084 | Your Success Is Inevitable

If you’re not where you want to be with your finances—if you’re truly honest with yourself—is it because you’ve given up on them?

Often I hear from lawyers who started down the road of managing their money better at some point in the past but hit a setback along the way and never got back on track.

They essentially gave up. But by giving up, you ensure your failure. If instead you keep going, you will inevitably achieve your goals.

In this episode, I share my own money journey, including the ups, downs, twists, and turns that ultimately led to success with my finances and how you can make your own success inevitable.

Lightly edited transcript appears after the show notes.

Topics Discussed

• some reasons why lawyers give up on their goals
• my money journey
• how to make your success inevitable
• a powerful question to ask yourself about any goal you want to achieve

Listen to the Episode

Resources mentioned

Episode 83: Three Steps to Better Money

Olivia Vizachero – The Less Stressed Lawyer website

Olivia Vizachero – Connect on LinkedIn

Work with me

If you’re ready to learn the mindset and strategies to master your money, let’s schedule a call.

Connect with me

Social media: Instagram and LinkedIn

Email: hello@rhothomas.com

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Lightly Edited Transcript

Hey friend. Welcome back to the show. I hope you are doing well and having an amazing day so far. So today we are talking about the inevitability of your success if you don’t quit, often when I talk to lawyers who are not where they want to be with their finances, they aren’t making progress toward what they want to do, because they basically given up for example, maybe they’ve tried budgeting with a particular budgeting method, and it didn’t work out and they fell off track. And then they just decided, You know what, this isn’t for me. Or sometimes people will say they were able to save a little bit, but then something would always come up where they had to dip into the savings, and then they just never got back on track with saving again. Same with paying off debt, right maybe you start doing it and make a payment or two here or there and then you run into some setback or otherwise fall off track. And again, rather than getting back up and trying again, you just stopped. At some point. People just give up on this thing that they want. Right they don’t stay the course. And so I’m going to talk about it because I truly believe that your success is inevitable if you don’t quit if you never give up you will figure out how to manage your money better how to save how to pay off your debt. But when you think it’s impossible for you think that it should be easier than it is or it should be happening faster than it is or you shouldn’t have to encounter any setbacks. That’s what makes you just give up like, Okay, this isn’t working. So that’s that I tried. But by getting up by deciding that it didn’t work by not continuing on, you lock in the failure, you make failure inevitable. You’re not able to succeed because you’re no longer trying. And I know when you’re looking at my story, or looking at somebody else who’s already where you want to be, it can seem like it was just easy for them. Right? You imagine that there was no difficulty that they never encountered any setbacks, that they never failed or had anything that didn’t work, but that’s usually not the case. And so I want to share some of my money journey with you so you can see all the things I did wrong, or that didn’t work or where I could have just given up but I didn’t if we take it all the way back to when I first started learning to budget or actually handle money because I didn’t have a budget. I used just swipe my card forever. Another thing that I realized is all about swiping cards a lot, but people don’t really swipe their cards anymore. Let’s say like put it in the card reader or online or something. But I would just be swiping my card everywhere and buying all the things and not paying attention I don’t know when I was making so much money on because I was a college student. I was on campus I had a meal plan. Like there were literally nothing that I needed to spend money on but somehow even working two jobs, my account would still get down to like $1 a week after I got paid so I had to wait until payday to be able to go out to eat again or shop or whatever it was I wanted to do. And there were a few times that I also overdraft to my account. That didn’t happen often but it did happen and learning about how to manage my money better started with the awareness, that same thing that we talked about in the last episode, the awareness of where I was spending all this money. So I did that and that awareness helped me to slow down my spending and to be more intentional about it. I didn’t create a budget as much but I tracked my spending throughout the month. And that worked for years while I was in school. I had the basics amazing no money down. Then I finished school and started my first real job and I was making more money and I had more real bills, right? And my husband and I were like we’re young professionals. Let’s go here. Let’s do this. Let’s eat there and all that and we’re spending a lot of money. There was just so much money that we were just losing because we weren’t being intentional about it. And so then we get to the part of the story that you may be familiar with having our first kid realizing that we had over 60 or $70,000 of debt. When we started looking at our finances and trying to get on track with that trying to climb out of this mountain of debt that we didn’t realize we had tried to do a budget for the first time. I remember the first budget we created we had like $100 $150 buffer and that was the amount that we were putting to work $670,000 A bit as an extra payment each month. And then sometimes we go over budget so then we didn’t even have that much right. We realized that wasn’t working. So we said okay, let’s be a little bit less here. We’ll try to free up more money there. So we can have a little bit more going toward this extra payment. And my husband also got a second job in the beginning because he was a resident so he started moonlighting on the weekend as well, which was tough at times. Because we had an infant and I worked all week and my husband had all these overnight shifts at the hospital when he was on call and already worked weekends, you know, a couple of weekends a month. And now he’s also moonlighting on one of his weekends off at home with his baby and I know that like that whole part isn’t part of the personal finance piece. But just to give you a picture of what was going on in our lives at that time. So we started moonlighting to bring in some extra money, and that helped us get things going as well. Like with that second job, we had more money to put toward our extra debt payments or whatever else. But then sometimes again, when over budget, and the amount that we thought we were gonna have to make an extra payment was smaller than we were expecting. And you know, just recognize that it wasn’t a case of, Oh, I’m gonna go on a budget now and pay off my debt and then it just went great. The whole time. There was a lot of trial and error with a lot of evaluating that didn’t work. Let’s try this other thing and see how that works. Okay, that went well. Now, this piece isn’t really working. Let’s try to do this. And let’s look at that. The key and all of it. The point of me telling you the whole story is even with all the difficulties, even with the things that were hard, even with the things that made it where maybe we didn’t want to do it, that didn’t feel good. We didn’t give up. We kept going even when we’re only able to put $100 or $150 Extra on our debt. We kept going and we didn’t make that bad. We didn’t make that a problem. Like okay, this is progress, right? It’s more than what we were doing before. And we just kept going from there. This amount is progress, but maybe we can do better. Let’s look at how we can reconfigure this budget. Let’s see if we can bring in some more money. And it took us five years, but we paid off almost half a million dollars of student loans, which was the majority of the $670,000 of debt we had. We didn’t quit. There was a lot of trial and error. We tried things that didn’t work. We fell down. We got off track and we picked ourselves up and kept going until we figured out what worked for us. A lot of you are not reaching the goals that you have for yourself because you make the slightest setback mean that you can’t do it. You make a budget and you fall off track and just decide that budget don’t work for you. Instead of figuring out a system that will work for you. You start trying to pay off your debt and you get overwhelmed with it or you get burnt out or whatever it is. And so you just stop doing it and fall back into your old habit because that’s easier. You fall down you stumble a bit and you just count yourself out and don’t get back up and don’t keep going and try again. And when you do that you’re guaranteeing that you’ll feel your success is inevitable. If you don’t quit you will eventually figure out how to manage your money in a way that works for you. If you don’t quit, you will figure out how to pay off your loans. You will figure out how to build your savings if you don’t quit. If you keep going and you keep trying new things when it doesn’t work and all of that you will inevitably be successful. I know you will. One of my friends and fellow lawyer coach Olivia Vizachero asks a powerful question all the time. What if you take quitting off the table? So I asked you what if you take quitting on yourself and your money goes off the table? How long are you willing to keep at it to achieve your goals? If you do that your success truly is inevitable. And if you’re like well, this whole trial and error business, I want the cheat code just tell me what to do, then reach out to me. I’ve been through it. I’ve been exactly where you are. I know what you’re dealing with and I know how to help you. So head to rho thomas.com/call. And let’s set up a consultation so we can talk about your specific situation. Alright, so that’s it for this week’s episode. Come join me over on social media. I’m most often on Instagram, I am rho Thomas, and LinkedIn. Subscribe to the show and leave a review on whatever platform you’re listening on. Both of those things help more people see the show which helps the show immensely. And finally, please take a second and share this episode with a friend who would find it valuable. I greatly appreciate you sharing and telling other people about the show because I want this information to help as many lawyers as possible. Okay, first, as we close out, I pray that you decide to take quitting off the table. I pray that we fall down we’ll get back up and keep going as many times as you need to succeed. And as always, I pray that you continue to take steps to regain control of your time, build wealth and live the life of freedom of choice you deserve. Talk to you later.