.

And you start to seek out people that you want to have these cool conversations with like: hey, what are you doing? You know, how did you reduce your taxes this year and where are you investing right now? Maybe it’s not in this city. Maybe it’s in a different state. How are you doing that? It just, it shifts your focus on how you look at life. So I absolutely agree with what you’re saying. It’s just, it’s a shift. It’s a shift for sure.

[Rho] Yeah, and something that I’ve heard you talk about is being an example of what’s possible for other lawyers. And then just right there, you’re talking about being connected with other people who are also thinking about their money differently, who are investing in different places and being able to have those conversations.

Do you have any tips for connecting with like-minded people who are thinking about money differently, who are investing etcetera so that you can see those examples of what’s possible and kind of surround yourself with that type of circle?

[Lauren] Yeah. So the first thing I would say is, you know, I think as lawyers, we often tend to congregate with other lawyers and that’s fantastic. Most of my friends are attorneys. I think it’s also really important to have non-attorney friends that you talk to because…for a few reasons.

Sometimes you’ll say something about like your day-to-day, especially if you’re still like in Big Law, and someone will say like what you worked, how many hours and your partner said, you know what to you in the office, it kind of makes you step out of the world that we live in and realize sometimes this world is bananas.

And I think that having friends who maybe aren’t always looking for what’s going to go wrong can be really, really helpful. So I just, I think that it’s important to at least have a few non-lawyers friends.

But if you’re like, OK, I don’t know who to talk to about this stuff. Like I’m gonna listen to the podcast here. I’m gonna, you know, do Rho’s program and all of that, but I need more.

Go to conferences, go to… not like a legal conference. Go to a conference about building wealth, personal finance, real estate investing. You’re gonna find an entire room full of people who are excited to learn and are curious, and you will make friends in that room.

Also, I think you know just shifting the way that we talk about things, you may not even realize that your friends are interested in talking about these topics. Sometimes just you starting the conversation of money because it’s still is so taboo, once someone starts talking about it, it kind of then sparks that conversion and I think that, you know, sometimes it’s great to vent with friends, but I love just sitting and having, like, productive, interesting conversations where I learn things rather than just vent sessions.

And then I think just, you know, again, listening, it doesn’t even have to be someone directly in your life just listening to podcasts, reading books, like flooding your brain with this information is really gonna push you light years ahead, light years ahead.

[Rho] I 100% agree and I am so grateful to be in this time, in this era where there are so many podcasts, so many books, YouTube, all of that available, where you can hear so many different people talk on these topics and they’re people that you never would have come across in your daily life, right? And that you wouldn’t have had the opportunity to learn from 20 years ago, 30 years ago, because we didn’t have the same technology. So I 100% agree with that.

And then something else where you were talking about just bringing up that topic of money. I had a client once who was telling a story about…there was a trip with like, maybe her and some friends, and she and her husband were trying to figure out how they could make this trip happen, and they didn’t quite have it. But maybe if we put half of it on this credit card, then we can do it.

And it just was one couple in the friend group that was like, you know, guys, we actually have this goal that we’re trying to save for. We’re not going to be able to make this trip.

And it almost gave everyone else permission to say, you know, this doesn’t work for our finances either and so no one ended up taking that trip and overextending themselves because that one couple was willing to speak up and say we’ve got this financial goal that we’re working toward, and this doesn’t fit with our plan.

And so I love that you mentioned just opening up that conversation with the friends that you already have because so many people do keep their finances, you know, close to the vest, but if we are willing to talk about it, we can learn something. We can share what we’ve learned, etc.

[Lauren] Yeah. And I think just normalizing conversations like, hey, I have financial goals, so I am putting this thing off for now. Or no, I can’t go do that, or let’s save that, you know, fancy dinner as a friend group for next month, because this month I have a certain, you know, amount that I wanna invest in my stock account. Whatever it might be.

I think the more that we talk about it and take away that tabooness, you know, just because we’re grown and we’re making money doesn’t mean we can’t say things like, hey, that doesn’t really fit my goals right now. That’s OK. Like money comes with so many emotions and feelings and whatever it may be, but we’re all in that same boat. You know what I mean?

I think to like my most wealthy clients all the way down to my least wealthy clients, we all have similar issues and similar concerns and it’s interesting to see from that perspective because we really are all the same. Yes, those who have a lot of money often have more advantages. That’s clear.

And their problems might look a little different, but at the end of the day, we’re all human beings just trying to figure out how to make it through this world, and money is a big part of that. It really is.

[Rho] Yes. It is and I don’t think that we have to be as secretive about it as we often are.

[Lauren] Yeah, I really advocate, obviously, unless it’s like a weird issue in your job with talking about your money, like we need to be talking about how much we’re earning, especially as women, but men too.

Because if we don’t talk about it, we may not realize that we’re being underpaid or that, you know, there’s something just that isn’t really adding up. The more that we talk about it, I think the more transparency we will have around what we are worth and how we can negotiate.

You know, it’s hard. It’s hard to negotiate, especially as a young lawyer. Like I kept trying to negotiate and I remember Deloitte was like you get this and I was like, I would like this, and they’re like, you get this or you don’t get the job. And I was like cool! I’ll take it!

[Rho] Yeah, I think it can be.

[Lauren] But you gotta practice.

[Rho] It can be more difficult in those bigger companies or bigger firms where, especially if they’ve already got a system, right, they’ve got the lockstep where first years all make this and second years all make that. You might not have the room to negotiate, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

[Lauren] Doesn’t hurt to try, and it might even not be, you know, the salary. It might be your vacation time or work-from-home policies. You know there’s no perfect fit. But the more that we know kind of what’s going on in our area of law or our city or whatever, even if you’re not a lawyer, you know, I think it’s just the more information we have, the less fear and uncertainty we will have around the decisions that we’re making, whether it has to do with money or or not.

[Rho] Yes, I 100% agree.

So in your work, you talk a lot about your work with coaching, with mindset. You’ve talked about your financial progress, the journey that you’ve been on to learn about your finances, the freedom that you have now, and all of the things that you’ve been able to accomplish.

How can someone follow in your footsteps? Like, is there maybe a breakdown that you could give someone to try to replicate that in their own lives?

[Lauren] That’s a really, that’s a good one.

So I would say, first and foremost, kind of going back to one of our first topics, and like what do you actually want your life to look like because it’s going to be very different from many of us. Really giving yourself the permission to sit down, and I would say like… I’m very much about the setting, so whatever makes you feel really happy for me, it’s like a really nice coffee shop. Maybe I’m sitting outside. I definitely don’t have my kids with me, love them, but I’m gonna… I’m having, like, a moment by myself and just sitting down and journaling out if I could have anything in the world, if there was no family obligations, no money, you know, constraints, what would I want my life to look like?

And dream as big as you can and then you can always modify based on, you know, reality, but don’t limit yourself too because your reality and your version of reality might be very limited when you can be achieving way more than you would ever believe, and I can attest to that personally.

My law partner is my best friend, and we literally are on Zoom together all the time and at least once a week if not twice a week, we just look at each other and go… can we believe this is our lives? We get to hang out together all day, make money, help people.

I digress.

But dream as big as you want to because it’s amazing what you can achieve.

Start there because so many of us, and I was in these shoes, have no idea what we actually want. Like, we kind of have a sense of what we might want, but we don’t give ourselves that space to just dream.

So journal, I would do it for at least, at least a half hour, if not longer and really think about what you want out of your life. Where do you want to live? What do you wanna be earning? Who do you want to be in a relationship with? What do you want your day-to-day to look like?

Really go like, very, very deep. Start there.

Once you have a sense and your brain is going to tell you all the reasons you can’t have it right?

So that’s the next step. Be really honest. What is your brain telling you? Because those are what we often call in the coaching world limiting beliefs. What is your brain telling you can’t have?

Because I would guarantee you that most of that, if not all of it, is total BS, total nonsense. It’s just. Our brains are computers. They’re taking into account our childhood, our young adulthood, our adulthood, our current life.

They’re taking into account our life experiences, and then they’re processing the information accordingly. That’s just how it works to be a human being. Write down all those limiting beliefs and start to disprove them. Why? Why is this not true? Is it actually written in the stars that you can’t, you know, live in this other city? Or is it written in the stars that you can’t live in one part of the world for half the year and another part of the other? Is that true?

And then what I would do is as you start to write the reasons those things are not true, look for examples of others who are doing the things that you want to do and like, don’t look at celebrities, don’t look at like big, fancy influencers. Look at like normal people who are doing the things that you want to do because as soon as you see one or two of them, you’re like, Wait a minute. OK, so it is possible for somebody else. So why is it not possible for me?

And then, like I said, just continue to flood your brain with examples of what people are doing with education, informing yourself, you know, sitting down, taking real honest stock of your financial, you know, situation, your net worth.

What are your expenses? What are you bringing in? Can you bring those expenses down in a way that feels intentional, that doesn’t feel restrictive necessarily. Can you increase that income? How can you do that?

And before you know it, as time goes on and you reassess this, you will wake up and you will be like, Oh my God, especially if you do that letter to yourself every year.

I go back and I read it and I’m like, oh, my God, it happened. It happened. Because there’s a big difference in life of just going through the motions and letting life happen to you versus being intentional.

I’m very A type. It’s not that you’re forcing life to be a certain way, but it’s just like anything when you focus on what you want you will, you will get more of what you want.

If you focus on all the negative, you will see the negative and you’ll bring more negative into your life, not even like in a woo woo sense, just that’s how the world works. So just flood your brain with all that, you know, that information and continuously check in on what you’re doing and how the how things are going, because the more you’ll see evidence of you achieving your goals and your dreams, the more excited you’ll get and the more confidence you’ll have in your ability to to do that.

[Rho] I love that, and I think your story is very inspiring the way that you kind of took stock of your life, of the things that were happening, and you went through and systematically, year after year, achieved the things that you wanted to achieve and achieved this life that you have that you love.

When as you mentioned, kind of at the top of our conversation, oftentimes lawyers are just kind of going through the motions, living this life but not thinking about what it is that they actually want out of it. So I love that you were able to break it down into some steps that people can take and implement to start doing the same kinds of things in their lives.

[Lauren] Thank you. And I will add one thing that I normally don’t talk about, but I feel like it’s something that’s come up a lot recently in my life, and in my friend group.

If you are partnering with another human, marriage or otherwise. It’s so important the person that you choose to spend your life with.

And I say this because my law partner and I are both…I’m married. She has a long term boyfriend, and when we each left our jobs they were so supportive. Not once did they say like this is a bad idea. You’re crazy. What are you doing?

They were nothing but supportive, and I don’t know if I would have been able to do what I did if I didn’t have that.

And I’m not saying that if you’re already in a relationship that they’re not that it’s OK, but if you’re choosing a life partner. And I it’s also OK maybe they’re not the right person for you, but also the more that you up level your life, usually people will either do one of two things, they’ll come along with you and they’ll up level alongside you or you’ll realize it’s not the right person.

But my point is, if you are not yet married or in a long-term relationship, be very intentional about who you get with, because I realized over the past couple of years how impactful that has been on my life and my career and my role as a parent.

So I don’t usually talk about that, but it kind of popped in my head. So I wanted to bring it up.

[Rho] Well, thank you for sharing that, and I will echo everything that you just said because in my case, my husband was actually the one who encouraged me to go.

You know, he noticed this passion that I have for personal finance, for helping lawyers manage their money better and he was like, we’ve been doing this work on our finances. Maybe we didn’t know that it was going to be this exact situation, right? A pandemic and I’m home with two toddlers trying to practice law and whatever.

He’s like, but we did all of this so that we could make this kind of decision. And he encouraged me to go and has been very supportive along the way. So I 100% agree with what you’re saying. I believe that the person that you choose to spend your life with can kind of dictate or heavily influence what you’re able to do.

[Lauren] I agree. So, shout out to all the great partners, partners, wives, husbands out there that are supporting because it takes a special kind of person to say, hey, why don’t you go try this thing? You know, it’s not always, it’s scary, but it’s also exciting, which is what makes it fun.

[Rho] Yes. Well, as we close out, Lauren, please tell everyone where they can find out more about you and the work that you do.

[Lauren] Absolutely. Thank you so much. So if you want to go check out about me and my offerings, you can go to my website, laurenalexisklein.com.

I’m also very, very active on Instagram, either @lawyerlaurenklein or @wealthylawyersquad and then we have the Wealthy Lawyer Squad podcast, which I know we’re going to get you on as a guest. I’m so excited.

But I’m always on Instagram. Feel free to DM me if you have any questions. Always happy to answer questions about law school, law practice, kind of what I’ve done in my own investing and mindset work, so I’d love to connect.

[Rho] Awesome. And I will make sure that we get all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here, Lauren. It’s been such a pleasure talking with you. And I know that the listeners are going to get a lot out of this conversation.

[Lauren] Oh my gosh, thank you so much. This has been a complete honor to be on today. I loved our conversation. So thank you so much for having me on, and can’t wait to continue chatting.

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All right, I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Lauren. I just love the way that she thinks about being intentional with your life and your money. I hope that you enjoyed it too. Be sure to stop by and check out her links and be sure to tell her that I sent you.

As we close out, friend, I pray that you take the information you learn here, apply it in your life, and open up to the realization that wealth is available to you. As you do that consistently week after week, you’ll continue to take steps to take back control of your time, build wealth, and live the life of freedom and choice you deserve. Talk to you later.